Before Education. Children Learned Survival, Community, & Morality

Let's step back. Away from the hustle and bustle, the gadgets, the information age, and the world where we need to know a million 'things' to succeed.

Back, to a time in history, or into a secluded tribal community where there is no idea that children need to be educated by a government, state or bureaucracy.
Or to places today,

A time or place where indigenous people still live outside of the idea of formal education systems.

We lose our own innate wisdom when we ignore how these people educate their children. It is true our children may have different things to learn than the children of indigenous tribes. But it is also true that if we just look at this human instinctual side of education, we may learn a few valuable lessons we can apply to our own educational philosophies.

Children learned survival.

This included skills such as hunting and gathering food, planting and harvesting crops, building shelter and crafting clothing. They also learned how to make tools, and other items used in making daily life possible.

These skills were learned by direct activity, mimicking and practice. They were not learned by studying the skill in a book, being shown pictures, or reading how-to articles. The learning was active , not passive. The action was to practice the skill until mastery was achieved.

They learned how to do all the things the adults around them did by practicing those skills.

Children learned morality.

Yes, primitive cultures have morality, it may have often been different than morality as we think of it in our culture today, but always there were cultural rules that were in place in order to preserve the smooth functioning of the tribe and to ensure that all the members of the tribe could survive. These customs were generally explained with stories. The stories would be told and retold until the child had absorbed the moral.

They learned by listening to stories.

Children learned community.

Parents were the primary educator of children, however, learning took place within a community. The child grew up interacting with other adults and children of both older and younger ages. There was no artificial separation of the child from the group as a whole.

Children learned in the presence of adults and children of all ages.

There is so much to soak in while contemplating this rudimentary model of education. Survival in today's culture may require a completely different set of skills than was necessary for a primitive culture, but survival might just be a good way to think of education.

What tools does the modern child need to survive in our current world?

What moral lessons do we want to emphasize with the stories we choose?

How can we ensure our children are submerged in greater communities and not lost in the darkness of emotional isolation?

Modern man may not struggle as deeply to survive physically, but there are many modern challenges to our emotional survival. We ignore these areas too often, and we have a rising suicide rate to show that it is time to stop neglecting emotional survival skills.

Can we reintegrate active learning in a complex community with amazing stories to shape our conscience?

I don't think doing these things would require much sacrifice. We can do all these things and still teach our kids the important modern skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. Those are just a few of the new survival skills of modern man.

We may need a few more skills, such as creativity and knowing how to learn, but again, those can be attained within a community with active learning, i.e. actually doing stuff.

But if we are educating amazing readers, writers, and mathematicians who do not know how to interact or connect with other people, what are we left with?

If we are not teaching other survival skills like how to cook a meal and wash clothes, how will our children feel competent when they move out of the house and find they cannot be an adult? They don't know-how. They never had any active practice in the various skills needed. We call these life skills. But perhaps they are just modern survival skills.

Being able to survive may no longer be a life or death situation but if a person does not feel they can handle basic life, either physically or emotionally, they will not feel truly alive. They will feel like a failure. They may even take their own life. That is a survival failure on the part of society, not just the individual.

Lessons of the past.

While much has happened between primitive cultures and our current technologically advanced society, I think we have lessons to learn from these cultures.

If we teach survival, morality, and community, as core purposes of our educational systems, our systems would improve drastically.

In the meantime, as parents, we have the power to make sure our children have these things in their lives.

Join me for weekly friend links to my Medium articles.