Does this matter?  We shouldn’t simply dismiss this by suggesting that we are just not being efficient or dedicated enough, for if we really haven’t got time to think things through we are damaging ourselves.  Even more importantly, ultimately parents screw up their kids.

Let me explain.  Years ago I remember hearing that anthropologists had calculated that our Stone Age ancestors spent less than 20% of their time hunting, collecting food and cleaning out their caves.  For more than three-quarters of their waking time they just sat around, talked, and enjoyed themselves.  I saw that when I spent time observing one of the very last remnants of such people, the Hadza out on the Savannah in Tanzania who, poverty stricken as they were in terms of western expectations, appeared to have all the time in the world to tell stories, and teach their children how to repeat them.

Cognitive scientists tell us that the brains of tiny children are a wondrous bundle of neurological possibilities, bequeathed to them genetically by their countless ancestors as preferred ways of making sense of the world.  But, like a new computer operating system, they have to be activated by the challenge of being involved in the world around them.  Unchallenged, they simply lie inert, whole swathes of wasted neurological opportunities.  Human nature has to be activated by human culture.

Those Hadza parents, true itinerants who owned nothing (not even herds, crops, clothes or buildings) are in many ways quite excellent parents.  With no written language, and no one to write things down, everything that they value is recorded in stories, and every child internalises such a wealth of culture that, years later, they retell their stories, often fables, to their own children.

English toddlers are born with the same neurological software but, as noted in a recent study by Oxford University, many children today come to school never having been told a story at home.  And it is getting worse with two-thirds of teachers saying that it is worse now than ten years ago.  Children whose imaginations have not been tweaked by a ‘sitting-on-a-parent’s-lap’ culture of storytelling simply fail, almost at the first hurdle, to be creative themselves.

A month ago a study from Sheffield showed that one in five of today’s teenagers are so illiterate and innumerate that they are incapable of dealing with the challenges of everyday life.  In Stone Age times they simply wouldn’t have survived for they would have been pushed out of the cave as being an unnecessary burden on the rest of the tribe.

Later it was noted that many middle-class parents were too busy to take time out to be with their own children, simply enrolled them in so many out of school activities that they denied their children the opportunity to ‘go out and mooch around in the garden.’  Mooching is where  creative thoughts is born – as it was with Newton when hit on the head by an apple falling from the tree, and so subsequently formulated the theory of gravity.

Earlier this month archaeologists completed an analysis of the bones from a medieval burial ground and have concluded that, in the 1400s, men only needed to work for 159 days in the year to provide for their families.  Now, it seems, both parents have to work full-time to do the same thing.  While that is undoubtedly true for the least well-off in our society, is that really true for the rest of us?

Running too fast may well damage your health.  If so, ultimately it has to be our own fault.  But it is not fair on our children if we so get our priorities wrong that we deny them the time and space to grow up in ways which naturally suited the Hadza, more than they do the unfortunate child of today with its iPhone sitting on the beach while its parents socialise in the bar.

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Haiti is almost entirely populated by people whose ancestors were stolen from their homelands in Africa and sold into slavery to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.  In last month’s National Geographic Magazine there was an article on a small group of hunter/gatherers still to be found around Lake Eyasi in Tanzania.  The Hadza are what anthropologists call a ‘relict’ population – an isolated group that has somehow survived socially and genetically unchanged over something like a hundred thousand years.  They still live as did all our ancestors for probably 99% of human time.  Their numbers have been draining away for centuries as individuals have married into other tribes and lost their naturally evolved survival skills that once enabled them to survive in some of the world’s least hospitable places.

Some of those Haitians fighting to survive carry Hadza blood in their veins but history – in the form of industrial farming operated by slaves – has all but obliterated the memories of their tribal behaviours that made them such great survivors.  The Hadza traditionally own no land, grow no crops, herd no cattle and build no houses; they have no concept of time and no thought of hoarding to protect crops for when they might be short of food.  Their lives are forever dependent on sharing.  In killing a large Wildebeest, an Antelope or Gazelle, the hunter and his immediate family share the meat with anyone else who is around.  Having no means of storing any excess that might see them through future ‘starving times’ the Hadza invest in goodwill – if you help me when I am down on my luck then surely you will help me if my luck changes?  And it nearly always works, providing no one breaks the rules.  In such societies there is no fighting over disputed food, and probably there is little chance for any one person to grow too fat.  It is a society dependent on trust.

I, too, visited the Hadza five years ago.  That visit made a deeper impression on me than anything that I read in the National Geographic which seemed too ‘politically correct’, for example I did not see the women overdressed in cheap western dresses, nor could I ‘smell’ the fear that grips you when, through the cotton walls of your tent, you hear a lion roaring close by in the dark.  At one stage I noted a half-hearted attempt to grow what looked like maze on a clearing near one of the huts, and I asked the elder what this meant.  His face immediately clouded as he explained that some visiting missionaries who tried to persuade some of the Hadza women to become settled agriculturalists.  Even though in most years there is insufficient grain to grow crops, the women had been given seeds and spades and encouraged to grow maze.  “This is foolish, for in most years the crops fail”, said the elder, “but the worst of planting crops is that when people do so and the crops flourish, those who planted them won’t share out the harvest with other people.  They say it is theirs because they planted it, and because the spirit of their ancestors let it grow.  What they don’t eat in one year they want to save for a bad harvest.  They become selfish and hold it back.  It is breaking our way of live.  We believe that what people find belongs to everybody.  Planting crops makes some people more powerful than others because they can bargain with things that had previously been owned by everyone.”

That moment five years ago was a truly thought-provoking time.  Anthropologists have long speculated that there was a shift from a communal sharing ethic, the root of social conventions for 98% of human history when all our ancestors were hunter/gatherers, to the time some ten thousand years ago when our ancestors started to settled down and stake out their own turf.

For too many generations the descendants of those hunter/gatherers have had no turf of their own, nor have they been able to build a society based on trust.  To see them fighting their way up that hill to get water shows just how broken human society could become.

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It has been going on for far too long, this bashing of bankers for the bonuses they regard as their rights, even though the banks for which they were responsible have been bailed out with hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money.  Yet today’s headlines were stark… “I’m keeping every penny.  Sir Fred Goodwin “won’t budge on his £17 million pension pot”. 

It is in my contract, implied Sir Fred Goodwin as he determinedly quoted the niceties of the small print.  It’s you guys who are wrong for not anticipating this situation. 

I thought back to something I had written six years ago when, in a distant part of Tanzania, I had spent some time observing the Hadza, one of the few groups of genuine Hunter/Gatherers still living exactly as did all our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.  The Hadza own nothing – no houses, no land, no animals, no tools, and hardly any clothes.  They survive from day-to-day simply because they unflinchingly collaborate with one another.  As such they can live where you and I couldn’t survive for a couple of hours. 

“Out on the savannah last evening”, I had written, “two miniature deer were brought in and their meat shared with everyone.  As was a large haul of honey.  Some weeks before a giraffe had been killed, we were told, providing more meat than could be consumed by all of the neighbouring villages but, within 4 or 5 hours – so fast do the forest networks communicate – hunters from a dozen other villages had moved in and the food was shared communally.  No one went hungry. 

Further along I was amazed to see a half-hearted attempt to grow maize.  My guide questioned the local headman, whose face clouded as he explained that some missionaries had tried to get the Hadza women to become settled agriculturalists, even though there is, in most years, insufficient rain to grow crops.  The headman shook his head disapprovingly: “Most years the crops fail but more worrying is that when the crops do flourish, the people who planted them will not share the harvest with other people.  They say it is theirs because they planted it.  What they don’t eat in one year they then save against a bad harvest.  We all become selfish and so cease to trust each other.” 

The idea of a written contract having more legality than a verbal promise is relatively new.  When those real risk takers, the Pilgrim Fathers, set out on the hazardous voyage across the Atlantic (an undertaking infinitely more dangerous to life and limb than anything Sir Fred Goodwin did in his office) they “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, covenanted and combined their services together in a civil body politic”.  Being all in the same boat they had all to pull together.  Covenants go beyond the legal boundaries set out in contracts to embrace a never-ending commitment to each other.  It was to the idea of covenant that John F. Kennedy appealed when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. 

An education worth its name should assist young people to live by covenants, not contracts.

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