What Are the Origins of Education? What This Means For Parents And Teachers Today
The oak tree at the end of our school nature trail drops so many acorns this time of year that you can’t walk without crunching them under your boots. Last week, I was leaning against its trunk waiting for the group to catch up, when 9-year-old Milo plopped down next to me, holding up an acorn he’d carved his initials into with a pocket knife. “Ms. L,” he said, “when did education start anyway? Like, before people built schools, did kids just not learn anything?”
I didn’t have an answer ready, I just shrugged and said we’d circle back to the question in class, but it stuck with me. That night, I was standing at my kitchen counter stirring boxed mac and cheese for my 7-year-old, and I kept turning it over. A lot of what I read in education classes talks about the origins of formal schooling, how it grew out of the Industrial Revolution to train kids for consistent factory work, but that’s not the origin of education itself, is it?
A few months back, my 4-year-old niece came over when I was fixing a wobbly dining room chair. I pulled out my screwdriver and a tube of wood glue, and she dragged her little plastic tool box over to the table, pulled out her toy hammer, and copied every move I made. She tapped the same spot I tapped, she squeezed a glob of play glue onto the leg, just like I squeezed real glue. I didn’t plan to teach her anything about carpentry that afternoon, but by the time I was done, she could tell you that you screw clockwise to tighten and counterclockwise to loosen. That’s education, right? That’s the oldest form there is.
Anthropologists have written about how hunter-gatherer groups raised kids for tens of thousands of years. There were no classrooms. Kids spent all day hanging around the camp, watching adults work. When they were small, they played at hunting or tanning hides or gathering berries. When they got a little older, they joined in, doing small tasks, and adults corrected them gently when they messed up—no tests, no grades, no separate “learning time.” That’s where education started: not as a separate thing you do for a few hours a day in a building, but as part of living. It was just how we passed on the skills the next generation needed to take care of each other.
Formal schools came much later, when people started growing enough food that some people didn’t have to work the fields. Scribes, priests, and nobles needed to learn specialized skills like reading and writing that not everyone needed, so they started setting up small classes to teach those things. By the 20th century, most kids went to formal school, and we started to treat education like it’s something that only happens there, something that requires textbooks and lesson plans and grades to count. That’s what makes Milo’s question so sharp. Most of us don’t stop to think that education existed long before schools did.
What does this mean for us, as parents and teachers? I’ve spent 10 years worrying about whether I’m teaching enough, whether my kids (both my own and my students) are hitting the right benchmarks. But when I go back to the origins of it all, it takes a lot of the pressure off. It doesn’t mean we don’t need formal schools, but it reminds me that most important learning happens outside of pre-written lesson plans, and there are small, low-effort things we can do every day that align with how education grew.
For example, instead of setting aside a separate 30 minutes of math practice for your elementary kid after dinner, next time you order pizza, ask them to figure out how many slices each person gets if you get an 8-slice pie. If you’re planting flowers in the yard, ask them to count how many pots you need, or how much soil to add to each one. If you’re going to the grocery store, tell them you have $10 for snacks and ask them to add up the cost of what they picked out. None of this takes extra prep, you’re just doing what you were already going to do, and letting them help. That’s exactly the kind of learning humans have done for thousands of years.
I tried this shift in my own classroom this year. Instead of working through a fractions unit straight from the textbook, we decided to plant a class vegetable garden. We had to measure the raised beds, calculate how much mulch to order, space the seeds the right distance apart. The kid who struggles the most with written math problems figured out the spacing for our tomato plants all by himself, because he wanted them to grow big enough to give tomatoes to the school cafeteria. It wasn’t fancy, and we got a few measurements wrong, but it stuck.
Last week, a week after Milo asked his original question on the trail, he brought in the chocolate chip cookie recipe his grandma taught him to bake. We decided to bake it for our Friday snack, and we had to double the recipe to have enough for everyone. Half the class got a turn measuring ingredients, and when we got to the 3/4 cup of brown sugar, a group of kids worked it out together that double that is 1 1/2 cups. We burned the first batch a little, but no one cared. We ate them anyway, and everyone went home knowing how to adjust a recipe for a crowd.
I still have to cover state standards, I still send home homework sometimes, I still worry that some kids are falling behind. There’s no going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that’s not what any of us want anyway. But every time I start to feel overwhelmed by all the boxes we’re supposed to check, I think of Milo’s question, and that 4-year-old with her plastic hammer copying my moves. Education started with people letting kids be part of their lives, not separate from them. It’s still that simple, most of the time.
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