Concerning education, hunter-gatherers trust that children and adolescents will figure out what they need to learn and will learn it through their own drives to observe, explore, and play with all relevant aspects of their environment (see my Aug. 2, 2008, post). They trust, further, that when young people are ready to start contributing in meaningful ways to the band's economy, they will do so gladly, without any need for coercion or coaxing.
Such trust, I think, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who are trusted from the very beginning usually become trustworthy. People treated in this way do not grow up to see life as a matter of trying to overpower, outsmart, or in other ways manipulate others. Rather, they grow up viewing life in terms of friendships, that is, in terms of people willingly and joyfully helping each other to satisfy their needs and desires. That is the attitude that I have been describing throughout this series as the playful approach to life--the approach that brings out the best aspects of our humanity.
Play, as I have said repeatedly in this series, requires individual freedom. Play is no longer play when one person attempts to dominate another and dictate what they do. If life is a grand game, then each player must be free to make his or her own moves, while still abiding by the general rules of the game--in this case by the larger rules of society, which apply to everyone. To interfere with the players' abilities to make choices is to destroy the game for them. Social interaction, learning, productive work, and religious practices become burdensome toil rather than joyful play when they are enforced and controlled by others. By refraining from using their greater physical strength or mental prowess to control children's (or anyone else's) behavior, hunter-gatherer adults refrain from destroying the sense of play in their children and in themselves.
Play requires a sense of equality, and hunter-gatherers are remarkably able to retain that sense even in their interactions with young children. Young children are clearly not as strong, skilled, or knowledgeable about the world as are older children or adults; but their needs and desires are equally legitimate, and nobody knows what a child needs or desires better than the child himself or herself. Hunter-gatherers seem to understand these truths better than do most people in our society today.
Why did the approach to parenting change with the advent of agriculture? It wasn't just that new metaphors became available. Rather, the goal of parenting changed--from that of fostering the child's will to that of suppressing the child's will--because the perceived needs of society changed. In next week's essay I'll say more about that, and why it happened, and then talk about ways by which we, in our culture today, might adopt a more playful style of parenting.
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Notes
*Some of the hyperlinks in these postings are automatically generated and may or may not link you to sites that are relevant. Author-generated links are underlined to distinguish them from the automatic ones.
[1] The theme of this essay, and some of the wording, is taken from my recently published article, "Play as the foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence," American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522, 2009.
