WE ARE NO CONTAINERS - Quotation - about learning

Source: Tim Ingold, “From complementarity to oblivion: on dissolving the boundaries between social and biological anthropology, archaeology, and psychology” (in Oyama, Susan et al , “Cycles of Contingency. Developmental Systems and Evolution”, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, The MIT Press, 2001, p. 272):

" [my approach] undermines one of the key ideas (...) - that cultural learning is like filling a universal, genetically specified container with culturally specific content. The notion that culture is transmissible from one generation to the next as a corpus of knowledge, independently of its application to the world, in untenable for the simple reason that it rests on the impossible precondition of a ready-made cognitive architecture. In fact (...) nothing is really transmited at all. The growth of knowledge in the life history of a person is a result not of information transmission but of guided rediscovery."