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CHAPTER 1: Primates to Primary Schools
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Once upon a time there lived some poorly endowed primates.
Their young were miracles of dysfunction. Immobile, helpless, loud. Bad even at sleep, digestion. Maturing slowly, over many years.
Conversation
But to compensate for a prolonged and especially useless juvenile period, and a general paucity of adaptive traits and overall lack of niche, these simians enjoyed unlimited potential.
Classic minmaxing, really.
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Over thousands of years they learned, struggled, and built, growing in sapience, creating rituals and ideas and tools and trinkets that slowly added up to societies and technologies. And lo, human civilization was born.
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One might be forgiven for thinking that such changes would be coupled with, perhaps even dependent on, new practices in childrearing and education: ways to actualize the infinite well of latent potential of this worldshaping species.
In fact, no one cared.
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There was no problem of education. The kids were fine.
Jobs specialized. Hierarchies complexified. Legal and economic systems emerged.
Children absorbed it, by cultural osmosis or familial exposure or apprenticeship. Each generation effortlessly ingested the gains of the last.
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Amongst the very small number of natural endowments of this species was language. All its young learned speech.
But now writing extended speaking. Language was elaborated in ways that were powerfulβbut that were more artifactual than natural, more engineered than biological.
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You today, dear reader, enjoy such privileges as paragraphs, punctuation, capitalization, and spaces between words. And still you required instruction to learn to read and write.
Our benighted ancestors had none of these cognitive conveniences.
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Despite its primitive state, writing was powerful. It *had* to be used widely and perforce learned widely. A nascent literary culture demanded literacy.
Yet its children *didn't* naturally acquire literacy. The unaided absorbent mind of the human juvenile had found its limit.
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Literacy required assistance. But assistance of what sort?
At long last, there was a problem of education.
The solution was to invent the grammar school.
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Children of 6 or 7 came be educated on letters, then syllables, then words.
They were drilled. The teacher modeled; the students copied.
Syllables and words were often nonsense. Students learned every possible combination of letters, in order, from shortest to longest.
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Literacy was mental gymnastics, a sequence of something akin to muscle isolation exercises.
It took years to build up to sentences. Students often hated it. The elders, parents and teachers alike, conspired to determine the right schedule of discipline and punishment.
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Still, children became literate. School was understood, by adults and often enough by children, as a bitter but necessary tonic for something truly esteemed.
Whatever literacy one had was wielded proudly. An aristocrat who could barely scratch out his signature would do so.
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Empires spread.
Literacy became ever more important, more common.
Conquered peoples were assimilated into the writing-powered systems of their conquerers. They became literate first in a foreign tongueβwhich complicated the learning, and required yet more time with drills.
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All the while and in parallel, these now rather socially and intellectually sophisticated simians considered their institutions of reading and writing.
They wondered if there wasn't promise of something deeper, a solution to an even more pressing problem:
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Some children became wise, others fools. Some virtuous, others vicious. A good father could sire bad sons.
But must this be accepted? Could this be fixed? Could character and citizenship be imparted? Could the power of bestowing excellence be wrested from the gods?
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