"The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum”

by Harold Benjamin (1939)

A man by the name of New-Fist-Hammer-Maker knew how to do things his community needed to have done,
and he had the energy and the will to go ahead and do them. By virtue of these characteristics, he was an educated
man. New-Fist was also a thinker. Then as now, there were few lengths to which men would not go to avoid the
labour and pain of thought New-Fist got to the point where he became strongly dissatisfied with the accustomed
ways of his tribe. He began to catch glimpses of ways in which life might be made better for himself, his family and his
group. By virtue of this development, he became a dangerous man

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New-Fist thought about how he could harness the children's play to better the life of the community. He
considered what adults do for survival and introduced these activities to children in a deliberate and formal way.
These included catching fish with bare hands, clubbing little woolly horses, and chasing away-sabre-toothed-tigers-
with-fire. These then became the curriculum and the community began to prosper-with plenty of food, hides for
attire and protection from threat. "It is supposed that all would have gone well forever with this good educational
system, if conditions of life in that community remained forever the same." But conditions changed..

The glacier began to melt and the community could no longer see the fish to catch with their bare hands, and
only the most agile and clever fish remained which hid from the people. The woolly horses were ambitious and
decided to leave the region. The tigers got pneumonia and most died. The few remaining tigers left. In their place,
fierce bears arrived who would not be chased by fire. The community was in trouble.

One day, in desperation, someone made a net from willow twigs and found a new way to catch fish-and the
supply was even more plentiful than before. The community also devised a system of traps on the path to snare the
bears. Attempts to change education system to include these new techniques however encountered "stern
opposition."

These are also activities we need to know. Why can't the schools teach them? But most of the tribe
particularly the wise old men who controlled the school, smiled indulgently at this suggestion. "That wouldn't be
education... it would be mere training". We don't teach fish grabbing to catch fish, we teach it to develop a
generalized agility which can never be duplicated by mere training and so on.

"If you had any education yourself, you would know that the essence of true education is timelessness. It is
something that endures through changing conditions like a solid rock standing squarely and firmly in the middle of a
raging torent"