Page 38 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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Nature and Nurture
As can be seen from the graph below,51 some countries had a head start with reading and writing and those populations had a small genetic advantage when it comes to learning to read and write but these additional generations did not dramatically increase those country’s citizen’s capacity to learn via rote.
Resource 12: The Global Uptake of Reading & Writing51
There is also the complication that some citizens in some countries may have been involved with additional rote learning in other learning domains that may have contributed to their ability to learn via rote. The correlation between how many generations of our forebears have been reading and writing and how well we learn, is not necessarily restricted to just reading and writing.
Our capacity to read and write is also further complicated by the environment that children grow up in. If that environment is a rich language environment and it has a strong communication culture, those children will gain confidence with their use of language. This is a major factor in how well these children will learn to read and ultimately compose written work. If the children are spoken to, read to and are encouraged to read, these factors provide another significant head start in building confidence, and an expectation that they can learn to read and write. It could be argued this probably has a greater effect that the graph above. The complex combination of these factors contributes to our beliefs and capacity surrounding learning to read and write via rote learning.
Our capacity to read and write is a combination of many factors that span both nature and nurture.
51 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2016) – ‘Literacy’. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/ [Online Resource]