Dear Josie,
The following New York Times' article by Jesuit-trained Timothy Egan is titled with the phrase Dave brought to my attention several years ago.
Egan represents the "Great Divorce" between people-and-nature in large part by the irresponsibility of America's educational process.
We have too much schooling and too little vacation - too little "schole" the Greek word for idleness from which the English word "School" derives.
School (as we know it) is largely a "low torque" exercise in which students "occupy the trenches" at 8:00 a.m., prepared to endure unnecessarily-prolonged exercise in tedium rather than participate in Life/Learning.
Contextually -- and "the medium is the message" -- the meta-level purpose of schooling is to teach students to sit, listen and endure the imposition of vested/putative authority.
Another fundamental purpose of modern "schooling" is to teach punctuality and "showing up" - conjoined practices that comprise "90% of success" - or, at least, what we call "success."
"By God children! Sit in those seats for 20 years and you will, with the certainty of tides, be assured a place in The Middle Class!
And, often as not, quiet desperation.
Another fundamental purpose of modern "schooling" is to teach punctuality and "showing up" - conjoined practices that comprise "90% of success" - or, at least, what we call "success."
"By God children! Sit in those seats for 20 years and you will, with the certainty of tides, be assured a place in The Middle Class!
And, often as not, quiet desperation.
Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success." He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."
William James, who penned "The Varieties of Religious Experience" provides this "bookend" to Merton's reflection: "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word "success" - is our national disease." William James
You might also enjoy an essay I wrote in 2000 which is featured on the homepage of my "legacy" website, "Apokatastasis" - "Success and The Undoing of America." http://
In ancient Greece, the "peripatetic method" was popular: many ancients believed that learning was optimized by conversation that took place while teachers and students were "walking about."
It is time to stop thinking of "the walk about" as a quaint anachronism, and to start focusing -- as you first pointed out to me (by way of Thoreau)-- the decisive importance of "sauntering."
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre"—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer", a saunterer—a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.
It is true, we are but fainthearted crusaders, even the walkers, now-a-days, who undertake no persevering never ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.
The rest of this fine essay is at http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/
I have long envisioned a charter school that would operate across the U.S. - Mexico border. In broad outline (and here I'm expanding on my original conceptualization of a "boarding" school in Mexico) there would be a state-side component that would be an "outdoor" school (like the one a group of us were planning for Camp Chestnut Ridge... until the board of directors nixed it), alternating with 3-5 month "segments" in the Yucatan, where students would participate in Life always with an idea to what makes Mexico tick - and what made it tick in the past. There would be archaeological digs, field trips with local historians, field work alongside campesinos, open-air market-going, cooking instruction with Mexican amas de casa, active participation in the art, music and drama of las posadas, los dias del santo patron etcetera.
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"Proposed Cross-Border Charter School"
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As you probably know, I am not suited to the navigation of bureaucracy and would therefore need to collaborate with people who have this gift.
Interested?
Pax vobiscum
Alan
“Nature Deficit Disorder," Timothy Egan - http://opinionator.blogs.
March 29, 2012, 9:00 PM
Nature-Deficit Disorder
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Eganon American politics and life, as seen from the West.
TUCSON — Your day breaks, your mind aches for something stimulating to match the stirrings of the season. The gate at the urban edge is open, here to the Santa Catalina Mountains, and yet you turn inward, to pixels and particle-board vistas.
Something’s amiss. A third of all American adults — check, it just went up to 35.7 percent — are obese. The French don’t even have a word for fat, Paul Rudnick mused in a mock-Parisian tone in The New Yorker last week. “If a woman is obese,” he wrote, “we simply call her American.”
And, of course, our national branding comes with a host of deadly side effects: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, certain kinds of cancer. Medical costs associated with obesity and inactivity are nearly $150 billion a year.
This grim toll is well known. Cripes: maybe surgery is the answer, or a menu of energy drinks and vodka (the Ann Coulter diet?). Count the calories. Lay off the muffins. Atkins one week, Slim-Fast the next. We spend more than $50 billion on the diet-industrial complex and have little to show for it (or too much).
This grim toll is well known. Cripes: maybe surgery is the answer, or a menu of energy drinks and vodka (the Ann Coulter diet?). Count the calories. Lay off the muffins. Atkins one week, Slim-Fast the next. We spend more than $50 billion on the diet-industrial complex and have little to show for it (or too much).
But there is an obvious solution — just outside the window. For most of human history, people chased things or were chased themselves. They turned dirt over and planted seeds and saplings. They took in Vitamin D from the sun, and learned to tell a crow from a raven (ravens are larger; crows have a more nasal call; so say the birders). And then, in less than a generation’s time, millions of people completely decoupled themselves from nature.
There’s a term for the consequences of this divorce between human and habitat — nature deficit disorder, coined by the writer Richard Louv in a 2005 book, “Last Child in the Woods.” It sounds trendy, a bit of sociological shorthand, but give the man and his point a listen.
Louv argued that certain behavioral problems could be caused by the sharp decline in how little time children now spend outdoors, a trend updated in the latest Recreation Participation Report. The number of boys ages 6 to 12 who engage in some kind of outdoor activity, in particular, continues to slide.
Kids who do play outside are less likely to get sick, to be stressed or become aggressive, and are more adaptable to life’s unpredictable turns, Louv said. Since his book came out, things have gotten worse.
“The average young American now spends practically every minute — except for the time in school – using a smartphone, computer, television or electronic device,” my colleague Tamar Lewin reported in 2010, from a Kaiser Family Foundation study.
You can blame technology, but behind every screen-dominant upbringing is an overly cautious parent. Understandably, we want to protect our kids from “out there” variables. But it’s better not just to play in dirt, but to eat it. Studies show exposure to the randomness of nature may actually boost the immune system.
Nature may eventually come to those who shun it, and not in a pretty way. We stay indoors. We burn fossil fuels. The CO2 buildup adds to global warming. Suburbs of Denver are aflame this week, and much of the United States is getting ready for the tantrums of hurricane and tornado season, boosted by atmospheric instability.
Last week, an Australian mountaineer named Lincoln Hall died at the age of 56, and in the drama of that life cut short is a parable of sorts. Hall is best known for surviving a night at more than 28,000 feet on Mount Everest, in 2006. He’d become disoriented near the summit, and couldn’t move — to the peril of his sherpas. They left him for dead. And Hall’s death was announced to his family.
But the next day, a group of climbers found Hall sitting up, jacket unzipped, mumbling, badly frostbitten — but alive. He later wrote a book, “Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest.”
Still, having survived perhaps the most inhospitable, dangerous and life-killing perch on the planet, Hall died in middle age of a human-caused malady from urban life — mesothelioma, attributed to childhood exposure to asbestos.
Various groups, from the outdoor co-op REI to the Trust for Public Land, have been working to ensure that kids have more contact with the alpine world than one lined with asbestos. And they don’t even have to haul children off to a distant mountain to get some benefit. An urban park would do.
This week, Michelle Obama appeared in the glow of spring’s optimism to kick off the fourth year of the White House Kitchen Garden, a component of her campaign to curb childhood obesity. If she is successful, it will be because people learned by their own initiative — perhaps at her prompting. A worm at work can be a wonderful discovery if you’ve never seen one outside of a flat-screen. But so are endorphins, the narcotic byproduct of exercise.
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. The First Lady supplied her own variation on the theme, with two powerful words that can go a long way to battling nature deficit disorder: “Let’s plant!”