The really great thing about that kind of playing and learning is that so much more than just a skill is learned. Children participate in the whole subculture that surrounds that work: the stories, the jokes, the eating together, the relationships and the shared history of those folks.
Wendell Berry again on work and the tobacco harvest: “On many days we have had somebody’s child or somebody’s children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children. As industrial work excludes the dead by social mobility and technological change, it excludes children by haste and danger. The small scale and the handwork of our tobacco cutting permit margins both temporal and spatial that accommodate the play of children. The children play at the grownups’ work, as well as at their own play. In their play the children learn to work; they learn to know their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.”
I love the fact that I learned to bake without being formally taught. I also know that I learned many other things in the culture of Lakeview Bakery that I still value today. When the deGroot siblings get together and we get on the topic of the bakery, the stories are endless. That was a pretty special education.