No environment can strongly affect a person unless it is strongly interactive. To be interactive, the environment must be responsive, that is,
must provide relevant feedback to the learner. For the feedback to be relevant, it must meet the learner where he is, then programme (that is,
change in appropriate steps at appropriate times) as he changes. The learner changes (that is, is educated) through his responses to the
environment.
The example of learning to drive an automobile, cited above, is really just a scale model of how mankind as a whole has learned to live. For
through millions of years man was a hunter, a fisherman, a sailor-navigator. As a hunter, he roamed earth as a member of a small hunting
party - a cross-disciplinary team, in a way. He evolved early (but elegantly functional) tools: evidence from Choukoutien in China shows that
Peking Man (Pithecanthropus pekinensis) fashioned stone tools long before Homo sapiens appeared on earth, and used fire as well.
Man as a hunter-fisherman-sailor was a non-specialist or a generalist, whose brain furnished him with that social under- standing and control
of casual impulses needed in a hunting group or society. We are told that even language evolved in answer to group need in the hunting party.
As hunter, man was highly successful. Equipped with spear- thrower, slingshot and bow, with knives superbly crafted of obsidian, horn, or
bone, he spread from Siberia to Spain and from the ice cliffs of Afghanistan to Mesopotamia. And adventuresome early hunters followed
bison and mammoth across the frozen Bering Strait into North America, where they settled the Great Plains nearly 15,000 years ago. They
were Homo sapiens, and they were hunters. Farmers would never have survived. Even the art works of the Upper Palaeolithic are evidence of
a fairly leisurely existence and, in Europe at least, life may have been quite pleasant for these hunters.
I am not suggesting the hunter as a 'noble savage' a la Rousseau. Compared with his farmer-descendant of the Neolithic, he may have been a
rough, nearly savage fellow. Yet as we study Palaeolithic archaeology or read about and live with the disappearing tribes still essentially
Palaeolithic today (the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Australian aborigine or the Eskimo), we see much that is ingenious and admirable.
To quote from Nigel Calder's The Environment Game:
How do you deal with an angry bull elephant, when all you have is a sharpened stone ? You nip aside, slip in behind, and cut the tendons of
his heel. What can you do to lure a giraffe, the most timid of large animals? You play on its curiosity for bright objects by flashing a polished
stone in its direction. The Bushmen, according to Laurens Van der Post, would use lions as hunting 'dogs', letting them kill game and eat a
little, before driving them off with fire. Franz Boas tells how Eskimo approach deer, two men together, one stooping behind like the back end
of a pantomime horse, the other carrying his bow on his shoulders to resemble antlers and grunting like a deer. The despised Australian
aborigine can 'travel light' with only a few wooden and stone implements and, by his knowledge of nature, survive indefinitely in the Great
Sandy Desert. If we once let these echoes of our pre-history penetrate our sophisticated heads, they strike in us chords of excitement, if not of
envy.