The Sabre- Tooth Curriculum

by Harold Benjamin

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 labor 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….

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-saber-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 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 this new technique 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 mean 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 of conditions like a solid rock
standing squarely and firmly in the middle of a raging torrent.”