A short history of schooling

Have you ever wondered

why human children take so long to grow up? Most of our already pretty intelligent cousins like chimpanzees and bonobo’s take about three years to mature. Humans need a staggering eighteen! From the viewpoint of nature there has to be an enormous gain for this period in which we do not reproduce, but are very likely to be killed.  If you might think this is some accident in our evolution, take in consideration the  time it took men to become this way, and how he lived during this era. For 95% of human existence men has been a hunter-gatherer. And we don’t know how our ancestors lived, but we do know quite a lot about modern-day hunter-gatherers.

The remarkable thing is that amongst those who travel and do not settle down (true hunter-gatherers or egalitarian hunter-gatherers) there is an enormous similarity in child-rearing. Amongst the !Kung, Hadza, Ache, Efe, Agta, Aka, Mbuti, Batek, Nayaka, Parakana, Yiwara and a few others there are these almost uniform traits:
-restrain from violence
-consensus desicion making
-sharing
-no formal education
-no direct instruction
-observation learning
-close physical contact
-indulging of children
-weening between 2 and 4
-mixed age groups
-high self-responsibility of children
-low control of adolescent sexuality
-children are allowed to play until they are grown-ups (boys 18, girls 15)[1]

Now doesn’t that sound an awfull lot like Rousseau, A.S. Neill, Wilhelm Reich, Jean Liedloff, to name a few child-centric pedagogues? It seems very, very likely that these characteristics have been our environment of early adaptedness (EEA) and that it has profound effect on the way we are meant to learn and live.

It’s all about play, stupid!

So because of our evolution as hunter-gatherers we have children who stay immature during a ridiculous long period, living in an immensely dangerous and demanding world and all they do is play??? That’s right. Play is nature’s foremost learning strategy. And as humans we have to learn a lot, so we have to play a lot, during a long time! That’s why children are so good at it, are drawn to it and hate school: It intervenes with there genetically perceived drive to play![2]

Hunter-gatherer cultures are nothing close to simple: adults have to know an enormous amount of things, from animal behavior to songs, tribe history, plants and places, yet playing and imitating are all they do to become competent adults. Given the complexity of their world, any strategy or knowledge is valuable. The greater the variety of ways of interacting with nature, the more chance the tribe has to survive change: self-directed learning is fundamental. Standard curriculum would only last until the first big shift in animal migration paterns, weather or geography. It is like gambling on one horse in a herd of thousands.

Agriculture changes everything

On top of one-another in Catal Huyuk: not good for health

But then comes agriculture; as a result of changing weather-paterns and new types of grass people settle down and as soon as they do there is no turning back. When you stay on the same place you deplete the wild resources and will have to keep farming forever to stay alive. Agriculture wasn’t the bright discovery we’re made to believe it was; todays hunter gatherers know perfectly well how to plant and seed , they just think it’s a bad idea.  In present day anthropology it is widely accepted that the shift to agriculture was a stupid thing to do: we lived shorter, nastier and more brutish lives (free to Hobbes). But thanks to the high birthrate (mainly because they were spaced closer together) ten starving farmers with rickets would still out-compete one well-fed, athletic hunter, so in the long run they took over the world.[3]

ADHD: successful adaptation or disorder?

Now the emergence of  farming and pastoral living has done a few things: it has introduced labor division, strong gender division, class-division, hierarchy, hard labor and overpopulation. In farming there are only a few ways to do things right; seed, weed, hoe and irrigate the crops, day after day out, year after year. Not everyone was suited for this kind of life. Research has shown that ADHD is an advantage for nomadic people, but a disadvantage for farmers. In the Chinese population it has been totally culled out [4]. The result of this inability to adapt to a changing lifestyle we still see in everyday schooling and we call it a “disorder”.[5]

Apart from being extremely monotonous, farming live was socially demanding; you could not leave easily after an argument with your neighbors – as nomads would – and class-division meant you could not choose your own destiny. Self-directed learning in this context meant trouble. Children had to be taught how to accept class-division, social norms and the jobs and trades of their fathers. In agriculture, every hour you spend working means higher outputs. In hunting, you wouldn’t be able to process, store and carry all the meat. Hunters have a lot of time to play. Farmers children don’t; to many hungry bellies to feed.

So due to a shift in our economy we end up with formal education. The idea that there is one set of knowledge, one set of customs and that play above all things is a waste of time that could have been spent working. Homo ludens has become Homo laborat.

Digital Savanna

Our long youth is a gift from nature to learn, and to learn by play. Where ever you look at  the evidence – in history, in paleontology, in anthropology, in biology – you will find that play is the single most powerful learning method. We shouldn’t waste our most vital years of development on the gradual abolishment of play, we should guard it!  But there might be a happy ending: after the invention of modern day schooling – which really is an industrial era thing, with the assembly line grade-system were they add a little extra knowledge each time until the product makes the mark or is disposed of – we get this information age: the end of class-division, gender division, economical inequality. An information environment in which nobody knows everything, and every strategy is as valuable as the other.

This is what I call the digital Savanna; a place very different, but in ways so much alike our environment of early adaptedness (EEA) that is it is compelling to think we once again could be the playful, self directed human beings we used to be in the absence of agriculture!   Know your past, change your future!

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[1]Gray 2009; Lee & Daly, 1999; Konner 2002; Hara 1979, Harako 1980; Yamamoto 1997; Hewlett & Lamb 2005

[2]For an in depth read about the subject: Hunter-gatherers and play by Peter Gray

[3]Hugh Brody, The other side of Eden,  2001

[4]To be precise; the most common gene associated with ADHD (7R allele of the DRD4 gene)  is rare in the Chinese while alleles derived from 7R are fairly common. This could mean that ADHD was selected against due to population politics that favor submission to authority. (Cochran & Harpending, the 10.000 year explosion, 2009)

[5]The Hunter vs. Farmer theory on AD(H)D was popularized by Thom Hartmann even before scientific prove had been found.