ABSTRACT
The basic question facing schools in any context at any period of history is, “What shall be taught?” In primitive societies before the advent of formal schooling the answer was, invariably, survival skills. Usually boys learned the skills of the hunter and girls learned to take care of the innumerable tasks associated with nurturing and caring for the young. Formal schooling began when the young could no longer learn these skills from simply growing up in the culture. The discovery of writing and mathematics probably was responsible for the first schools.
