The Failure to Learn from Success?

Human nature was forged in the harsh flames of tribal survival. Here, an overarching frame insured the possibility of a natural collaborative learning process.

The methodology of collaborative learning relies first on information, common knowledge that was available to everyone in a relatively small band of humans, for which I am using the term ‘tribe’. What became key issues and concerns easily arose when daily encounters with the group’s ‘world’ provided daily feedback. No problem, then, having small group discussions: one can easily surmise how the informal topics of conversation would bring up variables, individual positions, and suggestions for decision-making. It is hard not to also see room for debate as a band is by its very nature insuring the encountering – and verbalizing the differences – between its members.

It’s interesting how something called 'collaborative learning', this contemporary, post-civilization approach forwarded to ease the transition to consensus in such areas as environmental decision-making, is nothing larger than the forgotten, natural human way of interaction. Interesting, and also instructive in how ‘unnatural’ our overgrown human world has become. Where is group identity today? Certainly, not in an overarching small band of humans, working necessarily together to insure their group, and individual, survival. National, organizational and cultural identities are grasped in lieu of the tribe to which one ‘belonged’.

We humans are lost. We have become so estranged from our homeland that we have nearly forgotten from where we came. We became swept up in the novelties of the foreign cities to which we have traveled, distracted by the sparkle of the new. We became entranced with our growing powers, and in our naiveté set off into directions that left us in peril.

As we set about searching for a way out of the dangers that lurk all around us - and within us - let us not forget from where we came. Let us recall our human abilities won through innumerable generations before civilization took its bitter toll. Over time, our genetically produced capacity for civilization's technological glimmer deeded us a power that so entranced us, that it blinded us to our ancestral, hard-won success, earned by the trial and error of human survival, the experiments of the natural world. Nature was a harsh teacher, and it has injured us to the core to have lost her instructions regarding healthy human community.