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It looks like decentralization of education, through the sum of all media (especially of course the internet) is to radically change society from the centralized and often narrow educational systems of medieval and earlier times.

The present system does seem destined for collapse, but as with the Egyptian dynasty kingdoms, only when each dynasty exhausts itself on the dynamic it emerged with. After that, the hiatus is a time of devolution until a new dynamic emerges. Before, that was easier to see when the only energy was human and animal labor; the dynamic was intrinsically alive and conscious. Now, with energy in the forms of electricity and fuel from several sources, it’s not possible to say whether any such dynastic hiatus will resemble the ancient exhaustion. Rome lasted four hundred years under as a Republic under a Senate, but the present situation is that of a highly communicative world civilization and it is not possible to predict; the energy may fluctuate around the globe, first here, then there, etc. For instance, the “sunset on the West” of which China spoke, may actually be entirely a quieter time in American civilization, while Asia proceeds with development, and far less ominous than imperial tradition’s alarm suggests. After a time, the enthusiasm for rapid progress simply emerges again. And the pattern is similar, more rapidly or slowly, larger or smaller, depending on the size and condition of each region or country. It does not mean that any particular place is less secure during a hiatus — it’s simply a quieter time with less aggression in its construtions.

But you are not yet a forager. What will you be able to teach the young of your tribe?

I am not yet a forager. Nor do I yet have young. By the time I have young, I’ll be a forager. So where is the dilemna?

The next generation of your tribe will be cut off both from civilized knowledge and from ancient knowledge of living. Your sources of information about foragers are mostly civilized sources. This is why I think that your tribe’s knowledge will be inferior once you are cut off.

I’ll point you to Brent Ladd’s account to verify my intuition that ancient knowledge has a way of spontaneously re-emerging in the same context:

Generally (and I emphasize) one cannot improve upon what has worked for thousands of years for indigenous people. We would prove this out time and again, often the hard way. Shelter has been a prime example. We exerted more energy than I care to think of in attempting to build the “perfect primitive” shelter, only to return to the basics in the end.

Ultimately, though, there’s some truth in what you’re saying. The examples of other sustainable societies can be enough to get us started, but they are not our cultures, and a hopeless mish-mash cannot be expected to form some syncretic culture of its own accord. Even with Levi-Strauss’ bricolage, there is some amount of synthesis that is necessary. Primitive skills are the necessary foundation for sustainable life, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. The far more daunting challenge is to begin to build on that foundation, to create a whole new culture. There’s the challenge that lies before us. Our primary advantage in this, is that creating culture is the one thing we humans do best. The Fifth World is all about flexing those mental muscles, and training us to think in terms of creating new cultures through synthesis and syncretism.

In a world where these civilized means are denied to you, you will have to rely on the small portion that you’ve previously learned, and perhaps re-discover some of the rest on your own, if you survive the process. You will make errors that could have been avoided, and spend a lot of time learning something that a civilized person could have leart faster and easier.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. Certainly any forager’s knowledge of things relevant to a forager’s life is vastly superior to any civilized knowledge. “Book learnin’” can only get you so far. My academic knowledge is what finally led me to understand that academic knowledge is insufficient. If the next generation gets to skip that long, arduous step and go directly to the knowledge that’s important, rather than the useless trivia that crams my skull, I fail to see where they are in any way diminished by that.

But you are not yet a forager. What will you be able to teach the young of your tribe? The next generation of your tribe will be cut off both from civilized knowledge and from ancient knowledge of living. Your sources of information about foragers are mostly civilized sources. This is why I think that your tribe’s knowledge will be inferior once you are cut off. You will take books with you to your land, whether in your backpack or in your skull. There is no other choice for a transitional men, who is neither in a forager culture yet, nor in a civilized culture any more.

The so-called ruling class of which you are a member at the present is quite numerous. It includes many millions of people with the same abilities and powers as you.

As an absolute number, there’s some truth in that. As a percentage of the world’s population, however, it remains small: about 10%. Much less than that, and there’s too much discontent relative to contentment, and the system implodes. Much more than that, and quality of life becomes too great to maintain a civilization. That’s why every civilization in history has had about 10% of its population as an elite. Straying even as little as 8% or 12% usually precipitates collapse.

This number of people is increasing as access to knowledge becomes cheaper.

No, it increases as general population increases. In 1960, there were 3 billion people, and about 300 million elites. Today, there’s 6.5 billion, and about 650 million elites. It has nothing to do with access to knowledge; it increases in absolute numbers only as general population increases in absolute numbers, because no civilization can tolerate an elite that grows to much more than, or shrinks to much less than, 10%.

It doesn’t matter to your tribe, if some other tribe is cut off from knowledge; as long as you have the potential of accessing it, you will be able to use it.

My point was that today’s distribution is unequal. If 10% of the population has access to a great deal of information, but the other 90% has access to almost nothing, versus a system where everyone has access to an average amount of information, which one has more information? This is assuming your ethnocentric notion of primitive tribes as “ignorant” has a basis–which it does not. In fact, in primitive societies, we’re talking about everyone having access to a great deal of information, so that the overall effect on knowledge from collapse is very positive, not negative as you’ve suggested. But even in your own chauvanistic terms, if we ignore the little-known fact that primitive societies have knowledge at least equal to our own, your argument still fails, because you’re only examining the knowledge of the elites, and ignoring the ignorance that situation forces on the masses.

It is this access to knowledge that led you to your conclusions. It is the threat of breaking the connection to accumulated knowledge of civilization, that makes you learn things now that will aid in your survival later and are not very useful right now. If you could preserve the connection to knowledge base through the collapse, you’d have less to worry about, and less things to fill your head with.

By itself, that might be a valid point, but by what means? Knowledge is neither good nor bad: it is a tool. It can be good, or bad, depending on how it is used. Knowledge has often led to very bad ends–it’s a rather prevailing theme in myth and literature. So, if we must sacrifice something good, in order to retain more knowledge, then we have given up something good for something that’s neither good nor bad. Subtracting any positive number, and then adding zero, will always yield a negative number–the overall impact of such a sacrifice can never be worthwhile. But most importantly, you are again assuming that primitive societies have no knowledge, or inferior knowledge to our own society. This assumption is patently, demonstrably false.

In a world where these civilized means are denied to you, you will have to rely on the small portion that you’ve previously learned, and perhaps re-discover some of the rest on your own, if you survive the process. You will make errors that could have been avoided, and spend a lot of time learning something that a civilized person could have leart faster and easier.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. Certainly any forager’s knowledge of things relevant to a forager’s life is vastly superior to any civilized knowledge. “Book learnin’” can only get you so far. My academic knowledge is what finally led me to understand that academic knowledge is insufficient. If the next generation gets to skip that long, arduous step and go directly to the knowledge that’s important, rather than the useless trivia that crams my skull, I fail to see where they are in any way diminished by that.

What’s more, we are not even considering the potential negative effects of knowledge. The preservation of scientific knowledge could tempt people to try this terrible experiment again, and though it may be largely impossible on material grounds, that does not mean they can’t destroy themselves in the attempt. A little knowledge, the proverb warns, is a dangerous thing.

If weather starts to change very fast, you will be caught perhaps unable to adapt or move in the right direction to avoid the trouble and no weather satellites will guide your decision.

That doesn’t stand up to the evidence. What has our knowledge of shifting weather patterns benefitted us? We sit here actually debating whether or not global warming is real. The idea that science can warn us and give us a chance to avert disaster does not stand up to our historical record of inaction in the face of overwhelming evidence. Meanwhile, foragers “sense” the weather far more accurately than our weather satellites ever have. The rational mind is actually fairly slow at assembling evidence, particularly compared to the unconscious mind which stitches together unnoticed clues to come to very accurate, intuitive conclusions. The Andamnan islanders survived the tsunami, while civilized folk perished. Foragers have always been far keener judges of changing weather than meteorologists, and being nomadic omnivores, they are far rmore adaptable to changing circumstances than sedentary granivores. To suggest that foragers would be at risk from changing weather patterns more than civilized folk is pretty outrageous–the only advantage, meteorology, is far inferior to forager weather detection, and the sacrifice made for meteorology is susceptibility to natural disaster in the first place.

if a neighboring tribe happens to hate yours, you will be cut off from negotiating and diplomacy knowledge accumulated for thousands of years.

Civilized knowledge of negotiation and diplomacy is far, far inferior to the methods of consensus and relationship-building that is central to tribal life. This is an even more egregious example. If ability to build relationships were compared to speed, then tribes would be cheetahs, and civilizations would be tectonic plates.

If they attack, you will be cut off from the strategical and tactical knowledge.

Warfare is a civilized specialty, granted. Which is why this is a non-starter: tribal war is a very, very different thing. Civilized knowledge of warfare is useless in tribal wars. They’re so different as to barely deserve the same name.

You see, right now you have the access to knowledge of millions of brains, hundreds of generations.
After you are cut off, it will be only you and yours and whatever you managed to squirrel away while you still had access.

Civilization is cut off from the million years of human evolution. It is isolated, small, and brief. Once cut off from civilization, you plug in to the far larger, far older body of tribal knowledge.