On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 11:22:40 -0800, "Thomas McVey" <tmcvey_at_sric.sri.com>
replied:
>Yup. But it seems to me like a case of the prisoner's dilemma. If you put
resources into
>educating the girlies, and then marry them off into other clans, then you
don't have a
>*guarantee* you'll see the benefit of their education. If you devote the
same resources
>into educating your testosterone-poisoned males, then you *know* that most
of them will
>be sticking around.
To which, on Fri, 15 Sep 2000 21:49:00 +0100 (BST), Alex Ferguson
<abf_at_cs.ucc.ie> commented:
>[*] While I think I know what you all mean, 'Orlanthi education'
>sounds a bit like 'military intelligence'. ;-) The most intellectual
>people in the world they ain't! Aside from exceptional cases like
>lawspeakers, I don't think many people in Heortling society set
>about self-consciously 'learning' or 'being taught' things, other
>than in a 'learning by doing and being taught by having it done for
>you' sense, which happens largely through the desire to get the
>thing done, rather than through an educational ethos as such.
I think most people agree on this, though someone (perhaps tongue in cheek?) wrote about the Lhankor Mhy guy having to speak up to be heard by the girls in the back of the room. There are no school rooms in Sartar, unless the Lunars <spit> introduced them.
>...As Tom McVey said, it is rather like prisoner's dilemma, but without
>boring everyone with _too_ much game theory, one in which the
>population-stable strategy ought to move towards a co-operative
>state, I think.
Specifically, it's the _iterated_ prisoner's dilemma. That is, you do a prisoner's dilemma interaction each time, and you remember how your partner behaved the last time. A single-shot prisoner's dilemma is like buying a car--the car dealer will never see you again, because you'll probably go to a different dealer next time you need a car. An iterated prisoner's dilemma is more like having a contractor who sends you your raw material and you pay for it before you can tell the quality. He's not going to burn you intentionally*, because doing so is not in his long-term best interests.
The other reason why women get "educated" (whatever we take that to mean) is magic. Magic makes a difference in social roles, just as technology altered social and gender roles in our own society. In particular, the women-only magic of Ernalda and Uralda gives women an important social role that they lacked in many of the patriarchal cultures of our world. For that matter, the status of women in patriarchal society had its ups and downs, and before King Josiah cast down the pillars of Asherah in the temple of YHWH in ca. 622 BCE, Israelite society had a feminine dimension of the sacred and all that implies. Magic in Glorantha is a bit more obvious and mission-critical than it is here, so the effect will be greater.
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