If you've raised a kid, a lot of these things are really obvious with just a few gaps of understanding here and there where a good book on learning comes in handy. Watching a tiny human go from knowing virtually nothing more than how to breathe, three years later, singing, ABCs, various animal recognition and a plethora of other stuff is educational to understanding "learning". If you haven't raised a kid, then it's no harm, no foul. I didn't realize how important family influence was on a child's learning until I did it myself.
I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most. That's either your bio-parents, typically. Maybe grandparents if your bios are crackheads. Maybe a foster care system because everyone in your family is jacked up in general. But parent: those that are responsible for your general well being. Yes "society" plays a roll. But random people don't walk up to a toddler to teach them their ABCs or 123s. Someone has to work with a kid from beginning to end for that developmental knowledge foundation or that kid has a really good chance of having a ton of problems down the line. And yes, schools still do the ABCs and numbers. But that's more to fill gaps, which do happen. Not to straight up teach a kid that can't do shit at all. There are different programs for when a 5 year old can't even say their own name. Research shows things like consistent night time reading and playing with infants and toddlers give them a solid base that proves them well throughout their lives. There was one paper (out of many) that was on hackernews a week or two ago about it as well.
And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can. That has to do with the sophistication of the brain. Those crazy folks that have wolf sanctuaries and are "apart of the pack", would argue with you about animal language too. But to be fair, you have to be a level of crazy of jump into a cage full of wolves. Hell, bees do interpretive dance to communicate. They sure kick my ass in that field. Then take Koko. From the age of 1, they taught a guerrilla to use a modified form of American sign language and was pretty proficient at communicating. I highly doubt starting at a later age would have been as effective. Developmental years of learning are vital for that foundation.
> I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most.
I didn't mean we don't learn that much from parents versus who the hell takes care of the kids (that would be semantics). I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.
> And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can.
Right, that's why I said that the crucial point was not communication with parents (or who ever the hell takes care of the kid), but communication. If you happen to belong to a species that has difficulty communicating you will never learn much from anyone, regardless of which age your parents die.
An octopus doesn't have any type of parent. That's the problem. No one teaches them, at all. That's why info doesn't move around with them. They start from scratch every generation.
Now, if you want to make a real argument against the nuclear family model and trying to say it's useless, I'd take the tribal method. There are many Amazonian tribes where a child does not exactly "belong" to parents. The entire tribe/village/whatever IS the parent. That's an interesting concept. It's also been argued that some pre-neolithic Euro-Asian societies were the same way. In some respects you can even see a form of that in Spartan society as well, back in their glory days. If I remember right, it was more towards the males. At a point (I think it was 11 or 12), taken from the family to be trained and had a barracks like lifestyle. They still had family units and what not, marriage, blood lines, inheritance, but there was a much more "society owns you" than what we see today. I think the Mongols had a similar little thing going, a lack of a hard lined family unit as well, but I might be wrong or confusing with someone else. But I'm also talking about dead societies.
Can a village raise a child? Sure. But at the same time, it's also no one's direct responsibility at that point. I say there's too much risk. What happens when the trash needs to be taken out but it's no one's direct responsibility to do so? Either someone consistently bites the bullet in the name of "The house is doing it" because they are the weakest in handling the nasty smell or it never gets done and the house smells like shit. At least in a "parent" type lifestyle, it's someone's direct job to fulfill certain duties. Now, it does suck if they are no capable to begin with. But 80/20 rule, it works most of the time.
So, unless you have a really sour relationship with your folks and you're currently projecting, at this point, I don't understand your argument. The passing of knowledge is not happening with octopi. Doesn't matter if that's by parents or by some magical monolithic tablet in the middle of the ocean. If they did have some passing of knowledge, there's a fair chance that they'd be smarter than they currently are by leaps and bounds. Dolphins raise their young (parents) and are considered one of the most intelligent sea creatures. Octopi have a chance of that, but miss the one crucial point, passing of knowledge because the parents are not around, nor is anyone else.
Again, typically parents do the passing of foundational knowledge. No one is saying that's the only way. It's just the primary, typically convenient and typically efficient due to the whole evolutionary instinct "I protect my own blood". There will always be exceptions, but in terms of convenience and efficiency, parents are the best system for passing foundational knowledge to the newly born. Irks me to have to keep saying "typical" since we all believe in black and white suddenly when it comes to the internet.
>I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.
You can't read a magic tablet if you were never taught to read. You can't understand some random old guy singing wisdom if you can't understand spoken language. I got taught both, reading and speaking, in two languages, from my folks before I hit kindergarten. Parents are typically the ones that teach you how to do the basis of understanding here. Your professors would think you're a useless sack of meat if your parents didn't work with you when you were younger. Same goes for me.
I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most. That's either your bio-parents, typically. Maybe grandparents if your bios are crackheads. Maybe a foster care system because everyone in your family is jacked up in general. But parent: those that are responsible for your general well being. Yes "society" plays a roll. But random people don't walk up to a toddler to teach them their ABCs or 123s. Someone has to work with a kid from beginning to end for that developmental knowledge foundation or that kid has a really good chance of having a ton of problems down the line. And yes, schools still do the ABCs and numbers. But that's more to fill gaps, which do happen. Not to straight up teach a kid that can't do shit at all. There are different programs for when a 5 year old can't even say their own name. Research shows things like consistent night time reading and playing with infants and toddlers give them a solid base that proves them well throughout their lives. There was one paper (out of many) that was on hackernews a week or two ago about it as well.
And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can. That has to do with the sophistication of the brain. Those crazy folks that have wolf sanctuaries and are "apart of the pack", would argue with you about animal language too. But to be fair, you have to be a level of crazy of jump into a cage full of wolves. Hell, bees do interpretive dance to communicate. They sure kick my ass in that field. Then take Koko. From the age of 1, they taught a guerrilla to use a modified form of American sign language and was pretty proficient at communicating. I highly doubt starting at a later age would have been as effective. Developmental years of learning are vital for that foundation.