Traditionally we are taught to see farming as the prerequisite of civilisation. An elaborate social life, we have been told, could not develop
until man was freed from the daily chore of fishing or hunting. Lately, however, this theory is being challenged by the view that early
civilised settlements were based on highly organised food gathering rather than cultivation. The highly structured societies of American
Indians and the salmon-eaters of British Columbia were so well supplied with food that large settlements developed.
To return to Nigel Calder in The Environment Game:
Man's chief physical disadvantage as a hunter must have been the encumbrance of his family. The human infant is uniquely helpless and slow
to mature. Accordingly, a fairly settled, well-defended domestic life was necessary from the outset. Women at home minding the children
while the men were out hunting were well placed to develop arts like cooking, clothes-making, and pottery, to experiment with new foods,
and to discover in their 'gardens' the elementary principles of plant reproduction. Jacquetta Hawkes has remarked, 'It is tempting to be
convinced that the earliest Neolithic societies gave woman the highest status she has ever known'. (Pre-history, UNESCO History of
Mankind)
In truth it was agriculture that turned man towards the fateful downward slope of specialisation. Mankind, heretofore dynamic- ally moving
through the environment as a member of a non- specialised, cross-disciplinary hunting party, now settled down to patient, millennia-long
cultivation of the soil. Instead of learning through interaction with the environment, he substituted aeons of boredom and elevated tradition to
wisdom; hence to be conservative was a virtue. With human settlements located in prime agricultural areas, natural disasters became major
destructors of the social pattern. Zealous and vengeful gods had to be appeased through priestly classes, sacrifices, and rituals. Man no longer
stood and fought his surround alone, moving freely across the globe. Instead, territory became precious and war an extension of statecraft.
As Buckminster Fuller has said, every living creature is more specialised than man. Most birds can fly beautifully, but find it almost
impossible to walk. Pigeons can do a little better at walking than most other birds, and the robin can hop. But most birds can't begin to walk at
all. Fish swim beautifully, and get along in their medium, but they can't walk and (usually) can't get out on the land. These are all highly
specialised forms of life. What is absolutely unique about man is his ability to apprehend, comprehend, and employ information, and to
undertake unprecedented tasks.
For millions of years man's 'little red schoolhouse' was earth itself. Mankind was taught to react and to behave by the environment, disasters,
and predators. But now we have replaced our 'natural enemies' with educators, and we try to learn from them. To brutally twist man away
from his natural heritage of non- specialisation in this way can only have brutal results. It is in the area of driving men into ever-narrowing
fields of specialisation that the schools and universities have made their greatest mistakes. Today's 'revolution on the campus' is the student's
intuitive reaction.
Modern technology (computers, automation, mass production, mass communication, high-speed travel, etc.) is beginning to give mankind a
chance to return to the interactive learning experience, the sensory awakening of the early hunter. Hydroponic farming, ‘fish-herding', protein
manufacture, and skyscraper farms will help also. Education can once again become relevant to a society of gerteralistsy in other words,
designer-planners. We have established in the first chapter that designers (especially) must operate on a non-specialised basis; it is little
wonder, then, that the intuitive student revolution against ''status quo education' seems often to happen first in our schools of design. For the
designer shapes the environments in which we all live, the tools which we all use. And from the unpalatable manifestations of bad design in
our society, the design student cannot remain aloof for long.
The main trouble with design schools seems to be that they teach too much design and not enough about the social, economic, and political
environment in which design takes place. It is impossible to teach anything in vacuo, least of all in a system as deeply involved with man's
basic needs as we have seen design to be.