by Daniel Quinn
I said, “I would have thought you would endorse the teaching of history.”
“I do very much endorse it. I endorse the teaching of everything, because everything is what children want to know. What children very deeply want to know of history is how things got to be this way—but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that. Instead they’re overwhelmed with ten million names, dates, and facts they ‘should’ know, but that vanish from their heads the moment they’re no longer needed to pass a test. It’s like handing a thousand-page medical text to a four-year-old who wants to know where babies come from.”
“Yeah, that’s absolutely true.”
“You, here in these rooms, are learning the history that matters to you. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“Will you ever forget it?”
“No. Not possibly.”
“Children will learn anything they want to learn. They’ll fail at learning how to figure percentages in the classroom but will effortlessly learn how to figure batting averages (which are of course just percentages). They’ll fail at learning science in the classroom but, working at their personal computers, will effortlessly defeat the most sophisticated computer security systems.”
“True, true, true.”
“If you monitor the right magazines, newspapers, or television programs, you’ll see a report at least once a week of some new scheme or other designed to ‘fix’ your schools. What people mean by fixing the schools is making them work for people instead of just detaining them for twelve years, then releasing them unskilled onto the job market. In order to create something that works for people, the people of your culture think they have to invent something from scratch. It never occurs to them that they may be trying to reinvent the wheel. In case this expression is new to you, ‘reinventing the wheel’ means struggling very hard to duplicate a breakthrough that was actually made long ago.
“Among tribal peoples, the educational system works so well that it requires no effort on anyone’s part, inflicts no hardship on learners, and produces graduates who are flawlessly educated to take their place in their particular society. To speak of it as a system will be misleading, however, if you expect to see huge buildings staffed by warders and their supervisors, under the direction of local and regional school boards. No such things exist. The system is completely invisible and immaterial, and if you were to ask a tribal people to explain it, they wouldn’t even know what you were referring to. Education occurs among them constantly and effortlessly, which means they’re no more aware of its functioning than they are of the functioning of gravity.
“Education occurs among them as constantly and effortlessly as education occurs in a household where there’s a three-year-old. Unless you confine it to a crib or a playpen, there’s simply no way to stop a three-year-old from learning. A three-year-old is a questing beast with a thousand arms probing everywhere. It must touch everything, smell everything, taste everything, turn everything upside down, see how it looks sailing through the air, see how it feels when swallowed or pressed into an ear. The four-year-old is no less thirsty for knowledge, but it no longer has to repeat the experiments of the three-year-old. It has already touched, smelled, tasted, turned upside down, flung, and swallowed everything it needs to. It’s ready to move onward and outward—as is the five-year-old, the six-year-old, the seven-year-old, the eight-year-old, the nine-year-old, the ten-year-old, and so on. But it’s not allowed to do this in your culture. This would be too messy. Starting with age five, the child must be restrained, confined, and compelled to learn not what it wants to learn but what your state legislators and curriculum writers agree it ‘should’ learn, in lockstep with all other children its age.
“Not so in tribal societies. In tribal societies, the three-year-old is free to explore the world around it as far as it likes, which is not as far as it will go when it’s four, five, six, seven, or eight. There simply are no walls shutting the child in or out at any age, no doors closed against it. There is no age when it ‘should’ learn a given thing. Nor would anyone ever dream of giving thought to such a thing. Ultimately, all the things grown-ups do are fascinating to a child, and it eventually and inevitably wants to do them itself—not necessarily on the same day as every other child, nor in the same week or the same year. This process, Julie, isn’t cultural, it’s genetic. I mean that children don’t learn to imitate their parents. How could such a thing be taught? It’s hardwired into children to imitate their parents. They’re born wanting to imitate them, in exactly the same way that ducks are born wanting to follow the first thing they see moving, which is usually their mother. And this hardwiring continues to operate within the child … until when, Julie?”
“What?”
“The child craves to learn how to do every single thing its parents do, but this craving eventually disappears. When?”
“Lord, how could I know that?”
“You know it perfectly well, Julie. This craving disappears with the onset of puberty.”
“Wow,” I said. “It sure does.”
“The onset of puberty signals the end of the child’s apprenticeship to its parents. It signals the end of childhood itself. Again, this isn’t cultural, it’s genetic. In tribal societies, the pubertal youth is understood to be ready for initiation into adulthood—and must be initiated into adulthood. You can no longer expect this person to want to imitate adults. That craving has vanished and that phase of life is over. In tribal societies, they make a ceremonial acknowledgment of this, so everyone is clear about it. ‘Yesterday these people were children. Today they’re adults. That’s it.’
“The fact that this transformation is genetic is demonstrated by your own failure to abolish it through cultural means—legislation and education. In effect, you’ve passed a law extending childhood for an indefinite period and have redefined adulthood as a moral privilege that ultimately can only be self-awarded, on grounds that are far from clear. In tribal cultures, people are made adults just the way your presidents are made presidents, and they no more doubt that they’re adults than George Bush doubts that he’s the president. Most adults in your culture, however, are never absolutely sure when they’ve managed to cross the line—or even if they’ve ever managed to cross it.”
“That seems to be true,” I said. “I think all this has got to have something to do with gangs.”
“Of course it does. You can work that out, I’m sure.”
“I’d say that kids in gangs are rebelling against the law that extends childhood into an indefinite future.”
“They are, but not consciously, of course. They simply find it intolerable to live under this law, intolerable to be asked to deny the genetic hardwiring that tells them they’re adults. Of course, gangs flourish only in relatively disadvantaged groups. Other groups are well enough rewarded that they’re willing to forgo adult privileges for a few more years. It’s kids who are getting absolutely no reward for it—or at least no reward that they care about—who end up in gangs.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“I’ve led us slightly off track here. I wanted to show you a model of education that works for people. It works very simply, without cost, without effort, without administration of any kind. Children simply go wherever they want and spend time with whomever they want in order to learn the things they want to learn when they actually want to learn them. Not every child’s education is identical. Why on earth should it be? The idea is not that every child should receive the entire heritage but rather that every generation should receive it. And it is received, without fail; this is proved by the fact that the society continues to function, generation after generation, which it couldn’t do if its heritage were not being transmitted faithfully and totally, generation after generation.
“Obviously many details are left behind from one generation to the next. Gossip isn’t heritage. Events five hundred years old aren’t remembered the way events fifty years old are remembered. Events fifty
years old aren’t remembered the way events last year are remembered. But everyone understands that anything not transmitted to the younger generation is simply lost, completely and irrevocably. But always the essential is transmitted, precisely because it is essential. For example, toolmaking skills that are needed on a daily basis can’t possibly be lost—precisely because they’re used on a daily basis, and children learn them as routinely as children of your culture learn to use telephones and remote controls. Present-day chimpanzees learn to prepare and use twigs to ‘fish’ for ants inside an anthill. Where the practice is found, it’s transmitted unfailingly, generation after generation. The behavior isn’t genetic, but the ability to learn it is genetic.”
I told Ishmael that he seemed to be struggling very hard to say something that wasn’t quite getting through to me. To my great surprise, he suddenly reached out for a stalk of celery that he bit into with a sound like a pistol shot. He munched for a moment before going on.
“Once upon a time a distinguished elder blue-winged teal by the name of Titi called a great conference of other distinguished elders to be held on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. When they were at last gathered and settled down, one slightly less distinguished blue-winged teal by the name of Ooli stepped forward to make some introductory remarks.
“ ‘I’m sure you all know who Titi is,’ he began, ‘but in case you don’t, I’ll tell you. He is, without doubt, the greatest scientist of our age, and the world’s foremost authority on avian migration, which he has studied longer and deeper than any other teal in history, blue-winged or otherwise. I don’t know why he’s called us together here at this time, but I don’t doubt that his reasons are excellent.’ And with that, Ooli turned the meeting over to Titi.
“Titi ruffled his feathers a bit to gather everyone’s attention, then said, ‘I’ve come here today to urge upon you a vitally important innovation in the rearing of our young.’ Well, Titi certainly got everyone’s attention with this announcement, and he was deluged with questions from teals who demanded to know what was supposed to be wrong with chick-rearing practices that had worked for blue-winged teals for more generations than any of them could count.
“ ‘I’ recognize and acknowledge your indignation,’ Titi replied when he finally had them quieted down. ‘But in order for you to understand my point, you’ll have to recognize and acknowledge that I’m very different from you. As my old friend Ooli mentioned, I am the world’s foremost authority on avian migration. This means I have a deep theoretical understanding of a process that you merely experience in an unthinking and routine manner. Very simply speaking, in the spring and fall of every year you experience a certain restlessness that is ultimately relieved by taking flight in one direction or the other over the English Channel. Isn’t this so?’
“All his listeners had to agree that this was so, and Titi went on. ‘I don’t dispute the fact that your vague feelings of restlessness serve the essential purpose of getting you moving, but wouldn’t you like to be able to see your children’s lives guided by something more reliable than vague feelings of restlessness?’
“When he was asked to explain what he meant, he said, ‘If you were making the sort of detailed observations that are made by scientists like me, you would know how amazingly often you dither about for a week or ten days, making one halfhearted start after another, flying this way and that, setting out as if you really meant to migrate, then turning back after five or ten or even twenty miles. You would know how many of you actually set out and make what amounts to the whole trip—flying in the wrong direction!’
“The teals in his audience waggled their wings in a nervous way and ruffled their feathers to hide their embarrassment. They knew that what Titi was saying was absolutely true (and indeed it is actually true—not only of teals but of migratory birds in general), but they were mortified to learn that this sloppy behavior had actually been noticed by someone. They asked what could be done to improve their performance.
“ ‘We must make our chicks aware of the elements of an ideal migrating schedule. We must prepare them to observe relevant conditions and to calculate the optimum moment to set out.’
“ ‘But it would seem that you, as a scientist, are already able to do that,’ one of his listeners pointed out. ‘Couldn’t you just tell us when to migrate?’
“ ‘That would be supremely stupid,’ Titi replied. ‘There’s no way I can be everywhere at once, making all the relevant calculations. You yourselves must make these calculations where you are, in reference to the specific conditions you individually face.’
“It’s not easy to hear a teal groan in ordinary circumstances, but this flock of teals produced a mighty groan on hearing these words. But Titi went on, saying, ‘Come, come, it’s not as difficult as all that. You simply have to understand that migration becomes an advantage when the suitability of your present habitat is less than the suitability of the target habitat times what is known as the migration factor, which is just a measure of the extent to which the portion of your potential reproductive success that is under your active control would decrease as a result of this migration. I realize that this may sound like rather a beakful to you at the moment, but a few definitions and mathematical formulas will make it perfectly clear to you.’
“Well, these teals were mostly just ordinary birds, and they couldn’t imagine opposing such a renowned and respected authority, who clearly knew a great deal more about migration than they did. They felt they had no choice but to go along with plans so obviously intended for their own good. Soon they were spending long evening hours with their chicks trying to comprehend and explain such things as track patterns, navigation mechanisms, degree of return, and degrees of dispersal and convergence. Instead of frolicking in the morning sunshine, chicks learned calculus, a mathematical tool developed in the seventeenth century by two famous blue wings named Leibniz and Newton that enables one to deal with the differentiation and integration of functions of one or more variables. Within just a few years every chick was expected to be able to calculate the migration-cost variables in both facultative and obligatory migrations. Weather conditions, wind direction and speed, even body weight and fat percentages enter into the calculation of migration thresholds.
“The initial failures of the new education system were spectacular but not unexpected. Titi had predicted that migratory success would actually be lower than normal for the first five years of the program but would return to and then surpass the norm within another five years. By the end of twenty years, he said, more teals would be migrating more successfully than ever before. But when teals eventually began to migrate with normal success once again, it was discovered that most were faking the calculations—merely following their instincts, matching data to behavior rather than behavior to data. When stringent new rules were enacted to prevent this form of cheating, migratory success dropped steeply. It was finally accepted that ordinary parents were not in fact qualified to teach their children anything as complex as migratory science. This was something only professionals could be expected to handle. Chicks were henceforth taken from the nest at an early age and turned over to a new cadre of specialists, who organized their young charges into brutally competitive units, imposing on them high standards, uniform testing, and harsh discipline. A certain amount of adverse reaction to the new regime was expected and soon materialized, in the form of chronic truancy, hostility, depression, and suicide among the young. New cadres of truancy officers, guards, psychotherapists, and counselors struggled to keep things under control, but before long members of the flock were streaking away like residents of a burning building (for Titi and Ooli were not quite mad enough to think they could keep the flock together by force).
“After the two old friends watched the last remnants of the flock scatter into the sky, Ooli shook his head and wondered where they’d gone wrong. Titi ruffled his feathers irritably and said, ‘We went wrong by failing to take into account a great truth, namely that tea
ls are stupid and lazy, and perfectly content to stay that way.’ ”
“The problems involved in migration—when to start, which way to go, how far to go, when to stop—are far beyond the power of any computer to solve, but they’re routinely solved not only by relatively large-brained creatures like birds, tortoises, reindeer, bears, salamanders, and salmon but by plant lice, aphids, flatworms, mosquitoes, click beetles, and slugs. They don’t need to be schooled in this. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand.”
“Millions of years of natural selection have produced creatures capable of solving these problems in a rough-and-ready way that isn’t perfect but that does in fact work, because—behold!—these creatures are here. In the very same way, millions of years of natural selection have produced human creatures who are born with a ravenous desire to learn anything and everything their parents know and who are capable of feats of learning whose boundaries are literally beyond imagination. Toddlers growing up in a household in which four languages are spoken will learn those four languages flawlessly and effortlessly in a matter of months. They don’t need to be schooled in this. But in two years—”
I held up a hand. “Let me help, Ishmael. I think I’ve got it. Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. But to make them learn things they don’t have any use for, you have to send them to school. That’s why we need schools. We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.”
