Some things in this article I would like to object and to point out are (although I am not here to support or argue for/against the current schools):
>>But they won’t be publicly ranked and corrected nearly as often as in school, even though such things will happen far more often than their ancestors would have tolerated.
Are you kidding? Their ancesters would even be publicly killed/maimed by other foragers if they couldn't perform as expected or didn't conform to the
rules of the society.
I hate when modern people try to paint very rosy pictures of the past, especially of the so called tribal (hunter-gatherer) people. Many tribal societies can be seen to be guided by a single principle "survival of the fittest" and generally the survival function is some combination of "ability to perform as expected by other tribals" and "conformity to arbitrarily chosen rules by the tribal society".
>>They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be trained by many adults, can select them to be the most prestigious adults around, and can stop training with each when they like.
Here the author ignores one important aspect :- not even the forager children can stop training with each "when they like": there are many important factors to be considered here; that if a forager kid has not yet learnt how to "earn food and other things needed to survive" he/she must continue training and it may be under those adult(s) he/she may or may not like to train under.
>>Have teachers continually give students complex assignments with new ambiguous instructions, using the excuse of helping students to learn new things.
If any human language is used to give instructions, those instructions will be ambiguous. I doubt if the foragers used any unambiguous human language.
In short, the rise and need of schools is a very important topic and this article leaves too much out. If time permits, I will write my thoughts on it.
>>But they won’t be publicly ranked and corrected nearly as often as in school, even though such things will happen far more often than their ancestors would have tolerated.
Are you kidding? Their ancesters would even be publicly killed/maimed by other foragers if they couldn't perform as expected or didn't conform to the rules of the society.
I hate when modern people try to paint very rosy pictures of the past, especially of the so called tribal (hunter-gatherer) people. Many tribal societies can be seen to be guided by a single principle "survival of the fittest" and generally the survival function is some combination of "ability to perform as expected by other tribals" and "conformity to arbitrarily chosen rules by the tribal society".
>>They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be trained by many adults, can select them to be the most prestigious adults around, and can stop training with each when they like.
Here the author ignores one important aspect :- not even the forager children can stop training with each "when they like": there are many important factors to be considered here; that if a forager kid has not yet learnt how to "earn food and other things needed to survive" he/she must continue training and it may be under those adult(s) he/she may or may not like to train under.
>>Have teachers continually give students complex assignments with new ambiguous instructions, using the excuse of helping students to learn new things.
If any human language is used to give instructions, those instructions will be ambiguous. I doubt if the foragers used any unambiguous human language.
In short, the rise and need of schools is a very important topic and this article leaves too much out. If time permits, I will write my thoughts on it.