Romanticizing Learning
Knowledge is not just handed on around the campfire or out on the daily gather and hunt, apparently with no need to actually work at learning.
From The Memory Code:
Too often it is claimed that indigenous peoples just know their landscape or ocean through some kind of paranormal link to the earth which Westerners don't have, as is so popular with those who prefer a romanticised version of indigenous reality. The implication is that this knowledge is just handed on from father to son, mother to daughter, around the campfire or out on the daily gather and hunt, apparently with no need to actually work at learning. There is no society I could find that operated this way. In all cases, knowledge was formally taught over many years through the levels of initiation within the tribe.
In Australian Aboriginal cultures, it took on average 30 to 40 years for initiates to learn the full song cycles and dances, and to know all the sacred sites, objects and designs. Initiates were often removed from the community for an intensive period of instruction in the songs, mythology and dances that formed the integrated system of sacred, social, artistic and practical knowledge.
Māori in New Zealand attended traditional schools where they studied from dawn until midnight for five months of the year. The Baktaman of New Guinea were trained from childhood for over twenty years through seven degrees of initiation. The intense study regimes of the Poro of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Yoruba diviners of southwestern Nigeria and the central African Luba have all been documented. Students of the Luba secret society, the Bumbudye, paid fees at each level of initiation and were formally examined before being initiated at that level.
