THE

SABRE-TOOTH
CURRICULUM
Harold Benjamin, 1939

CPE 108
THE TEACHER AND
THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM
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 the thought.

New-Fist got to the point where he

became strongly dissatisfied with the
accustomed ways of his tribe. He began
to catch glimpse 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...
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-tooth-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”.