[00:01.49]Lesson 33
[00:03.49]Education
[00:10.75]Why is education democratic in bookless tribal societies?
[00:17.86]Education is one of the key words of our time.
[00:21.78]A man without an education, many of us believe,
[00:25.37]is an unfortunate victim of adverse circumstances, deprived of one of the greatest twentieth-century opportunities.
[00:33.77]Convinced of the importance of education, modern states 'invest'in institutions of learning to get back 'interest'
[00:41.88]in the form of a large group of enlightened young men and women who are potential leaders.
[00:48.58]Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out,
[00:53.66]punctuated by textbooks--those purchasable wells of wisdom--what would civilization be like without its benefits?
[01:03.18]So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers,
[01:07.17]lawyers and defendants marriages and births--but our spiritual outlook would be different.
[01:14.47]We would lay less stress on 'facts and figures' and more on a good memory,
[01:19.85]on applied psychology, and on the capacity of a man to get along with his fellow-citizens.
[01:26.76]If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past
[01:31.38]we would have the most democratic form of 'college' imaginable.
[01:36.32]Among tribal people all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all;
[01:42.35]it is taught to every member of the tribe
[01:45.38]so that in this respect everybody is equally equipped for life.
[01:51.56]It is the ideal condition of the 'equal start'
[01:55.10]which only our most progressive forms of modern education try to regain.
[02:00.60]In primitive cultures the obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction is binding to all.
[02:08.79]There are no'illiterates'--if the term can be applied to peoples without a script--
[02:13.96]while our own compulsory school attendance became law in Germany in 1642,
[02:19.54]in France in 1806, and in England in 1876 and is still nonexistent in a number of 'civilized' nations.
[02:30.53]This shows how long it was before we deemed it necessary to make sure that
[02:35.46]all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the 'happy few' during the past centuries.
[02:43.38]Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means.
[02:48.41]All are entitled to an equal start.
[02:51.77]There is none of the hurry which, in our society, often hampers the full development of a growing personality.
[02:59.23]There, a child grows up under the everpresent attention of his parents;
[03:04.54]therefore the jungles and the savannahs know of no 'juvenile delinquency'.
[03:11.24]No necessity of making a living away from home results in neglect of children,
[03:17.60]and no father is confronted with his inability to 'buy' an education for his child.