black wildness law
*’socializing’
adding page because (another oh my Carol) of:
http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/
[pretty much whole thing – just go to link]
We have forgotten that these were the original purposes of the factory-like institutions that most of us grew up in; we speak of our familiar school experience almost as though it were an integral part of nature itself, a natural and essential part of human childhood, rather than the vast and extremely recent experiment in social engineering that it actually is.
wilde not us law – based on science of people in schools
perhaps we experiment ourselves.. back to the wild..
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A child who knows where to find wild berries will never forget this information. An “uneducated” person in the highlands of Papua New Guinea can recognize seventy species of birds by their songs. An “illiterate” shaman in the Amazon can identify hundreds of medicinal plants. An Aboriginal person from Australia carries in his memory a map of the land encoded in song that extends for a thousand miles. Our minds are evolved to contain vast amounts of information about the world that gave us birth, and to pass this information on easily from one generation to the next.
But to know the world, you have to live in the world.
revolution in reverse: revolution of everyday life ness.. as the day
a nother way – 3 ship\ables
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There is some dawning awareness these days of the insanity of raising children almost entirely indoors, but as usual our society’s response to its own insanity is to create artificial programs designed to solve our artificial problems in the most artificial way possible. We charter nonprofit organizations, sponsor conferences, design curricula and after-school programs and graphically appealing interactive websites, all of which create the truly nightmarish impression that to get your kid outside you would first need to file for 501(c)3 status, apply for a federal grant, and hire an executive director and program coordinator. We try to address what’s lacking in our compulsory curriculum by making new lists of compulsions.
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But the truth is we don’t know how to teach our children about nature because we ourselves were raised in the cinderblock world. We are, in the parlance of wildlife rehabilitators, unreleasable. I used to do wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and the one thing we all knew was that a young animal kept too long in a cage would not be able to survive in the wild. Often, when you open the door to the cage, it will be afraid to go out; if it does go out, it won’t know what to do. The world has become unfamiliar, an alien place. This is what we have done to our children.
This is what was done to us.
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Researchers are finding that children in these settings spend most of their time in a completely different attentional state from children in modern schools, a state psychology researcher Suzanne Gaskins calls “open attention.” Open attention is widely focused, relaxed, alert; Gaskins suggests it may have much in common with the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” If something moves in the broad field of perception, the child will notice it. If something interesting happens, he can watch for hours. A child in this state seems to absorb her culture by osmosis, by imperceptible degrees picking up what the adults talk about, what they do, how they think, what they know.
We didn’t have a name for it, but my friends and I often noticed that our kids–– who didn’t go to school–– had this quality of attention as they moved through the world. They were in a different mental state from schooled kids. You could see it. They noticed everything. They remembered everything. Their minds were open, clear, alert, at ease. If something caught their interest, they were on it with laser focus. When we encountered adults who were used to dealing with groups of school kids — at museums, aquariums, archaeological sites, animal-tracking hikes, beach clean-ups, citizen science projects –– they would say they had never seen kids like this before. They would be sort of dumbfounded by it. They expected all children to be wound up, tuned out, half-frantic with suppressed energy, like a dog who’s been locked in the house all day.
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Once you have been shut away from the world like this, and once you have turned off your natural state of open attention to the world, you don’t learn much when you’re finally let outside. Everything is a blur; everything bores you.
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Some of our children, it turns out, are more like pigeons and squirrels, and some are more like bears. Some of them adapt to the institutional walls we put around them, and some of them pace till their paws bleed. The bleeding of these children, if we listen, can tell us many stories about ourselves. The boy drugged with Adderall tells us a story of forests full of trees to climb, rivers to swim and paddle, open meadows to run across. The girl who slowly starves herself tells us of a family and clan in which acceptance is a birthright rather than something we compete for with thinness and good grades. The kids who fight back, who become defiant to the point of self-destruction, tell us a story of freedom from authoritarian control, from petty rewards and punishments, from endless surveillance and evaluation. The kids who turn to drugs tell us of feelings of warmth, of energy, of intimacy, of peace that they don’t find in their lives of never-ending scheduled competitive busy-work.
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Our DNA is a text, a vast, intricate sacred text, carrying information not only about ourselves but about the Kosmos we were created for.
already in each one of us… importance of following that map.. that whimsy..
let’s listen to that ..as the day… it’s a simple message..
Is this a romantic “noble savage” argument? Does it mean that children in their “wild” state are perfect little angels? No. What it means is that no matter how smart we think we are, we are a species of mammal, and like every other species of mammal, we have a natural history, an evolved nature — a wild nature — that we disrespect at our peril.
perhaps better than we can imagine.. no?
1\who wants.. what’s seemingly perfect – rather – embrace uncertainty.. antifragility.. entropy..
2\ noble savage .. i’m betting on yes we can/are.. but only if we let go.. 100%
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No human society is utopia; no human society will ever eliminate suffering and conflict and grief. But the severe and epidemic pathologies that have developed within our modern institutions –– the bullying, the eating disorders, the depression, the anxiety, the compulsive self-harm –– are as distinct and identifiable as the pathologies that develop in zoo animals.
In fact, they are the same
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But this is not true of everybody, everywhere.
wake up.. from pluralistic ignorance
The same people who do not see themselves as “above” nature but as within it, tend not to see themselves as “above” children but alongside them. They see no hard line between work and play, between teacher and student, between learning and life. It is a possibility worth considering that this is more than coincidence.
Children, like the natural world, do not benefit from our dualisms.
labels et al
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The underlying belief that somebody always has to be in charge is stubbornly persistent, woven into our thinking at a very deep level. There always has to be a subject and an object, a master and a slave. We have forgotten how to live and let live.
control et al
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We no longer frame people as either “civilized”or “savage,” but as “educated” or “uneducated,” “developed” or “developing” (our modern terms for the same thing). But we retain the paternalistic attitudes of our forebears, toward our children and toward the “childlike” adults we find all over the world — a paternalism in which the veneer of benevolence is underpinned by the constant threat of violent force.
civilization ness
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Control is always so seductive, at least to the “developed” (“civilized”) mind. It seems so satisfying, so efficient, so effective, so potent. In the short run, in some ways, it is. But it creates a thousand kinds of blowback, from depressed rebellious children to storms surging over our coastlines to guns and bombs exploding in cities around the world.
control.. perpetuate\ing not us ness… feedback loop is broken..
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Species die, our planet warms, and in the name of teaching our children to save the world, we go on destroying their wildness, “socializing” them away from nature and into the cage we have built around childhood. Our nice teachers try to find ways to make it “fun,” to limit or at least soften the damage that is done; like zookeepers giving beach balls to captive polar bears, they try to find substitutes for what is lost. But the world is too beautiful to substitute for, and the wildest of our children––the ones they have to put on Ritalin, the ones they have to put on Prozac–– know it. These children are the canaries in the coal mine, the ones who will not obey our masters, who will not take their place as cogs in the machine that is destroying the earth. They are not the ones who have a “disorder.” They are the ones who still hold the perfect Kosmos in their hearts.
The revolution will not take place in a classroom.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
revolution in reverse: revolution of everyday life ness.. as the day
a nother way – 3 ship\ables
hosting life bits…et al.. (dna ness or whatever)
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For your Sunday and your soul, “The Peace of Wild Things” – a poetic classic, animated https://t.co/Qd1CR5CIQJ
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1398972713948094465..I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
arbitrary ness as free enough to be wild ness
our fear of play and fear of arbitrary ness.. of wildness.. is keeping us from us.. in other words.. keeping us the most unsafe..
best safety for all of us: gershenfeld something else law
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wildness
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be you. 