Through past experiences, I am convinced that "unschooled communities" such as tribals, nomads, cattle-herders, etc. (and persons belonging to such communities) have very different ways of thinking through and negotiating everyday issues. We schooled people construct our thoughts in "a different language", and face great difficulties in communicating and negotiating with them (aside from simple tasks such as buying their produce).

Do the schooled have thinking systems that are substantially different from the unschooled?

If so, what are the prominent differences?

  • $\begingroup$ I don't think it matters. Even schooled people act and think differently among schooled. $\endgroup$ – Grasper Nov 3 '15 at 17:00

Given that 1) schooling intentionally exposes individuals to conventionally prescribed concepts they would otherwise not be exposed to, entailing formation of neurally encoded cognitive representations thereof at different levels of context-specificity (concreteness) and context-generality (abstractedness) and that 2) metacognitive activity (i.e. thinking and thought-processes) is concerned with the accessing and structuring of concepts seemingly relevant to one another, and can entail the emergence both of new levels of awareness and of thinking-related skills, it is logically predictable that wide differences in the nature of schooled and unschooled individuals' thinking would occur.


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