‘BIG HISTORY’ OF EDUCATION: OUR PATH TO LISTENING SOCIETY. PART ⅕: THE STONE AGE

Abstract

The method of ‘Big History’ [Christian, 2011] — an academic study of the past from a very broad perspective — may be the most relevant pedagogical initiative of our days. This paper aims to offer the ‘big history’ of education — to narrate the story of civilization in light of conditions it creates for the development of adult people. I hypothesize, provocatively, that every culture is essentially a cult, an ecology of practices that cultivates people into a worshipped ‘form of life’. And since the given society ‘worships’ exactly that ‘form of life’ which is most conducive to solving its key problems, as society ‘ages’, so do the worshipped forms of life ‘grow up’ to face more complex and abstract problems, sustained by the ecology of the complementary educational practices, the ‘feedback loop’ between science, law, and church: from the concrete knowing to the abstract, from the lawmaking by the strongest to the universal declaration of rights, and from the zero-sum competition of wills-to-power over limited possessions to the non-zero-sum communication of people which creates everything out of nothing. These ‘loops’ grow as the increasing abstraction of the common good requires people to comprehend and abide by the increasingly complex system of law — requires us to join increasingly abstract ‘language games’. If ‘ages’ of the progress of civilization indeed match ‘ages’ of the ethical maturation of a person, we ought to rethink and thence attend to what is most relevant: education that transforms numb wills-to-power who compete for private possession of finite goods by inviting them into increasingly abstract conversations between persons who communicate and cooperate for the sake of the common good. Thus, relevance of education lies in the fact that it is the primary means we have for transforming the hell of the Bronze Age Paganism, the strife of all against all, in which the artificial ‘scarcity mindset’ locks Late Capitalist society, into a relative utopia which Hanzi Freinacht calls the Listening Society –– a term coined in his seminal and eponymous treatise [Freinacht, 2016]. If the educational project based on this account takes hold in schools and universities, our systems of learning shall come closer to vindicating the Hegelian definition of education as ‘the art of making man ethical’. In this first out of five papers, I will examine and idiosyncratically synthesize the recent publications on education of the Stone Age.