FIVE
EPIPHANIES
There have been five occasions in my life in which the assimilation
of a single piece of information struck me so forcefully that I found myself
confronted with a profound clarity as to some of my deepest awarenesses of Truth,
Beauty, Love, Justice, and Purpose. In these moments I remember feeling intensely
aware of the essential freedom that is natural to the human experience. At the
same time I suddenly felt as if conscious for the first time of an awareness
that something was terribly wrong, that forces and patterns at work in our
world were, in fact, quite unnatural and very unhealthy for the realization of
the great potential of human nature—and that these forces were man-made! In each
of these five cases, I was faced with a profound awareness that the socially
accepted systems of education that we have been using are completely oppositional
to the nurturance and encouragement of the attainment of the joys and freedoms
and curiosities that are the natural-born rights of we humans (American or
otherwise).
Another, I think secondary, outcome of these realizations was that I was also awakened to an undeterrable
compulsion that it was my job, my duty, almost a need, to pursue further clarification and elucidation of this feeling.
I knew that this meant going on a quest—however long it might take--to gather and
organize knowledge on education, learning, and the reasons society has chosen
the forms of structured learning, the forms of education, that it has. I also
knew that my search would naturally incorporate as part of my process the reporting or sharing of my
findings with others.
Religious teacher and mystic guide Andrew
Harvey calls this feeling of having an unavoidable compulsion to raise consciousness in
others over injustice a “sacred activism.” I believe that the discovery of
one’s sacred activism is an event which can give cause and meaning to life and
that sacred activism may be one of the factors that motivate we humans to
remain social. Though
I have had trouble defining and pinpointing my sacred activism, I have definitely felt
compelled to pursue all information that might have some bearing on the
pressures that have some bearing or influence on the ability of humans to
pursue the realization of their fullest potential. Systems which try to control
and order learning, such as our current and past systems of education and
schooling, are definitely major contributors to the repression of human
potential. Having been drawn into an early vocation of teaching, I see that
education served as my entry point into my personal sacred activism. Having worked for some years under the fire of this drive to find out what's wrong, how we've been duped, distracted, manipulated and/or brainwashed, I have realized that the scope of this sacred activism is much larger than just education, that education is, in fact, merely a symptom of a more systemic disease within our society--perhaps even within human nature--and that my work may be merely that of trying to opening the eyes of my here-to-fore ignorant and/or blind fellow human beings.
My first encounter
with my personal Pandora’s Box occurred while I was in my twenties. While working as an
elementary school classroom teacher I was also taking courses at Michigan State
University, working toward a Master’s degree. I was otherwise living a rather hermetic
bachelor life, choosing to spend most of my spare time interacting with people
through their works of art instead in person. At this time I was on the journey
of self-discovery—a journey that I felt most people had undertaken during their
teens but which I’d somehow missed. Apparently, I had been uninterested in and,
therefore, obtuse to the acquisition of “cultural literacy” during my teen
years--though in actuality I realize that it was more like ‘distracted from’
due mostly to my preoccupation with athletics, music, and the opposite sex. In February
of my Junior year of college (age 20) I had undergone an ‘awakening’, the
result of which had left me starved for all things thought- and
aesthetic-provoking. This new, voracious and insatiable thirst for knowledge led
to the beginning of my true formative
years—years dictated by an internally compelled pursuit of self-education.
Unbound curiosity led me through hours
spent with literature and music, through many travels focused on art and
architecture, through teaching to try to share my love for learning with
others, and, later, through an unstoppable desire—almost a need--to write. (Writing, I later to realized, is my spirit’s Jungian
way of processing unconscious desires and ambitions.)
And so, now in my Twenties, in a career of choice, I found my research
desires spurred on by my perpetual frustration with the duties and expectations
of the babysitting/police work which dominates the time and attention of
classroom teaching. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with ‘education,’
what other options were available, and how and why that we, as a society, created
and evolved to the institutions that supported the social/educational paradigm
we were currently using. I had been exploring alternative venues of
education—private schools, developmental schools, Montessori and Waldorf
schools and training centers--I had even visited and studied a school which
existed within a homeless shelter (try that for lesson planning and funding
contingent on standardized test scores!) At the same time I was reading
voraciously everything I could find on education, psychology, sociology, and
even anthropology: John Dewey, Michael
Apple, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paolo Friere, Ivan Illich, Maria Montessori, A.S.
Neill, Herbert Kohl, Jonathon Kozol, Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, Alice
Miller, Carl Jung, Krishnamurti, Tara Singh, Pestalozzi, Rudolph Steiner, Jan
Leibloff, Thomas Armstrong, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and John Taylor Gatto are some
of the authors/writers whose work had great impact on me. But the work and works
of John Holt and his Growing Without
Schooling magazine were by far the most fascinating. Something about the
“homeschool” movement struck a chord of “rightness” within me. The coup de
grace occurred while coming across a particular passage in John Holt’s 1980
publication, Teach Your Own, in which
he list of the talents, skills and accomplishments of one ‘common man,’ Hiram
Salisbury, as they were listed in 1815.
Like our Founding Fathers, Hiram Salisbury was a product of that time and not atypical or uncommon among his contemporaries. Moreover, his ‘education’ was the direct result of the skills and knowledge necessary to the needs of his daily life. As was most customary at that time, he mostly learned by doing. Practicing, imitating, personalizing and ‘improving’ upon the skills that his family and community members were using in order to make life tolerable, passable, comfortable, easier, productive and, hopefully, enjoyable. These were the skills and activities that proved mutually supportive to the successful functioning of their home and community. Raised in the youth of our nation, Hiram Salisbury was a contemporary of Our Founding Fathers.
Below I reprint a fascinating list of the skills of a common man from that era. It is important to remember that, like most Americans of his time, Hiram Salisbury never saw the inside of a schoolhouse.
" . . . he [Hiram] was a man of his time [1815] . . . I scan the journal for clues and reconstruct the post-Revolutionary American. I list his skills, one sheet of scratch paper after another. He knew every farm chore. He milked cows and attended the calves in birth. He physicked his horse. He plowed, he planted, he cultivated, hayed, picked apples, grafted fruit trees, cut wheat with a scythe, cradled oats, threshed grain with a flail on a clay floor. he chopped the corn and put down his vegetables for the winter. He made cider and built cider mills. He made cheese and fashioned cheese tongs. He butchered hogs and sheared the sheep. He churned butter and salted it. He made soap, candles, thatched barns and built smokehouses. He butchered oxen and constructed ox sledges. He fought forest fires and marked out theland. He repaired the crane at Smith's mill and forged a crane for his own fireplace to hang the kettle on. He collected iron in the countryside and smelted it. He tapped (mended) his children's shoes and his own. He built trundle beds, oxcarts, sleighs, wagons, wagon wheels, and wheel spokes. He turned logs into boards and cut locust wood for picket fences. He made house frames, beams, mortised and pegged. With six men's help he raised the frames and built houses. He made a neat cherry sand with a drawer for a cousin, diced clocks and went fishing. He carved his own board measures (yardsticks) and sold them for a dollar a piece. He fitted window cases, mended locks, and fixed compasses. He hewed timber, surveyed the forest, wrote deeds and shaved shingles. He inspected the town records and audited the books of the Friendship Lodge, the oldest Masonic lodge in the country (still running). He chipped blows, constructed carding machines, carved gunstocks and built looms. He set gravestones, fashioned wagon hubs. He ran a bookstore and could make a fine coffin in half a day. He was a member of the state's General Assembly, overseer of the poor, appraiser of property and fellow of the town council. He made hoops by the thousand and also pewter faucets. For many years he collected the town's taxes. . . I have not listed all of Hiram's skills but enough. I do not think he was an unusual man. Put me in Hiram's world and I would not last long. Put Hiram in our world, he might have a little trouble with a computer, but he'd get the hang of it faster than I could cradle a bushel of oats." ----- "A Life-Taught Man" from John Holt's book Teach Your Own
When I first read this passage I was overwhelmed. I could not begin to fathom how to learn much less master one-tenth of the skills listed as those under Mr. Salisbury’s repertoire. “Where does one go to school for those things?” would be a not-far-off response from a modern day, public schooled individual. And yet this amazingly skilled and obviously learned man prospered in a time in which schools did not exist. Schools were not yet considered ‘necessary’ to the proliferation of a “hardy, literate, involved, creative, and innovative citizenry.” (These widely published goals of education are in actuality the words of empty propaganda, for these “goals” have in fact been falling farther and farther from the real outcomes of the results coming out of our “experiment” in compulsory public education. It can be exhibited how achievement of the exact opposite—sickly, ignorant, detached and isolated, numb and dull, cynically uninvolved--is, in fact, the true hidden desire of the Captains of Industry who have commissioned and financed this “experiment” in social engineering.)
Fearless, rugged individuals possessing a vast array of practical skills like Hiram Salisbury were the norm at this pre-schooling, post-Revolutionary time of our nation's history, not the exception. We modern, ‘educated’ individuals have been so babied, so denied the wealth of knowledge and skills that could serve us in self-responsibility, self-sufficience, and independence. Instead, we have been emasculated, pampered into numb ignorance and inescapable dependence upon other “experts” to do such everyday tasks as Hiram or any farmer or Amish person would surely be capable of doing. Can you see how the destruction of the agrarian-based lifestyle with its self-sufficience and tight family and community ties became the top priority of the shapers of our society, our so-called “Captains of Industry”? Is it no wonder that the wealthy industrialists saw in schools and schooling the means to creating a vast and obedient (unquestioning) work force?
The second event signaling my inescapable culpability and complicity to society’s ills was really more of a brewing and percolation to the surface of my conscious brain of the fact (which took me years to verify and validate) that many of our Founding Fathers had no ‘formal’ education--that they received their education through the exposure to and the living of life, through following their natural curiosities, through family-hired tutorials, through satisfying personal interest and need--that they never saw the inside of a factory-, asylum- and prison-modeled school house. (I later learned that schools and a state-organized system of compulsory schooling did not rise to existence until many years after our Founding Fathers’ generation had passed.) And yet they were brilliant! They were intellectual giants possessed with incredible courage and fortitude, and were obviously quite spiritually advanced (in order to sacrifice one’s life daily to a greater cause wouldn’t one have to have some kind of heightened spiritual awareness? Either that or incredible ignorance and naïvete.)
I’m talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Edison. Many—perhaps all—of our nation’s greatest leaders, thinkers and innovators have taken very unusual paths to the education that contributed to their success—many of which never touched on the institution of mass schooling. To be sure, our nation's founding fathers never saw the inside of a school building. The nation’s first state-mandated compulsory school attendance laws weren’t put into practice until the 1860s! Public schooling simply did not exist during the first 100 years of our nation’s history! And the typical multi-roomed school building , modeled on the sanatoriums, factories and prisons of arising in the (as a result of the) Industrial Revolution weren’t institutionalized until the 20th century.
So, what did they do? How did they
get educated? For the wealthy there were a few private parochial schools and private
boarding schools. For many private personal tutors were hired by parents to
teach their children in the home. Otherwise people experienced formal learning
from the Bible, from reading (our nation's literacy rate in 1776 was nearly
100% Oh! And by the way: the acquisition of the skills necessary to read does
not require and has never required teachers, teaching, or schools.), or from
courses offered from state agencies or trade organizations. And of course there
were apprenticeships. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
and their peers were educated by doing, by need, by watching, by emulating
their heroes, by apprenticing with respected masters, by reading, by
participating in discussions, through group and community work situations,
through specialized tutoring, through learning what was necessary to match that
day's family or community needs/tasks. Some were given private instruction by family-hired
tutors (usually temporary or itenerant).
Another favorite story of mine
regarding education before the existence of schooling is that of the boy that
became our nation’s great Revolutionary hero and, of course, first President: George
Washington. George never attended "school." However, at the age of
11, he decided that learning the trade of surveyor was something he’d like.
Thus, he began training for a career in surveying. That’s right: by age 11 he
had the maturity and wherewithal to make a career choice. He began with three
subjects: geometry, trigonometry and surveying. You see, in a 97% agrarian
society, which between 1750 and 1840 had a complex (as compared to
"functional" or fourth grade, newspaper reading) literacy rate of 93
and 100%, it was expected and natural to have learned how to read, write, and
do numbers at home. Geometry, trigonometry and surveying were not so bold an
undertaking. Even for an eleven-year old. (Apparently, George did not make a
very good surveyor—and, in fact, may have been motivated more by the status and
income that such a profession and such commissions as the ones he received
might earn him.)
My point here is that schools did
not exist and in fact were not necessary to the proliferation of a hardy,
literate, involved, creative, and innovative citizenry. Fearless, rugged
individuals possessing a vast array of practical skills like Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson and Hiram Salisbury were the norm, not the exception, at this
pre-schooling, pre- and post-Revolutionary time of our nation's history. Public
schools and schooling for the masses came into existence through the desire of
a few rich industrialists needing a vast and obedient work force. Our so-called "Captains of Industry" found the means to their sheepish workforce requirement by backing (read: "funding") the
idealistic ivory tower intellectuals like Horace Mann and, later, John Dewey, in order to give intellectual credence to theories that would and could validate their capitalistic urges and desires. The former, Harvard intellectual Horace Mann, and many others of his ilk had conveniently fallen under the spell of
the latest state education practices coming out of the amazing new economic superpower, Prussia. Later, Mann and the intellectual theorists and mouthpieces for state-mandated compulsory education of the masses found further support for their efforts in the science of Charles Darwin, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the blossoming new 'scientific' fields of psychology and sociology. While the masses struggled for fair wages, work safety guarantees, collective bargaining, strikes and anarchism, the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford, were finding rationale for their impersonal and ruthless methods with theories of class distinction, superiority of certain strain or class of humans or of a master race, or of the veritable moral obligation of the wealthy elite to steer the course of the 'wild and untamed' mass of ignorant humanity from social Darwinism, eugenics. and the exciting new sciences of psychology and sociology.
Compulsory
education began as an experiment. The goal was to figure out how to best control and shape mass populations.
The sad part is, the propaganda accompanying this mass system of education is
one of "democracy" and "family values" and "education
as a means to a better life" when in fact the compulsory schooling system
supports none of these "core American" beliefs. In fact, education has been purposely and intentionally molded and
shaped to destroy these possibilities—to instead indoctrinate us to feel fear,
isolation, ignorance, dependence, incompetence, helplessness, and to then seek
escape and addictive behaviors to try to deal with (or avoid dealing with) our
inadequacies, insufficiencies, insecurities, and lack of self-esteem!
The third epiphany involves the husband of former Governor
of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, Daniel Mulhern. Dan is a nationally renowned motivational
speaker who speaks on leadership and organizational development. Around 2005,
in one of my inaugural forays into the World Wide Web, I happened upon the
re-printing of one of Dan’s speeches in which he said (unfortunately, I must
here paraphrase): “As a parent, I’m not in the business of raising children;
I’m trying to raise adults.”
Ding! Yes! This made so much sense! In order to
raise adults we have to stop treating them as children and raise them with the
expectations of their learning and using “adult” decision-making processes and
behaviors. The question then arises, of course, as to what “adult” means. While defining what it means to be an adult (and to act accordingly) is truly the grist for an entire other post, for the sake of flow let us say that it
means an individual capable of achieving, sustaining and enjoying success in
life. If this is the case, then one must decide: What are the skills and behaviors that lead to
autonomic success? I believe that these should include nurturing humans that make healthy choices for themselves, can
establish non-addictive habits and behaviors, are self-determined,
self-sufficient, capable of critical thinking, independent, of being able to weigh the life and health benefits to all living beings.
The point is, through my third epiphany I was able to awaken to my own personal belief that in order to
raise—or rather, allow the development of—young human beings in order to best allow
them to achieve timely (early) autonomy—to show success in making healthy
choices, in finding confidence to take on independent decision-making and ,
that we had stop babying them and using authoritarian methods of behavior
modification that unconsciously (and, I think, unintentionally) breed behaviors
of dependency, codependency, and all of which serve most to delay the growing
up process. Unfortunately, the authoritarian model is the most broadly accepted model of
parenting and “adult” treatment of children. And, unfortunately, it is one of
the best kept secrets (or most denied truths) of our world that the creation of
disharmony, dependence, disease, fear, isolation, laziness, boredom, addiction,
financial enslavement (through taxes and debt) that our capitalist system keeps “working”--working to ensure the perpetual primacy of the wealthy elite and their
progeny.
The fourth event signaling my inescapable
culpability and complicity to society’s ills occurred during the past year. It occurred while I was reading Stephen E. Ambrose's biography of Meriwether Lewis, Undaunted Courage. Meriwether Lewis,of course, is most famous for his leadership role in the Thomas Jefferson-commissioned expedition to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. I'll never forget being stricken dumb by Ambrose’s accounting of the
fact that young Meriwether had already made several trips to Georgia (to visit his brother and other relatives) by the time he was 12 years old. This, in and of itself would be no very big deal except that Lewis made these trips alone, on foot, through the
rough, Indian-inhabited woodlands and mountains.
Multiple times. Alone. On foot. To Georgia and back. By the time he was 12-years old.
Let me repeat this one more time in order to help you digest this.
According to Stephen E. Ambrose in his biography of Meriwether Lewis, titled Undaunted Courage, young Meriwether had traveled at least five times, alone, on foot, to and from Georgia, by the time he was 12 years old.
Alone.
Through
wild, often roadless, back woods. Among the foothills of the Appalachian
Mountains.
For weeks
at a time.
Alone.
And
we imagine Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer to be rugged and brave!
The fact that a pre-pubescent
aristocratic boy was allowed to make the decision to go off alone into the
wilderness of Appalachia in the hopes of finding his way to a specific
destination 200 miles away is, to me, staggering. To contemplate my own self
walking hundreds of miles through not-necessarily friendly wilderness, alone,
at age eight, nine, or even 12-years old is virtually inconceivable. The
contemplation of even conceiving of such an idea (or of a family member
proposing such a task) is to me unfathomable. Then to imagine being the parent
of that child--supporting that child’s request (or suggesting/commanding it!),
allowing the departure, having no contact for weeks at a time, putting the that
kind of trust into God, Mother Nature, and human nature--is, again, so far from
my experience and comfort zone. And with no cell phone!
And
yet, this occurred; it is historical fact. And I believe that this was probably
a fairly common occurrence—especially from confident, secure, boys who were not
brought up with fear-based boundaries and restrictions.
In
comparison, the occurrence of hitchhiking—once a quite common choice for
transportation—is now something virtually eradicated and taboo among we
Americans. We have been brainwashed into thinking and believing that it is
dangerous—that all strangers (i.e. people we just happen to have never met but
who are, in fact, human like you and me) are dangerous potential
rapist-murderers. Such is the success of our media-controlled world. Now try
imagining the same people—these hitchhikers—walking across miles of wilderness.
(And without cell pones! We have become such breeders of fear and dependency!)
My point here is that learning, education, growing, discovering the strengths and weakness of one's self, are all achievable without teachers, without books, without classrooms, without structures and schedules, without authoritarian rules and regulations, without media hype, without consumerist participation, without democratic participation, without nationalization, without acculturation, without moderation or modification, without legislation or "protection," without corporate packaging and definitely without controlled 'socialization.' As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that learning is better achieved without all of these contrived methods of control of human behavior.
Try walking to Georgia and back. Alone. Now, that would be an education!
My fifth epiphany
occurred while doing some research into my own family history. I am descended from the Fisher Brothers of Detroit automobile fame. As a matter of fact I carry forward the name of one of those entrepreneurial brothers, my great grandfather, William Andrew. While reading
old articles or historical blurbs on the Fisher Brothers I fell upon a line which read “as was custom of that
time” my great grandfather’s parents' generation pushed their sons out into the world upon
graduating from school (which at that time only went through 8th
grade) at age 14. In the cultural custom of "going out and seeking one's fortune," the boys were expected to make their way, explore the world,
themselves, and career opportunities until age 21 when they were expected to
set themselves into an adult life. Most of the Fisher Brothers moved away from their home town of Norwalk, Ohio, in ‘early manhood.’ They spent time traveling to various centers of culture and industry mostly in the Northeastern part of the country. This was in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Fred and Charles worked at various woodcraft and mechanics' jobs on the East Coast--Boston, New Haven, New York and smaller cities on the eastern seaboard. My great grandfather, William, worked on local farms around Norwalk, in a local hotel, and for his father and uncles in the family carriage-making business.
This custom and practice, it turns
out, is similar to that used within present day communities of the Amish--or, as they call themselves, the “Plain Folk.” This seems to make sense since the Old Order Amish have for all intents and purposes "frozen" all customs--as much as possible--as they were around 1860.
In Amish communities, “scholars” ages seven through 14 (eight grades) attend local one-room schoolhouses from September to early May. Then, between ages 14 and 21 they “find themselves” by working alongside many family and community members, testing their hands and their interests at many crafts, learning many skills, so that, at age 21 one, when they choose a partner or mate, they are most definitely ready to take on the multifarious tasks of heading their own farm, family and possibly a specialty trade.
To me this practice, used with great success for generations and generations before the advent of the modern compulsory mass schooling movement makes so much more sense for improving the odds for success in a responsible adult life. Contrarily, I believe that our public school system is actually set up (yes, even intentionally so) to delay, distract or even retard psychological and social maturity. The maturity and independence achieved, expressed (and expected) by the older custom of ending ‘formal’ education at eighth grade and then spending the next seven years learning and actually doing meaningful work among other real, actuated adults seems uncontestable. Instead, schools have been used to intentionally keep perfectly capable souls out of the work force by extending a sentence of wasted ‘jail’ time for four, eight, or, now, ten-to-twelve or more years beyond the aforementioned customary eighth grade education. One of the bonuses added more recently to the task of compulsory schooling is that of breeding insecure, fear-filled, debt-ridden, dependent (one could say, "enslaved"), well-conditioned consumers.
The common theme running through all of these five "epiphanies" is that they are all representative of a form of education that existed before, or that exists as an alternative to, the state mandated system of mass schooling which is our current paradigm. Unfortunately, we have come to accept the framework of this modern system as the highest expression of human educational achievement. We have been programmed into believing that this system of compulsory education for the masses is the epitome of democratic principles because it tries to reach everyone (through state-mandated and state-enforced attendance, ages 7 through 16 or 18); because it supposedly "levels the playing field" for all Americans, allowing them to have exactly the same access to the chance of realizing the 'American Dream.' The sad thing is that the American "dream" that is the reality is more like a nightmare: we are all released from our 12-plus year jail sentence to walk about in a numb, dumb, haze or stupor of zombi-automation--completely void of independent adult behaviors, completely and (the powers that be hope) irrevocably dependent on the tools, skills, and expertise of consumer goods and services for our 'health,' 'safety,' welfare, information, and opinions.
When the world was our classroom--when the
family, the farm, the community, even the workplace--served as the means to the
learning "rugged individualism" "strong moral fiber" "innovative creativity" that these admirably accomplished individuals obtained.
“Auto-didactism” is the fancy Latin-and-Greek-derived word that ‘intellectuals’
studying the “science” of ‘pedagogy’ have created for what could be called
‘self-education.’ It’s as if learning were some unusual disease or extraordinary achievement when in fact the 'exceptional' individuals our unschooled society produced were normal, average humans that were allowed
and encouraged (some might even say forced) to be guided by the internal motivation
of need, desire, and curiosity. I would posit here that our fear-based
education and media-controlled system has been created and constructed with the
express purpose of instead distracting, discouraging and denying us from these
natural motivating forces. Our "Captains of Industry" do not want any charismatic leaders, they do not want any creativity or inventiveness to occur outside of (or to grow without the umbrella of control of) state or corporate control. So they have financed the creation of a very effective system that dumbs us down, numbs us into isolated paranoia, enslaves us through debt and taxes, controls us by forced competition for jobs, money, play toys, and basic needs, keeps us unhealthy through engineering immune system compromising and disease-causing foods, media, and environment. The layers of enslavement to the capitalist system are daunting to say the least, effective to be sure. A return to self-sufficiency and the natural forms of learning that occur therein might be our only hope.
