How would your orientation to life be different if you had been reared in an agricultural society?

This question is asking you as a student to imagine how your life might be different. You should note that the lives of the educators answering these questions are not identical to your life and thus that our answers will be quite different from yours. For example, the average life expectancy in many agricultural societies was less than 30 years; this means that many educators who contribute to this site would be dead rather than living productive lives, something that would not be the case for most students of traditional age. Also, you might note that "agricultural society" can refer to anything after the neolithic transition but before the Industrial Revolution, a period of some 10,000 years including many different parts of the world. A peasant in ancient Mesopotamia would have a very different life than an aristocrat in Ming China.

Your starting point for examining how your life might differ from that in many agricultural societies would be to think about the sorts of technology you use in everyday day life such as cell phones, artificial lights, automobiles. You might also consider the difference between buying food, often already prepared, and growing and gathering your own food. Most people in agricultural societies are involved in food production unless they are very wealthy. While urbanization is a trend in industrial civilizations, in agricultural ones many workers needed to live close to agricultural land, but this was not true for everyone, as even in antiquity there were important urban centers. Another difference is that literacy was rare before the nineteenth century.