Rewilding Education
Indigenous cultures did not have schools. In fact, in 3 million years of human history, we’ve only had schools for a few hundred. What does that tell you? People did fine without schools, lived sustainably without schools. In spite of all its rhetoric of education, civilization continues to destroy the planet at an accelerating rate… Not only did we do fine without schools, we did better.
I always hated school. No wait, I mean, I always fucking hated school. In fact, I’ve dropped out 5 times, from 4 schools. Four of the programs I actually chose to go into myself, excluding the fifth, compulsory schooling, which no one ever gave me a choice. As soon as I realized I had the choice, I left immediately.
Even those who claimed to have loved school can’t possibly, honestly mean it. My friend Willem loves it when people say, “I liked school.” He simply replies, “So you stayed inside and cried during all of your snow-days?” Unless they “liked school” in the Stockholm Syndrome sense(Also called “trauma-bonding”), where people become sympathetic and loyal to their captors/abusers.
Schooling not only destroys our passion for life but also never lets us know it exists. As children we have no choice but to place trust in our culture to meet our needs. We do what they say, expecting to learn how to live in the world. By placing us in school, with a one-size-fits-all curriculum we have no choices to follow the things in life that interest us as individuals and give us power as individuals. The hierarchy of school falls in to place quite easily because: some kids do really well in school. This makes all the kids who don’t fit well lower on the pyramid. Of course the ones who do well enjoy school because they reap the benefits of sitting higher on the hierarchy. Those who do what teachers ask of them (homework, raising their hand to speak, asking to use the restroom, etc), those who have no difficulty tossing out their individuality, their soul, reap the benefits; pizza parties, good grades, honor role, the elitism and self-worth that comes from thinking you have more smarts than your fellow classmates.
Just because I hated school doesn’t mean that I hated all of my teachers. On the contrary, teachers themselves simply serve as captives to a larger system as well. I had some really great teachers that shaped my life and some real assholes too. Most teachers don’t realize this and think they can change the system or work the system. Unfortunately, the system itself does the teaching, and you cannot change a flawed system. It doesn’t matter what subjects you learn or teach, the system (or structure) teaches you the real lessons; watch the clock, follow instructions, fear those in power, fear your peers, believe your intelligence and self-worth rests in the hands of those in power.
In elementary school my teachers loved me. They always raved to my parents about my creativity and imagination. They placed me in the TAG (talented and gifted) program in kindergarten. I believed I had more smarts than those not in the program because I had more “talent” and more “gifts” which lead to an elitist attitude. It works conversely; those who don’t go to TAG feel like they don’t have the smarts, which leads to self-loathing.
In my first year of middle school I attended Outdoor School. At the time I went to Outdoor School I had participated in the Boy Scouts for about one year. At my Boy Scout camps I could wander off for hours into the woods as long as I had a buddy, a watch and a compass and told people which direction I started in and when I’d arrive back in camp. This allowed all the freedom a young child could ask to explore the beauty of nature without any asshole trying to force knowledge or bullshit systems onto us. We could simply experience nature without any civilized agenda. This of course made me hate Outdoor School; we couldn’t leave the sight of an adult and had to constantly take notes in a mindless boring scientific way with industrial-made plastic test tube-like instruments. How do you make the natural world totally fucking boring and alienating? Projectile vomit the compulsory schooling structure onto it and voila; you have “Outdoor School.” Of course, the only way you could get funding to put school kids outside at all would involve tainting the experience through the same old schooling process.
All week the counselors spoke of a “plant village” that we would experience on Thursday. They really built it up. All week we heard the hype. I remember thinking at 12 years old, “Hell, with all this hype, at least plant village may feel pretty cool.” The morning of we met in a large circle. It went something like this:
Counselor: Alright, now the moment you’ve waited all week for… Does everyone feel ready for PLANT VILLAGE?!?
Campers: YEEEEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!
Counselor: Awesome! You won’t believe your eyes when you see it!
(pause)
Counselor: But! Before we go to plant village we’ve selected a special group of kids who get to go on a special, super cool hike to an old growth forest… instead!
(Pause… all the kids look around confused. I think to myself, “Why the hell would anyone want to go to an old growth forest after all this hype over plant village?”)
Counselor: Okay, if I read out your name come stand over here.
The counselor began to call out names. The first three names called belong to the three loudest African American kids in my class and it became painfully obvious to me what the teachers had done (not to mention the unarticulated connection between class and race and hierarchy). They dreamed up this bullshit hike in order to get the “trouble-makers” as far away from plant village as possible so that it would run smoothly. Than they call a few other names of some obnoxious white kids and it confirms my theory. I felt so embarrassed for those kids. Than the most shocking, transformative, eye-opening thing happened to me; they called my name.
The psychological pain felt (and still feels) indescribable. This story still makes me tear up with rage as I recall it. I couldn’t quite talk at first; I felt winded. “Am I a trouble maker?” I thought in B-English. “They think I am a trouble maker?” This confused me all to hell. Just a year before my teachers thought of me as the clever, creative genius. I remember thinking, “Oh. You think I belong with the trouble makers? Okay. Fine. I’ll give you what you want. I’ll make some fucking trouble.” I looked at Marcus, someone who acted like such an asshole to me (threatening me with a knife several times that year), and for the first time I felt such sympathy towards him and all the others in this group. I got it. If they had miss-labeled me, they had miss-labeled all of us and in doing so gave us permission to make trouble; if those in power tell you what you “are,” than you must give them what they want. At that point I stopped doing homework and completely lost interest in school. I didn’t really do much “trouble-making” because I didn’t have the energy for it. I fell into suicidal depression that year that lasted until I transferred to an alternative arts high school my sophomore year (which I later dropped out of). I never fucking asked about Plant Village anyhow.
Because of my decline of interest, my freshman year of high school, the counselors placed me in “intermediate math.” AKA math for the allegedly not-so-smart kids. I had the wits to read through the lines and see the hierarchy of “intelligence”: Advanced Math (smart kids), Algebra 1 (normal kids), and Intermediate Math (dumb kids). Of course, none of the kids in any of those classes had more smarts than anyone else and these classes merely reflect the arbitrary one-size-fits-all curriculum. I demanded my counselor change me to normal math. Though the time I spent in intermediate math made me realize that those kids had about as much interest in school as me and it had nothing to do with their actual intelligence.
By experiencing the full spectrum of the intellectual hierarchy, from smart TAG kid to stupid math kid, I understood the hierarchy in a way none of my peers did. Especially because I fell down the ladder of hierarchy rather than climbed it. I lost benefits and saw the results instead of gaining the benefits and losing sight of previous psychological abuse. Those who do well all through school or those who do better later do not see or forget what it feels like to sit at the bottom.
Looking back now, I can’t imagine a better way of killing the souls of children and preparing them for slavery, under the guise of freedom. It looks rather genius and it should. The same great minds who facilitated the Great Depression and the creation of the Federal Reserve, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, and others brought us compulsory schooling because, as Woodrow Wilson said, “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” This class which has a liberal education obviously refers to the rich, who at the time went to private colleges (before they came up with the genius idea of trapping poor people in debt by enticing them to pay for this “liberal education”).
By dropping out of high school (to teach myself wilderness survival) I faced the wrath of mythology around living as a drop out and having to flip burgers and pump gas for the rest of my life. Funny, in the real world you realize just how much a high school diploma, and yes even a college degree will get you; not a damn thing but thousands of dollars in debt. From age 16-19 I worked at coffee shops as the youngest employee with no “education.” I made the same amount and performed the same tasks as the 20-30 somethings who all held not just high school diplomas, but college degrees as well.
In a hierarchical economy, only a few people actually work the job they wanted, and only a few get paid to do what they went to school for. But more importantly, to work at the bottom of the pyramid, you don’t have to have shit for a degree and since most people get degrees these days (or try) it means a whole lot of slaves in a whole lot of debt, just to have a piece of paper that they didn’t need to work the job they do. The only perk they have amounts to the perception of self-satisfaction of feeling all smart and stuff. Of course, if you think you need a degree to get a job, you can always just lie. I’ve never heard of anyone checking.
The smugness with which many high school and college grads refer to their “education” makes me want to vomit. Most people get what they call an “education” and yet they don’t even know anything about reality. I mean, about the physical reality of this planet and its workings and its other-than-human community. For example, how many people, specifically urban people, know 5 native plants? Their medicinal uses? How to process them to make them most effective? We have no knowledge of self-sufficiency outside of civilizations economy. We do not know how to get food, except from the hand outs of our masters as we perform physical/psychological slavery of ourselves while exploiting the planet for them. If forced schooling didn’t fuck you up enough, how about making you pay to have your mind inculcated into a civilized paradigm, than believing it made you all the better.
College strengthens our resolve in hierarchical structures by making us invest finances in civilized mythology. As a child, we never really had a choice; our parents made us go to school. Later in life, they make us choose (and pay) to go, further solidifying our belief in these systems. This only furthers denial by college grads; if we spent all that time and money for nothing, we would have to face the reality of our way of life and admit that civilization duped us.
You only need a resume for one reason: to work for someone you don’t know. All my life in school we learn that we need to have a diploma so that we can write it on our resume. But why do we need a resume? What does a degree really mean? If you have a large social network, you don’t need a resume because people know you and they know what qualifies you to have a particular job. You don’t need a resume to start your own business. You don’t need degrees to start your own business. A resume stands in for lack of relationships with people. A degree says, you don’t know this person, but they have had this particular set of training that you believe qualifies them for this job. Again, you can always lie. I and nearly everyone I have spoken to, have plenty of times! To live as an entrepreneur, you simply need street cred. We all know that most of the things we learn in school we don’t use or we forget after the test. This means that if you actually have earned street cred, you did so through using information (meaning you won’t forget it because it has a purpose beyond an arbitrary test) and doing things you’ll continue to do.
The system of schooling further ingrains our dependency on the hierarchy to command our actions. That doesn’t mean you can’t find value in the lessons you take from the schooling experience; it just comes at the cost of training your brain in a systemic way. We need a new system of education that works against hierarchy. Against creating slaves dependent on the system to provide their needs through painfully laborious and soul-sucking work.
Unlocking Rewilding Knowledge
We need to rewild the way we see education. First off: school ≠ education. I can hear you say, but what about schools that teach rewilding skills? If I want to live as a hunter-gather and have no need for money, than spending time running classes to get money looks hypocritical. What if I spent that time hunting and gathering with friends instead? Then I wouldn’t need money. It works as a paradox. Of course, we all have to start somewhere, and the schools that teach rewilding skills work as a great place to meet people interested in rewilding. This paradox can do more harm than good if you get caught in the pitfalls.
I have noticed of many students of these programs, and in my own experience as a student, the students who go to these schools become dependent on them. Rather than seeking out relationships with people who practice rewilding near our homes, we pay people money to teach us without having to build a relationship with them. It doesn’t help you build a relationship that will last. These schools don’t build a friendship, a culture, which works as the real teacher. You still pay the person money to hang out with them.
I often justify teaching rewild skills for money as a means of escaping wage slavery. And yet I have come across many rewilding programs that can never make that much money, so you spend so much time trying to get students and market your classes that you don’t have much time for hunting and gathering. Again, it becomes a paradox.
Not everyone wants a community. Some people want to learn these skills and take them back to their community, and that works well for people like me who love to teach but feel a little guilty and lame for not spending more time working on building my own community. If I can help individual communities by exchanging my skills for some cash, I feel no guilt. This shows the real value in schools. A community with no skills sends a member to go learn them at a school and return to share them. Of course, the invisible social technologies don’t work that way…
At a 7-day primitive skills school I went to, the celebrity teacher told everyone that if they couldn’t survive it meant their “skills sucked.” That kind of attitude can make you feel guilty about not living 100% wild. Fuck that. We don’t have a wild culture to provide for us for 12 years while we learn to rewild and we don’t have time to feel guilty about it. But we do have modern technology and resources that we can leverage to our benefit. We can use them to replicate the support of the culture while we build it. You need to read letters before you can read a whole word, let alone a sentence.
This school also claimed that you would have all the skills to “survive lavishly” at the end of the week. A nice fantasy, but in reality, you cannot learn to rewild in 7 days. I find it funny when I ask Joe-blow if he thinks he could survive the collapse of civilization and he says, “No problem.” Of all the time I have spent rewilding, I would never make such a claim. At this point I don’t really concern myself with surviving the collapse as much as I feel concerned with breaking out of the prison of civilization. Indigenous peoples don’t “survive in the woods.” They practice ancient, streamlined, seasonal routines that provided comfort, enjoyment and sustainability. They also live(d) in an environment full of wild foods that have now died at the hands of civilization. So tell me, if civilization collapsed tonight, could you live that way tomorrow? The next day? Six months from now? 5 years from now? 500 years from now? How long does it take to build that kind of culture? How long does it take to die of thirst or hypothermia or the flu (without anti-biotics)? How many people could our ravaged lands support? Would you still answer, “No problem?”
I appreciate these programs, workshops and schools for what they teach, but I believe you can’t really learn or truly know something by reading about it in a book or listening about it at a lecture at a school. It works as great first step, but not the all-encompassing journey of rewilding. I like to use the example of learning foreign languages. You can learn it in a class or you can immerse yourself in a place where you can only speak the one language. I can take classes or read books about participating in nature, or I could go out and immerse myself in a primitive lifestyle. Similarly, most people learn Spanish with the intent to visit Mexico, but how many people learn Spanish so they can move to Mexico? I believe rewilding means “moving to Mexico,” so to speak. We need to create rewilding cultures immersion style.
By using these civilized forms of information hoarding, rewilding skills remain under lock and key by forcing people to participate in the economy of civilization for access to the information, while continuing to spread the alienation and lack of culture that promotes this way of life. As long as this remains true, we will never have what it takes to form these rewilding cultures. I do not mean to devalue schools that teach rewilding skills (though I definitely devalue any other kind of school), books & rendezvous. I only point out that if you use money in place of real relationships, civilization still owns you. Schools that teach rewilding can work as a great first step, but if we yearn to move beyond civilization and truly rewild, if we wish to get the knowledge that will allow us to unlock the food, and live socially, we must work to unlock the knowledge and skills of rewilding. In order to accomplish this, we need change our strategies for sharing this information. Or add more strategies to our already existing list.
Current Strategies
*The Field Guide/Web Information
Books cost money. Some may perceive this as trading and not as hoarding; exchanging money for information. Information stored in books generally remain under lock and key. This may work for some, however in a field guide, the knowledge of skills remains locked in a book. Copyright laws prohibit an individual from dispersing the information. Also, books seal information in a state of fixation; once written down the information cannot change. This makes books themselves a kind of false guide, as rewilding bases itself off the ever-changing landscape.
*The Primitive Skills School
By their nature, schools form hierarchical relationships. Information only flows one way, from the minority (of instructors) to the majority (of students). By paying an “expert” to teach you about skills. Or as an instructor you become obligated to give the students “their moneys worth.” Information at Primitive Schools remains under lock and key. In order for primitive skills schools to stay in business, free access to primitive skills information & communities must not exist. The schools themselves represent the lock and money represents the key to this knowledge. Therefore, ideologically those who start wilderness schools generally don’t have the intention of training people to rewild and wanting instead, to keep people ignorant to the skills.
*The Primitive Skills Rendezvous
The Rendezvous represents the closest format of information sharing that comes close to Open Space Technology. Yet still, you must pay money to attend, and you must seek the approval of the organizers in order to hold a class. Some rendezvous do not cost money and some do.
*Emphasis on Artifacts
Most of these sources emphasis physical skills and crafts such as flint-knapping, basketry and making deer skins into buckskins. How many “primitive skills” books, schools, and rendezvous teach the invisible social technologies such as child-rearing, storytelling, clear communication, group meetings, debriefs, etc.? Not many.
Unlocking Rewilding Knowledge
*The Free, Changeable Field Guide, That Anyone Can Edit
The internet, though created through unsustainable methods and has a short lifespan, can serve to spread this information very quickly to a wide audience. While I personally don’t see this technology lasting another 10-20 years, we can use it during this time to unlock (at least in some sense) this information in hopes that it will reach enough people to make a difference. Rewild.info serves this purpose. I like the irony of using the most modern technology to spread the most ancient.
*The Community Building Skill-Share
By running a public skill-share (such as a Rewild Camp) you can attract more people to rewilding and promote awareness for it while learning skills from others in the community. You can also run a private skill share for just family and friends. The purpose of the skill share comes back to the idea of building relationships and forming real cultures that hunt and gather together rather than continue to teach for money. I believe in exchanges and trading and the skill share does exactly that. You share your skills and learn from others who share theirs. You exchange your talents and knowledge instead of money.
*Emphasis on Social Technologies, not just artifact replication.
Conclusion
If we wish to unlock the food, but in order to do that must first have the knowledge of how to procure food, than it seems obvious that the next step involves unlocking this information. Rewild.info and community building skill-shares make the primitive skills school, field guide, and old school rendezvous nearly obsolete (in terms of function). I believe it would behoove us to borrow the hacker philosophy of freedom of information and start spreading it as fast as we can using any means necessary from word of mouth at a skill-share, to writing your own zine, or blogging & adding to the wiki using the internet.
Oh, GAwd, Scout, I’m sorry for the pain you’ve gone through in school. I’ve only read part of this so far, but I’m feeling rage and sorrow for the indignities schooling inflicts everyone. I’m thinking about my two “misfit” “behavior problem” children - who are so smart and creative. I’m also thinking about my “Granny”, who has always felt shame for having “only” an eighth grade education. Yet she has taught me about plants, food preservation, sewing, scavenging, and lots more.
Damn this system.
Scout–Haven’t had time to read your blog lately, so I was behind, but now I’m caught up… Fantastic post. I can so very strongly identify with the pain and loneliness and outrage you felt in school… It is clear school only got in your way of knowing who you are and your place on –and in relationship to– the planet and other beings. I am so happy to know you, and to know you resisted.
I love your analysis of what can be done instead, in sharing rewilding knowledge and community building. There’s so much here. It feels like the core of your bok (but then I feel that way every post you write!!!
Thank you!!!
Hey,
From beginning to end of serving time in school I had this fantasy of blowing them all (schools) up. Later though, I recovered and found out that I should not fantasize schools being blown up but the whole system, including schools.
What I knew on a intuitive, instinctive level, I later gradually learned to articulate more in details as I was finding out about the intricacies of civilization’s power structures.
Thanks for sharing.
I forgot, you also mentioned:
“*The Community Building Skill-Share
By running a public skill-share (such as a Rewild Camp) you can attract more people to rewilding and promote awareness for it while learning skills from others in the community. You can also run a private skill share for just family and friends. The purpose of the skill share comes back to the idea of building relationships and forming real cultures that hunt and gather together rather than continue to teach for money. I believe in exchanges and trading and the skill share does exactly that. You share your skills and learn from others who share theirs. You exchange your talents and knowledge instead of money.
*Emphasis on Social Technologies, not just artifact replication.”
It is inspiring to see that this awareness is growing, in strength as well as in the number of people. This is actually something I’ve started to look into in my area. I’m not aware of anything of the sort goin on around here so…
Oli Bamkanni / Travel well
Every time I read one of your articles, I realize we have more and more in common, man.
I too, quit school and became an unschooler/autodidact.
I too have been to a week long survival class and thought it too expensive/limiting (though valuable and interesting) to be feasible for a lot of people, including myself. I’m thinking you’re referring to a certain Tracker school?
I totally agree with your call for open-source culture. Open information sharing for survival, sustainability, and building balanced communities.
Wow, did you just step in on a very deep and similar conversation I was having with my husband and father in law just last night?!
Your article really helped us put some things in perspective such as the notion of getting schooled to get re-wilding education and how to get out of the vicious circle of civilization.
Unfortunately we realized too late the pointlessness of receiving a college education and now we are shit-deep in loans, working, as you put it, in “soul-sucking” jobs, trying to find an escape. We find ourselves working our way out of society, but isn’t that just feeding the monster?
Thank you for your website, thoughts, knowledge, and motivation. We feel we are not alone. . . thanks especially for that.
By the way we are down here in Eugene. . .can we connect this great divide of I-5??
Peace and Love
Hey Shusli, Yeah I hate it when older people feel bad about not graduating. It’s like, no, don’t believe this shit!
Roxanne, thanks for you comments.
Misko, thanks for your comments.
Peter, thanks for your comments, and I will not mention the school I went to for legal purposes.
Anna, I’m so glad this help you and that it made you feel good.
Excellent article. I am right there with you when it comes to the motives behind schooling. No doubt you have read Gatto’s The Underground History of Education. Another one you would enjoy is Education for Extinction about the forced schooling of Native Americans, the motives are stunningly manipulative and ethnocentric. I am home/unschooling three children. I too, see that we need to actively work towards change when it comes to our life choices.
Just a small point I would add about the history of schooling, while it is true that mass public schooling has only been with us for a few hundred years, schools have existed anywhere there has been written language and math, all civilizations both ancient and modern. The Mayans had schools, the Sumerians had schools 8000 years ago. These schools only ‘educated’ the elite and that has been the huge ’step forward’ in that now we ‘educate’ everyone, if you can call it that.
Reading and math can not be acquired from simply watching someone else with those skills read or work sums, unlike foraging, hunting, fishing, herbal medicine etc etc. Thus the necessity for schools. And in times past that very powerful advantage of ’secret’ knowledge was used to keep the majority in bondage to the few. It’s not all that much different today. Written language literally reshapes the brain in a physiological way. A couple more books: The Alphabet vs the Goddess and The Geography of Thought go into these subjects.
I was very conflicted about teaching my kids to read… but alas.. I succumbed to societal pressure and did.
As a side note, I also hated school. I was homeschooled my high school years, had some college and dropped out. I am now a healer and have several certifications as such but am largely self taught. I use various modalities with my clients; nutrition, herbs, energy work, hypnosis, body work. I am always learning. I think had I had a traditional education I wouldn’t be nearly as inquisitive and intuitive.
Keelia
I don’t so much hate the schooling, as I do the fact that I could have spent that time doing projects on my own, under my parents’ support. The classmates I knew who did have that opportunity somehow, managed to make out a lot better on that front. Now I live on my own, “making a living”, and wondering why I never have time to do the things I want.
But yes, I went through the “You’re gifted!” - “You’re a failure!” bit too, though not anywhere near as severe. Then I went to a private school, struggled to stay afloat, went BACK to public school, and aced the grades again, just because I had adjusted to a higher difficulty level. But socially I think the experience practically killed me.
I had a visceral distaste for school, my whole life. I now know I split muself into any number of sub-personalities simply for the purpose of survival. Thus the constant struggle for the last, oh, say, twenty years, to find my authentic self again. I have such a powerful instinctual repulsion for the system that I cannot even put words to it, most times, which has made it difficult to explain to others why it is so very crucial that my daughter does NOT attend school.
I do not homeschool my daughter. I’m not sure I even want to be known as an unschooler, for giving who I am and what I do TITLES makes my skin crawl, and is limiting, by definition. That’s why I liked what you said about books, Scout, and how once written down, they are, by their physical nature, restrictive. I don’t claim to know it all, but I also don’t believe anyone else does. The idea that we love to have our gurus and our teachers and our masters can lure us into spending most of our lives reading books, consulting manuals, the internet, etc., instead of going out into the ‘real world’ and growing by being.
I want my daughter to learn a new kind of intelligence, how to think, to reason, to use both her logic AND her deep sensitivity to the world around her, to live and think and PLAY outside the BOX I spent years and years clawing my way out of.
I haven’t read much on the topic of schooling. I prefer to go with my instincts, most times. That has required immense amounts of self-trust, since the pressures from outside for me to conform (not for MY benefit, but so that everyone around me can remain comfortable that I am not rocking their ship of illusions) are very strong.
I felt the same way about pregnancy and giving birth. It BLOWS my mind that at this stage of human development on this planet, there are more books out there on how to have a baby, and how to nurse and care for your baby than any mother could possibly wade through in years! To me, this speaks of how absolutely useless spending some 18 years in institutions of education were to me and everyone else, if no woman out there has a f-ing clue how to give birth, when this is one of the most likely things she will experience in her lifetime! The books represented WAY too much information, and eventually I realized I could feel the creeping in of all kinds of needless worry and fear as a result. Counterproductive!!! I thought: shouldn’t giving birth and being a mother be a FEELING experience, not one where you are in your head the whole time? I put the books away, and thought f-it, I’M DOING THIS MY WAY. I gave birth in a highrise in downtown Toronto, with a midwife and my best friend and my partner and his two daughters, who watched Calli make her way into this world, and who cut her cord with love and reverence. I was extremely present. Where did I get my confidence and inner knowing/knowledge? Being present for my sister’s two births. More valuable than ten books on said topic.
Wow, I’ve digressed, methinks.
I also wanted to say to Keelia that because you and I can read and write we get to experience the benefits of what we are right now engaged in, and perhaps that is worth it. That’s why we are encouraging Calli to learn these two things. Indeed she is self-motivated to do so. It is ONE of the pages we can all be on, but not the only one!
PS, I am also a healer (in perpetual progress) much like yourself.
I hope my daughter will totally outstrip me in intelligent thinking and feeling and spirituality in such a way as to know no boumdaries. I only hope that I am not too much of a hindrance to her in my ignorance or inability to provide enough creative environments for her. What with my useless soul destroying educational background!
Natasha
I’m at an age when one of two things are expected of me: go to school or get a job. I’m at an age where everyone calls me an adult, but they still think of me as a kid. I’m at an age that, at least in this society, makes life hectic and frustrating and not very fun at all. (I’m 20.)
I’ve attended 3 semesters of college, but it’s been a year since the last one. Everyone asks me “Are you going to school?” For a while I just answered “Not right now,” leaving the impression that I was on a break and that I’d be going back. But lately I’ve just embraced the truth; when someone asks me now, I just tell them that, No, I am not in school. When they ask when I’m going back, I just tell them I’m not. I’m done with it. I don’t want a career, anyways. And besides, it’s a waste of time and money if you don’t know what you’re going to do with that new magic piece of paper.
I’ve always been a good student, too. I’ve always loved learning, but I’ve never cared for school. The teaching/learning methods forced upon us, as students, never seemed to work for me all the way. I graduated high school with a 3.8 cumulative GPA, which I’m told means I can “do anything.” The thing is, I never did my homework, never studied, and never gave a fuck. I actually had a teacher pull me aside one year after class to tell me that I was a bad influence on the other students because I wasn’t doing my homework. I had a 97% in her class.
School as-is isn’t working how it should. The things we’re taught (although a good chunk of them are useless knowledge) could be taught to the students in a fraction of the time, and at least when it comes to college, for a fraction of the cost. Of course I think teachers have an important job, since it’s always a great thing to have someone there to help you through the text, but they could do their jobs so much differently.