Somebody Bought a Coffee for Jay Eaton:

“I love all your aliens so much, thank you for creating such great content! Could you share some about how young ferrets are educated?”

What we think of as typical schooling, ie, a teacher standing on a stage and lecturing a class, is virtually non-existent in bug ferret cultures. There is rarely a situation in which a young ferret is just being talked at by a teacher, reading plain text, or copying slides– nor is there a “school” location where pups are sent off alone for the majority of the day. Given ferret psychology, regular human public schools sound like a form of child torture!

Generally speaking, ferret youngins are educated by the caretakers in their families (which have up to 30 adults in various household roles), or in a group of nearby families’ caretakers and kids. Lessons are primarily taught in the form of hundreds of games and interactive objects. Most governmental districts have a standard set of lessons/games that must be taught to all pups, but many families supplement this with their personal favorites. In some areas, there are ferret families employed as government teachers, who go from neighborhood to neighborhood holding game sessions to teach state-required lessons. Field trips are also fairly common, usually as families taking their kids out for government-sponsored lessons at relevant locations.

Once the pups have grown up, they are ready to go out in small groups of peers to “colleges,“ where they can interact with more specialized teacher families. Colleges are basically just convention halls where teacher and trade families schedule meetings, and “lectures“ are a big educational moshpit where the host family and peer groups interact freely, usually with several learning games and interactive objects to keep everyone on topic. There is no strong equivalent to “homework“ in ferret schooling, but peer groups may be assigned projects or games to work on together in their off hours.