Known Forever By the Tracks We Leave
If there is really a toxic element in Rousseau's legacy, it is this: his promulgation of the 'myth of the stupid savage'—even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity.
From An Historical Introduction to American Education, Third Edition (2012):
The Europeans brought their concept of private ownership to North America. Much of English common law, for example, dealt with property ownership, rights, and inheritance. The ownership of property in Europe was the basis of the socioeconomic class system which, in turn, shaped European educational patterns.
In sharp contrast, the Native Americans saw the earth's natural environment as something to be shared, not owned as private property by the people who lived on it. The earth's natural resources, its plants and animals, belonged to everyone, particularly to the tribe who lived in the surrounding area. Many tribes, though located for stretches of time in a particular region, were nomadic, moving in search of game. While different tribes would fight to possess an area and its resources, these conflicts were not based on attempts to own property. They were attempts to use the natural bounty of a region for one's own tribe as a group.
Because of these significant cultural contrasts, Native Americans and Europeans developed significantly different attitudes about education, especially the transmission and induction of the cultural heritage into the young.
What are these 'significantly different attitudes'? The author rightly assumes that we are more or less familiar with the European model, so he lays out only the indigenous model to make the contrast:
The Native Americans relied on informal educational processes rather than the formal schools that Europeans used to educate their children. Native American children learned practical life skills through direct experience with their parents, tribal elders, and from the requirements of life itself. Much of the practical Native American education consisted of training children in the "survival" skills of hunting, fishing, trapping, food gathering and harvesting, cooking, and defending the tribe.
From their rich oral tradition, passed down through tribal elders and sages, American Indian children learned about their tribe's origin, past, religious beliefs and practices, and values. Elders, often gifted storytellers, sang or recited narratives that merged myths and legends with actual historical events. This oral tradition was the means by which the young took on their primary identity and learned their tribe's spoken language and cultural traditions.
By observing and participating in ceremonial rituals, American Indian children learned their tribe's religious beliefs and values. Important ceremonies with ritual music, chanting, and dancing marked the young person's passage from childhood to adulthood. The oral tradition, reinforced by ritual ceremonies, created a psychic connection between the spirit and the natural worlds that evoked moral responses. The young thus learned what was acceptable behavior and what was forbidden.
These two models, while certainly different in content, were very similar in form.
Each was concerned with intergenerational transmission. Elders passed down oral histories, survival skills, and ethical norms through storytelling and ritual, while European parents, clergy, and community members accomplished the same through schools and religious instruction.
Each had a way of developing practical skills. Indigenous children learned hunting, fishing, agriculture, and craftsmanship through hands-on participation, while European boys learned trades via apprenticeships and girls learned domestic skills through household labor.
Each had a strong moral component. Native ceremonies reinforced communal values and behavioral norms, while Puritan schools emphasized Bible study, obedience to authority, and sin avoidance.
("A commonly cited difference between Indigenous and Western modes of education is of primarily oral versus primarily literate cultures. In Indigenous societies, great emphasis is placed on the oral transmission of knowledge through storytelling, traditionally used to convey Indigenous knowledge, customs, and values. Cajete says that 'stories [teach] people who they are so they can become all they were meant to be.' Storytelling is described as the oldest form of the arts and thus the basis for the other arts, such as drama, dance, and music. Whereas Western cultures often view storytelling as an activity to entertain small children, in Indigenous pedagogy it is a central tool for teaching and learning." [PDF] See also Romanticizing Learning.)
Yet, throughout the period of American colonization and expansion from the 17th to the 19th centuries, European colonizers—and their Native American counterparts—had strong incentives to not see or minimize these similarities and exaggerate their differences, on the one hand framing European society as obsessed with greed and one-upmanship and on the other hand framing Native practices as fundamentally different and inferior. While overlooking educational similarities may have largely been the product of ignorance, it was certainly motivated ignorance.
Is this ignorance still with us—that we modern Westerners are better than 'primitives' simply because we cannot see these similarities? The historical passages at the top of this post suggest that the answer is yes, as they do nothing else but evoke ordinal differences, conjuring images of cosmopolitan and urbane Europeans next to those of Native Americans surrounded by myth, ritual, and animal hides—a worn, misleading characterization of the past that is frustratingly common in academia, according to David Graeber and David Wengrow, who write in The Dawn of Everything (2021):
The overwhelming majority [of historians] still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It's all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the 'noble savage' or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas (deism, for example, or rational materialism, or unconventional views on marriage).††
Yet, it is likely much more accurate to say that, rather than missing the similarities—as both 'sides' did—the problem for the Europeans was that they simply did not understand (or care about) the complexities and formalities of the indigenous education model, which made it similar to the European one fundamentally. It seems clear, for example, from reports of colonial missionaries, that something like 'instruction' was difficult for them to find in some Native American practices:
'I can say in truth that, as regards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior to Europeans and to those who dwell in France. I would never have believed that, without instruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorous eloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management in things to which they are accustomed.'
Rousseau, importantly, was no less a victim of this ignorance. Detailed reports (from the sober to the fantastical) of encounters with American Indians spread all over Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and were extremely popular reading:
I don't dare speak of those happy nations who do not know even the names of the vices which we have such trouble controlling, of those American savages whose simple and natural ways of keeping public order Montaigne does not hesitate to prefer, not merely to the laws of Plato, but even to anything more perfect which philosophy will ever be able to dream up for governing a people. He cites a number of striking examples of these for those who understand how to admire them. What's more, he says, they don't wear breeches!
Schismogenesis
As you can see above (with many of the boldfaced terms), even as we struggle to argue that Western education and the cultural training that exists in Native American tribes share many crucial similarities (with particular emphasis on intergenerational transmission), we are often frustrated by characterizations of Amerindian practices and people—words and images in sources both past and present—that make this positive comparison practically impossible. We are assaulted constantly with the image of the indigenous as happy, ignorant, simple, pantsless, free, informal, practical, dancing and chanting, spiritual, and worried about pure survival. Is this the image of a cultural equal? Graeber and Wengrow write: "The racist denigration of the savage, and naive celebration of savage innocence, are always treated as two sides of the same imperialist coin."
To some degree, . . . reluctance to engage with indigenous sources is based on completely legitimate protests on the part of those who have, historically, been romanticized. Many have remarked that, to those on the receiving end, being told you are an inferior breed and that therefore anything you say can be ignored, and being told you are an innocent child of nature or the embodiment of ancient wisdom, and that therefore everything you say must be treated as ineffably profound are almost equally annoying. Both attitudes appear designed to prevent any meaningful conversation.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term schismogenesis to describe this process—a more or less natural one—of caricaturing differences at the expense of similarities:
In a historical confrontation of civilizations like that taking place along the east coast of North America in the seventeenth century, we can expect to see two contradictory processes. On the one hand, it is only to be expected that people on both sides of the divide will learn from one another and adopt each other's ideas, habits and technologies (Americans began using European muskets; European settlers began to adopt more indulgent American approaches to disciplining children). At the same time, they will also almost invariably do the opposite, picking out certain points of contrast and exaggerating or idealizing them—eventually even trying to act, in some respects, as little like their new neighbours as possible.
The Price of Ignorance
What is deeply interesting about this process of schismogenesis is that Rousseau appears to be at the center of it:
Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the 'noble savage', which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the 'myth of the stupid savage'—even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity.
We all know where this has gotten us††:
Rousseau promoted the idea of the natural development of children. This idea, according to Rousseau, should guide all pedagogical interventions by educators—nature is the norm. Second, is the importance of observing the child; that is, not to look ahead to what the child could become, but to focus on how they are. It is to acknowledge the child as a child instead of as not an adult. Third, is the importance of negative education; that is, to wait, to sit on your hands and do as little as possible to allow the natural development to unfold itself. The teacher or governor is asked to control themselves, not to speed up development, but . . . to actively hinder it. Fourth, no rules or demands should be given to the child, since this will hinder natural development and create guilt and shame. Furthermore, Rousseau valued experience—to do and to try—over instruction. Experiences are directed mainly at the development of bodily strength and instrumental skills, to be able to survive in life, as Rousseau saw it, like the natural man, the primitive man and the Indian. Hence, his admiration for Robinson Crusoe, the only book that Emile was allowed to read.
