Great work; it seems interesting, though, as others mentioned already, the methodology appears rough. I want to add a low-confidence historical take on this. TLDR: This sounds like learning in the ancestral environment, industrial civilizations education is shaped by statist interests
Society is using a version of the Prussian school system to this day. Said system was built to generate obedient soldiers and productive workers. Those systems domesticate humans into an industrial society. Cultures with little formal schooling often have difficulties functioning in industrial settings like factories. The very structure of school optimizes those two goals. You are to follow a superior authority figure, which historically was allowed to use excessive power and was considered right by the system. You are to do precisely what you are told, in a manner that disturbs no one, for a set time, and if you get breaks, you come back in as soon as the factory bell rings.
In contrast, learning in a hunter-gatherer society works a lot like you describe the way those exceptional people were educated. They are shaped by the social and physical environments, can roam and play a lot, and have free access to adults doing interesting things (I’m simplifying a lot of cultural limits and social conventions away, but I think in a society that was still developing those, this would be the situation), and were involved in those activities from a very early age on (a hurray for child labor).
I think that most of this learning process was and is directed toward figuring out how to function in a band of monkeys. Other monkeys are the most complex, dangerous, and valuable thing in the ancestral environment. Social isolation or making the vital qualities in those environments intellectual instead of having them be the usual status games adapts those old software modules.
I’m less sure about my model for farming societies, but you already described the ways of aristocratic education, and I think that a farming village isn’t too socially different from a tribe on this front.
Great work; it seems interesting, though, as others mentioned already, the methodology appears rough. I want to add a low-confidence historical take on this.
TLDR: This sounds like learning in the ancestral environment, industrial civilizations education is shaped by statist interests
Society is using a version of the Prussian school system to this day. Said system was built to generate obedient soldiers and productive workers. Those systems domesticate humans into an industrial society. Cultures with little formal schooling often have difficulties functioning in industrial settings like factories. The very structure of school optimizes those two goals. You are to follow a superior authority figure, which historically was allowed to use excessive power and was considered right by the system. You are to do precisely what you are told, in a manner that disturbs no one, for a set time, and if you get breaks, you come back in as soon as the factory bell rings.
In contrast, learning in a hunter-gatherer society works a lot like you describe the way those exceptional people were educated. They are shaped by the social and physical environments, can roam and play a lot, and have free access to adults doing interesting things (I’m simplifying a lot of cultural limits and social conventions away, but I think in a society that was still developing those, this would be the situation), and were involved in those activities from a very early age on (a hurray for child labor).
I think that most of this learning process was and is directed toward figuring out how to function in a band of monkeys. Other monkeys are the most complex, dangerous, and valuable thing in the ancestral environment. Social isolation or making the vital qualities in those environments intellectual instead of having them be the usual status games adapts those old software modules.
I’m less sure about my model for farming societies, but you already described the ways of aristocratic education, and I think that a farming village isn’t too socially different from a tribe on this front.