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Glenn Toddun's avatar

To achieve anarchist goals we’ll need a rewrite of human source code. We’ll need a whole new set of stories to bind us and a whole bunch of narratives will need to be tossed away. Discussions like this are a great way to move these stories into the mainstream.

The thing is, to live within our means, we need to embody a lot of anarchist principles. We need to devalue domination while lifting up cooperation. We need to devalue the personal wealth of accumulation and value the common wealth of redistribution. It’s not really utopic when you look at it this way, it’s necessary.

Somehow, we have to get to this state or expect an endless future of conflict over diminishing resources.

I believe this is possible, just not in my lifetime, and I fear that will take planetary level cataclysm to do so.

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Avi's avatar
Nov 13Edited

Tribal living was the way children was educated for hundred of thousands of years. They didn't have anything resembling school, and learning happened naturally by being part of the community. It is easy to underestimate just how much native people learned as part of this process (since it looks so different from our learning), but they had an encyclopedic knowledge about their surroundings and how to survive in it.

For a recent example, check out this article about some native kids that was in a plane crash and ended up alone in the middle of the jungle, yet still was able to survive where even experienced forest guides would have a hard time: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-4-children-survived-40-days-jungle-plane-crash-amazon-colombia-rcna88791

You could say that this is all good, but it would never work for the kind of learning needed by children today. You are not going to learn arithmetic in the jungle.

But it turns out that this process also can work for a modern curriculum. There is a school in Massachusetts, called the Sudbury Valley School, where the environment is set up as a mini version of the outer world, with a a full democracy and all the kids being fully autonomous members of the society (so no classes, no grades and nobody can tell anyone else what to do). The surprising thing is that this school has existed since the 60's and have great track record of kids turning out well rounded and ready for college. They have tons of material documenting their method and results on their site: https://sudburyvalley.org/

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