This crucial topic seems to be approached on two levels. One is the scientific study of how humans and all creatures learn, grow, mature and live out their lives. The more common concern is the present agony over the school systems and related institutions.

The objective scientific approach is commonly neglected or displaced by distress over the common school. But how children learn is well studied. They learn by imitating and exploring. Words can never describe accurately and completely, but let's indulge this verbal approach for now.

An easy approach begins with babies. They are not yet able to articulate or rationalize, yet the seem quite able to make their needs known. They need constant attention to temperature and nutrient, but most important they need elaborate affection and stimulation. Never in our evolutionary history have neonates been so isolated and deprived of human interaction. For millennia, babies are constantly attended by mother, adults and children in the immediate household. Our Modern Abstract Culture (MAC*) trends toward increasing isolation, a poverty of babyhood. Typical pathologies include not only neglect, but TV. The infant, beginning her interpersonal life, is exposed to images of people who do not respond in any way. Worse yet, the images are often grotesque cartoons, a tragic pathological compulsion of children's programers. Their initial interpersonal process is truncated. This function of TV is a major contribution to our epidemic of autism, damage to the developing interpersonal process of the most vulnerable. As one nursery school teacher complained, "When I speak to them, they just turn away, as if I were a TV". Therefore, the first requirement of this first stage of life is a residence with plenty of people at the ready. Genetic relatedness and cultural tradition is helpful, but humans easily adjust to quasi extended family roles if the architectural structure is appropriate.

Little children need to be watched constantly, and attended to and played with when awake. The tragic isolation in MAC not only neglects positive mental and physical development, but also continues the undercurrent of loneliness. `Time-out' isolation makes matters worse. In contrast, the tabooed common spanking reasserts physical and emotional intimacy and security. Child abuse is increasingly unlikely in the extended family context, simply because there are plenty of caring people at the ready. In Organic Social Life (OSL*) people care for each others children.

In OSL older children assume care giver roles. Tending their youngsters begins learning responsibility and empathy, traits postponed and neglected in our compulsively age segregated MACs. Countless scientific studies indicate that nursery schools are better for the children than staying home with a single mother or care giver. That implies that even an age segregated (AS) group process is healthier than having the poor child isolated with a lonely mother. Nursery school is a small but inadequate step toward quasi extended family households.

The tragedy of Compulsive Age Segregation, CAS, continues its pathologies in common schooling. Not only do the children not learn to care for the youngsters, but they do not identify with the otherwise more empathetic and responsible elders. This basic mechanism of maturity, learning caring and responsibility from elders, that enabled and sustained human life for our evolutionary life, is now damaged and broken. Humanity exhibits a dearth of maturity and responsibility and this lack portends the decay of human culture and life. [THE NURTURE FALLACY Judith Harris]

Worse yet, given the deep human need to identify with tribe, segregation by age isolates the age peers into its own quasi tribal life. Children shift their loyalties from fragments of family to the tyranny of peers. Age segregation that seems to have begun when Martin Luther decided to teach the masses to read the bible by themselves. This disastrous mode has become the dominant mode of the `civilized' world. Being a northern European rationalist, Mr. Luther assumed that age was the only generalization one could make about a child. [L. L. White "The Next Development of Man."]

Politically, this AS promotes the basic immature basis for mass teenage frenzy, fascism, brutal immature conformity, and pervasive narcissism. Humanity's challenge to address the needs of our degrading supportive ecosystem cannot be addressed by the governments of masses of immature people. Economically, the essence of "limited liability" is a manifestation of AS and irresponsibility flourishes on every level.

* refers to letsprehend.com a Manual of Human Ecology and Culture Design.

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