Education Bookcast

Jared Diamond is a geographer and author of many bestselling books about civilisation, including Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. In The World Until Yesterday, he combines his scholarship and his personal experiences in the New Guinea highlands to discuss how non-state societies of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers and herders differ from modern industrialised state societies. In so doing, he sheds a light on the differences between our modern world and the way that humans have lived for the majority of our existence on this planet. Although the whole book is fascinating, there is only one chapter that is really relevant to the themes of this podcast: the one entitled Bringing Up Children. In it, we can get a much broader perspective on the ways that different societies approach childhood and education than we ever could by comparing industrialised state societies with one another (say, comparing the People's Republic of China to the United Kingdom). The chapter deals with the following themes: chi