> Being a neurodiverse, or more commonly known "on the spectrum", is a guaranteed way to get bullied (or worse) by your peers who are not. How is that supposed to help with survival?
Schools as a concept are a relatively new thing, historically speaking. Most children outside of those recruited by/given to the clergy used to be homeschooled, either by their parents or for privileged families by dedicated servants, and when they were of age, they went to trades training or the military. And that was fine, because most jobs were manual labor and didn't require a lot of actual knowledge - not even the ability to read and write, literacy rates were abysmal in the utter majority of the population [1]. Side note, that was also why religion got so entrenched - oftentimes, the local clergy were about the only people in town that were actually able to read the Bible and to speak/translate Latin. That gave them a loooot of power.
Only at the beginning of industrialization came the realization that societies and economies needed at least some common basic standard set of knowledge and that homeschooling could not provide this, so schools were introduced for efficiency reasons.
Schools as a concept are a relatively new thing, historically speaking. Most children outside of those recruited by/given to the clergy used to be homeschooled, either by their parents or for privileged families by dedicated servants, and when they were of age, they went to trades training or the military. And that was fine, because most jobs were manual labor and didn't require a lot of actual knowledge - not even the ability to read and write, literacy rates were abysmal in the utter majority of the population [1]. Side note, that was also why religion got so entrenched - oftentimes, the local clergy were about the only people in town that were actually able to read the Bible and to speak/translate Latin. That gave them a loooot of power.
Only at the beginning of industrialization came the realization that societies and economies needed at least some common basic standard set of knowledge and that homeschooling could not provide this, so schools were introduced for efficiency reasons.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/reading-writing-globa...