Can’t Be Bought

The question that arises in my mind after reading “Hypothetical” is your proposed idealization would mean exactly what for your boys in relation to the rest of the world?  If all our children were raised as you expressed it, Ben, and who wouldn’t want to be raised so, what would it mean for them if the rest of the world excels in the arts of technology and science, all in the competitive framework we now exist in?  How would they cope if the world overtakes them and thus “controls” them, if you will, because it controls the way’s of the world, it’s economic day to day reality?  The perfect life I’ve found has the seed of sadness within it, because, it is my belief, we cannot sustain it here in this world.  The deeper we experience happiness, the deeper we sense the fragility of life, its impermanence, its imperfection (Tim O’Brien’s song “Brother Wind” expresses it perfectly for me). How we prepare our children for the world they will inherit is a profound question because it exposes our deepest beliefs to our own self and our responsibility to them. 

The great thing about the comments of late is that ya’ll are basically writing this blog for me, as well as providing plentiful fodder for book #4. So thanks for that. The check’s in the mail, as they say.

I don’t really disagree with anything Tim writes above. I think there is a degree of risk in having chosen to raise our children so far off the well-travelled path of the modern American experience. Is it possible that Fin and Rye will forever struggle to find their place in a world that barely acknowledges the very existence of so much of what they have come to revere? What if the rest of the world excels in technology and science, while they excel in… what, exactly? Bow making? Trapping? Foraging? Hide tanning? Goat milking? Romping through the forest? Hog butchering? One imagines them living together in a deep woods cabin, wearing woolen long johns year ‘round, and subsisting on smoked beaver and woods sorrel. (Although really, what would be so wrong with that?)

There are two points I would like to make, not so much in defense of my sons’ unique educational path, but rather in explanation of my views pertaining to how our children might best be prepared for the world they will inherit.

First: I cannot in good conscience raise my children in any manner but which offers them the best possible opportunity to develop the connections and relationships I touched on briefly in Hypothetical. To do otherwise would be to live in direct opposition what I believe is possible for them and for the world at large. And that is no way to live.

Second: Is it possible that by allowing them to learn in a self-directed manner, outside the context of the institutionalized education system, we are actually providing our boys with the tools they will need to learn what they need to know, when they need to know it?  School does a fine job of relaying information to our children, but I believe it does a lesser job of actually teaching the process of learning. And no wonder: This process is highly individualized, and if there’s one thing our resource-strapped educational institutions can hardly accommodate, it’s individualism.

Three (yeah, I said I had two points; consider this one a freebie): At what point do we, as a society, begin the process of making truly substantive change? I’m not talking about feel-good changes – the compact fluorescent light bulbs, the hybrid cars, the recycling, the so-called organic food, blah, blah, and blah – that still fit quite neatly within the paradigm of the exploitative growth economy. I’m talking about change that can’t be bought,  that requires entirely transformed expectations and assumptions about what defines an “economy,” about human exceptionalism, and about our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

I can’t promise that my children will be part of that change. But I’m pretty sure that if all I do is cynically encourage them to follow the well-trod path (of which a mainstream education is only one facet) toward presumed success in the context of corrupt, diseased, and exploitative arrangements, they will not.