Education in Preliterate Societies

EDuCAtIon Is About what was (the past), what is (the present), and what might be (the future). In meeting their immediate, daily classroom challenges, teachers understandably tend to focus on the present. but today’s classroom episodes soon become yesterday’s past. Professional standards and teacher-education programs ask teachers to reflect on their practices. Going from the ancient to the modern, this chapter invites you to broaden your reflections and to interpret today’s events in the light of previous experience. Reflection, arising in the present, illuminated by the past, can aid us to envision a better future for our students, our country, and, maybe, the world.

3-1 educatiOn in Preliterate SOcietieS

Paleolithic period The prehistoric “old stone age,” which lasted for 2.6 million years to about 10,000 BCE, when small, nomadic bands of people searched for food.

enculturation A process of cultural transmission by which children learn their group’s language, customs, and values.

FOCUS What is an oral tradition, and how does it function in education? Have you experienced an oral tradition in your own education?

oral tradition The use of the spoken, rather than the written language, to transmit the cultural heritage through songs, stories, and myths. Neolithic Age The “new stone age” in human development characterized by the making of tools, domestication of plants and animals, and settlement in small villages, which began around 10,000 BCE. Human history began in the Paleolithic period (the Old Stone Age in 10,000 BCE) when small nomadic bands of people searched for food, such as edible fruits, plants, and roots, or hunted for birds, fish, and animals. Organized into simple kinship clans or tribes, preliterate people lived with the ever-present fear they might not survive. The natural environment that nourished them also threatened them. Their source of food might disappear with storms, floods, earthquakes, or droughts. Between their treks for food, they sheltered in caves or in simple dwellings fashioned from branches or animal skins. They improvised tools—clubs, spears, or pointed digging sticks. Importantly, they learned to make and use fire. By trial and error, they developed survival skills that over time became cultural patterns.

For a culture to perpetuate itself, it must be transmitted from the group’s adults to its children. In the Paleolithic period before the invention of writing and reading, cultural transmission took place through a largely informal process of enculturation by which children learned their group’s language, customs, and values. From their fathers and older men, boys learned to hunt, fish, and defend the group from enemies. From their mothers and older women, girls learned to find and prepare food and sew garments. Gender patterns that designated some activities as specifically appropriate for males and others for females had a staying power in education that persisted into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The group’s beliefs about the world and its mores, that is, approved behaviors, were transmitted to the young through stories, songs, and religious rituals. Tribal elders, such as priests and chiefs, transmitted the group’s religious beliefs and moral values to the young so they could be preserved from generation to generation. Children learned that good actions, conforming to the group’s sanctions, helped it survive; bad actions, challenging the group’s beliefs and values, jeopardized its survival.

Lacking writing to record their histories, preliterate societies relied on oral tradition— storytelling—to transmit their heritage. Elders or priests, who were often gifted storytellers, sang or recited poems and stories that commemorated events, especially legends, about the group’s past. Combining myths and history, the oral tradition constructed the group’s collective memory and identity by telling of its origin, heroes, and victories. The individual’s passage from childhood to adulthood was celebrated with dramatic ceremonies that incorporated dancing, music, and acting that gave the event a powerful, often supernatural, meaning. Storytelling continues to be an engaging teaching strategy today, especially in preschools and primary grades. Often adults, such as military veterans and artists from the school’s community, visit classrooms to tell their stories.

To make life more secure, the early humans made a momentous transition as they went from hunting to growing food. Ushering in the agriculture, the Neolithic Age began around 10,000 BCE. Now farmers, people needed to plan their activities around the seasons of the year—to times for sowing seeds, cultivating plants, and harvesting crops. The plotting of these seasons led to the calendar. Thus, a new objective was added to education: developing and using a sense of time.

Because farmers lived where they raised their crops, nomadic life yielded to living in settlements, and then to small and later larger villages. Good farming practices generated