St. Paul, Minnesota. October 10, 2009.

We are not born knowing how to communicate; it is something we learn just as we learn to tie our shoes (or wear them). Clearly, if we do not come with the knowledge “built in,” is knowledge we must “pick up” elsewhere. We can speak of children being “inducted” into the use of appropriate symbols for our culture, much as we speak of adults being inducted into an army (Frank, 1966, p. 7). Since children learn communication, this implies that it would be possible to observe children as they learn what is involved in communication, as in fact social scientists can and do. Only through learning how to communicate appropriate [sic] do we join other humans and become a society. “Communicative competence is not just another useful skill, like shoemaking; it is one’s ticket of admission to human and social life” (Thayer, 1982, p. x). Our primary job as children is to learn to understand and display the appropriate communicative system for the group of people into which we are born. Thus:

a child must learn to transform the world of actual things and events, of signals and signs, into a symbolic world of meanings and purposive striving in accordance with the symbolic patterns which have been devised to make human living more orderly and goal-seeking. (Frank, 1966, p. 7).

Excerpted from Communication in Everyday Life: A Social Interpretation, by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Published 1989 by Ablex Publishing Corporation, Westport, Connecticut.