Rare exceptions

Not all agrarian state societies only had home-schooling and monastic orders.  Some had education of groups which did not just consist of siblings.  The pupils were then children of people which had enough economic resources not to need to use their children as manpower.  Then you can socialize as equals without constant fear of punishment.  This is a necessary requirement for learning that other points of view exist.  Such insights can’t be taken for granted in historically documented societies.

A cultural area having such was Ancient Greece.  The Ancient Greeks also got further than thinking of evilness as ill will.  Instead, it was viewed as deficiency in insight in what is good.  Consequentially, they did not believe the first woman’s mistake to have cursed humanity with ill will.  On one hand, most believed in many gods out of which some have come and went before that.  So it is clear that death and reproduction existed before humanity.  On the other hand, the mistake of the first woman was believed to have realised more specific phenomenon.  These were such things as lies, war, famine, disease, but also hope.

Ancient Greece was better than its neighbours at accepting different opinions.  However, this does not mean tolerance as we perceive it today.  Socrates had the habit of asking people to define well-known concepts.  He was considered enormously annoying which eventually led to his death.  It was his pupil Platon which wrote it down afterwards.  He was in turn Aristoteles’ teacher.  Aristoteles is credited with codifying thinking in terms all or nothing being true.  This led to some paradoxes as for example this:

A man from Crete claims that all Cretans lie.  Is he lying?

With the thinking Aristoteles formulated this paradox can’t be solved.  My solution is that he lies because there are Cretans who don’t.  I presuppose other people to have come up with this solution generations ago.  One just has to realise everyone does not have to match stereotypes.  Then one can draw the conclusion that the error is in the word all.

The Ancient Greek cultural area was eventually conquered by the Roman Empire.  The Romans also hade schools educating groups of children which were not necessarily siblings.  The expression “to err is human” is also a Roman insight.  The Roman Empire was succeeded by the Byzantine Empire which survived until 1453.  But I don’t know if it had resources for more than home-schooling and monastic orders.  If it did not have this the insights of the Greeks and Romans was lost.

Some other agrarian state societies may also have had groups of pupils.  However, one can’t take it for granted that a certain society had this.  Instead, one has to find out if there was in a certain society during a certain time period.  I think it has been rare.  At least considering all the self-righteousness written over the millennia.

Uploaded on the 16th of June 2023.