Ancestral Education is a re-emerging educational approach that capitalizes on human beings’ innate, ancestral capacity to

learn and grow via mimicry. 

For millions of years, without defined, standardized knowledge, humans learned what (and when) they needed in order to survive.  They learned by mimicking successful elders (role-models) who passed down useful tricks of the survival trade.  The curriculum was defined by what worked, not what ‘should have been’ taught.

(n=1) 

(m=1) 

+

=

(s=1)

The history of science, the history of knowledge, teaches us that epistemic humility is of ultimate importance: We must recognize that we know far less about the world than we think we know. Thus, at some point, since no one knows everything, each of us must self-experiment to figure out what works and what doesn't work in our own specific cases. It's an n=1 clinical trial, the statistics of individuals, and this local, small-scale tinkering approach is the modus operandi that rises to the surface as the best way to confront and make decisions in the face of opacity. In this spirit, self-experimentation operates under a thinkering model: Generate m=1 my-thologies and then test these conjectures by conducting n=1 tinkering efforts, just to see what happens, falsifying negative results along the way, re-editing your personal narrative in the process