Ancient technologies and education - Part I

May 7, 2010

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Our world is changing every day in infinite ways. Just as an example of these changes we only have to look at the new technologies surrounding us. There are plenty of them in every field we can imagine, i.e. medicine, computation, travelling, education, communication, etc.


Since the very beginning as human beings we have been producing changes, and it was for sure the secret of our success as a species on earth. These changes were the roots of evolution. Over successive generations humans created and transmitted accumulated knowledge and technology. Our ability to use this cultural baggage was the main characteristic that differentiated us from the other animals.


Our ancestors who lived before the dawn of history left behind them many things we can see and we can touch. Material things that are telling us what we know about their creators. Great quantities of tools, weapons, art artifacts and other articles shaped by their hands have been found by archeologists. We cannot see their faces but we know them through these things, what skill they had acquired as tool makers, we can figure what they did to survive, and to what degree of culture they had attained.


And more important, in addition to these material things which can be seen and handled, they left for us many immaterial things.


One of the greatest task and achievement of primitive men was the making of language. This achievement seen as a "new technology" of communication is so vast that it has never been exceeded. Without this achievement all the successive acquisitions, skills and discoveries would have remained impossible to transmit, impossible to communicate.


Language making, particularly in its earliest stages, must have been a very slow process, no doubt. Periods of time like geologic epochs must have been required for the language making of the first men.


Experts presume that the subsistence strategy employed by these early men and human societies for more than two million years was hunting and gathering. The food was directly obtained from the wild. It could be fruit-collecting, fishing, hunting, or foraging. In such a society any member had to use a huge amount of knowledge and technology inherited from his forefathers. They tended to be relatively mobile or "nomadic", moving to find the best places and natural environment to provide sufficient resources in order to sustain their population.


However, although they were nomadic, I guess there must have been a form of teaching and learning, that is, a form of &#&"elementary education" &#& to teach a new generation of young people, for example, how to make a knife with flint stone, or a fishing hook, or a bow and an arrow. How to obtain food and shelter.