I have tried so hard to read and engage with anarchists and I always come away with the realization that it's idealistic wishful thinking that just would never work, not ever.
the totally ideal system that we have where nothing bad happens, ever?
i have had this conversation so may times, where nothing but the creation of utopia would validate anarchy
but heres the thing.... this argument expects anarchy to solve the problems that modern civilization can not solve.
how is modern civilization going to end violence? is it even possible for modern civilization to exist without violence? how many of the problems discussed here are created by modern civilization?
anarchy doesn't have to create a perfect world, just one that is better than what we currently have (... and thankfully its a pretty low bar)
Modern society is not a thing separate from humans, its not something imposed on us, it came about in part because of our nature. We created it. That's I think the part where I can't ever see anarchy working on any scale significant enough to matter.... i.e. it's always human nature that will get in the way. Modern society is not great, and there's too much violence, poverty, pollution, hunger, etc. But it is much better than it has been for thousands of years. To progress beyond what we have now we have to solve the problems in the system and account for human nature and bad players. This is where anarchism fails, it assumes the problems are because of modern society/ the systems and that if we get rid of that human nature is inherently peaceful, we are not though. You and I may be, but it only takes a handful of bad guys to screw things up. I think we will eventually progress beyond the modern system we have and hopefully get to something better. I have a sneaking suspicion that the internet, AI, and robots will play a factor in that and that the future anarchists want is not dissimilar from the future we all want, but it won't be anarchism that gets us there.
> Modern society is not a thing separate from humans, its not something imposed on us, it came about in part because of our nature. We created it.
modern society is created, but it is a creation of civilized cultures. it is not separate from the humans that formulate and reproduce it, but it is separate from the cultures outside of modern society (i.e. indigenous cultures) and for those cultures, it is an imposition.
it seems that you are confusing "human nature" with "the nature of civilized peoples"
"human nature" does not exist, we are empty containers than can hold so so much.
but lets pretend it does:
if human nature precedes "the nature of civilized peoples" then "civilized nature" is a subset of "human nature" and while a subset can provide a different perspective of its superset (the same way a subculture creates a perspective on the culture) but the subset does not define the superset
Just want to name to people that this description of stateless "tribal communities" is simplistic to the point of racist. Indigenous societies are not homogeneous. Some are more permissive of physical conflict or punishment, some much less so, some are complete pacifists, some are the originators of practices of "restorative justice" that have been the basis of major alternatives to a criminal justice systems all across the world.
I don't think Elle actually read Anarchy Works (for starters it's a book, not a website) but it seems odd to say that I cherry pick when I engage directly with the kind of arguments E is making, and the examples I give are not to establish an alternate absolute vision of human nature but to disprove absolutist generalizations like Elle's. Between that and another book, Worshiping Power, I do my best to show that the arguments of some white academics that humans "naturally" tend towards war and violence is based on cherry picking and statistical majorities extracted from data that comes mostly from the accounts of racist colonizers and mostly after the beginning of all the violence unleashed by global colonization.
People who are interested in challenging these racist and simplistic assumptions that we're brought up with, which really just serve as an alibi for our complicity with murderous institutions, can find much more detail in the works of Sullivan and Tifft, for example.
I'm not being absolute at all. In this essay I'm agreeing with you that there were both peaceful societies and unpeaceful ones. I was just saying that sometimes the peaceful ones get taken over by unpeaceful ones and I'm asking Peter Clayborne (who recommended your work to me in a previous letter) how peaceful societies should protect themselves. Did that not come across somewhere?
The whole purpose of this series is me asking questions of an anarchist thinker so I can learn more so I would appreciate further explanation of where this question goes wrong for you?
> I was just saying that sometimes the peaceful ones get taken over by unpeaceful ones
but why is the impetus on peaceful societies here? imagine you were trying to elucidate a different way of living and every point you made i countered with "what if a superpower bombs your utopia into oblivion?" this is essentially what i see in these kinds of discussions, as if tyrannical states must be solved by peaceful ones.
can't we explore what peaceful societies might look like without hypothesizing their destruction by aggressive assholes in the same breath?
All good points, everyone, but I still can't help but feel that any polical system that on relies on "our better angels" is fragile and open to exploitation (and perhaps domination) by those who choose to not play by the cooperative rules.
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.
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/
Yeah. Archeology is finding that people invented weapons and began fighting with each other even earlier than originally thought. Apparently we are a species who just love to fight.
Incidentally, I was discussing this with someone the other day, does anyone know of a society that has gone more than a generation without some kind of war? My hypothesis is that every generation has some big war or other catastrophe to contend with. We, as a species, can't get away from this for too long. Anyone have proof to the contrary. (I wouldn't mind being proven wrong on this.)
I frequently say, those who are not willing to fight for their freedom must be willing to be a slave. There is no third option. And why would that be a problem? Why would having a well established defense system be a threat to freedom? The answer is that a well established defense takes you most of the way to having a well established offense.
Those who over-simply the issues are more of a problem than a solution. The ultimate path to peace is totalitarianism, forced compliance to 'authority'. I want no part of that. No, I don't have a sure-fire answer, any more than anyone else does. But I will not be a slave.
I won't say that can't happen. But I still say that a good defense can be made into a good offense. We must always guard against that, but that's not easy to do.
I just came across this quote on The Naked Emperor's Newsletter:
“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
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.
I'm reminded of the evolutionaey biologist E.O. Wilson's comment on Communism - "great idea, wrong species".
The more we understand about our closest cousins, the primates, it's plain to see that their "societies" aren't all peace, love and understanding. There is war, rape, infanticide, murder, jealousy, hierarchy, social exclusion, resource hoarding and unequal distribution, etc etc.
Any social and political theory that only works if EVERYONE is morally perfect, psychologically stable, and emotionally intelligent is laughable.
The broad sweep of History, and our own lived experiences, show us over and over that NONE of these things are true for ANYONE over their lifetime.
Everyone gets angry, lies, makes bad decisions and hurts other people at some point in their lives, and some make an entire lifestyle out of being that type of person.
Economics and game theory have loads of concepts like "the tragedy of the commons" or "the freeloader problem" or "deflection" (eg in "The Prisoners Dilemma") that talk about how expecting people to always choose the group over their own best interests is doomed to failures over the long run.
It depends on the primates, Stephen. We are as closely related to bonobos as we are chimps; bonobos settle conflicts with sex and grooming. As to chimps, it appears they aren’t as violent as originally thought; human intervention caused an increase in violence when people who wanted to study them built banana boxes, and some of the young males began to guard those banana boxes.
As to Elle’s comments about anarchism - we are looking at a very thin, narrow period of human history. We’ve been people for hundreds of thousands of years; recorded history begins with the agricultural revolution (where we built our own banana boxes and then had to guard them…) That guarding behavior led to concern about primogeniture, mate guarding, wives and children becoming equal to livestock, the rise of feudalism, and our current state of endless war.
I would like to refer you all to the book “The Dawn of Everything” - the way we are now is not the way we always have to be. We have been different.
There is also the conflict bias in history to consider. When we look back, we see the fractures and disruptions in culture far more than we see the billions of people who just got along nicely with mutual cooperation.
These are the true heroes of history.
The villages and towns that found balance, the cities that learnt how to distribute power and wealth and continue for centuries. These are lost to history because they were boring to story tellers.
Recently, in the carbon pulse, we have had cheap energy firehosing into our systems, destabilizing, amplifying everything. It does seem that we are a nasty bunch if we look at the last 100 years. It will not always be like this, cheap energy will leave us and we’ll need to rely more on each other again to resolve conflict.
Glenn - which history? This is the thing. We 'know' our history from about 6,000 years ago (a blip of time...), and the 'history' that we know was predominantly written within the last few hundred years. (History is written by the 'victors.')
As a child, I was taught that the native Americans sold Manhattan for wampum because they were so stupid. The natives thought the Europeans were stupid because, from their standpoint, no one 'owns' land. That idea was just considered absurd to the natives in the 1600's.
The European enlightenment and the thinkers of the French Revolution were largely influenced by the North Eastern native Americans tribes (you know, equality, egalitarianism, fraternity) - within our own 'modern' history, other's were living in ways and thinking in ways far more akin to anarchism than to 'capitalism,' feudalism,' etc.
The fractures and disruptions, 'tooth and claw' stories we are told support a narrow world view, and are told by people who benefit from that narrative. As mammals, and most especially as primates, we have succeeded through cooperation rather than through competition. This notion is grounded in science: we are too small and fragile to hunt in anything besides packs; we MUST use tools (and therefore depend upon toolmakers) because we are fangless, clawless, furless apes. We developed language because without the ability to clearly communicate with each other, we'd all starve to death - for an apex predator, we are physically ridiculous individually.
The vast swathe of human history tells a story of communication, trade, migration, community - with which we would never have survived as a species. It is written in our DNA and in the archeological record.
Those who would make us into wolves (again, that story is ridiculous too) who rely on individual prowess, competition, 'survival of the fittest' tell us this story only because THEY are 'wolves' - any native American tribe would have banished (or exorcised) those psychopaths as being ill-suited for living with human beings.
Re children not going to school but still being educated, home education is already an option. Three of my four kids were home educated for at least a few years (one of them for all but two early years) and they are all highly capable, intelligent and well-informed. If you met them you would think them well-educated.
The challenge with home education is that one parent has to be available at home all the time. The necessity for two incomes makes this impossible for many (even were one parent willing to be at home).
Yes that’s true, but I would still consider that an education, no? Like you are teaching them things and giving them a well rounded education, not just letting them experience “the school of life”?
A “well-rounded education” is a school concept. We quickly learned (after a few months of trying to “school” them) that it was irrelevant. We stopped setting them tasks, or giving them worksheets downloaded from the internet. With maths we paid for a website for a while, but they didn’t take to it. We couldn’t afford to get locked into battles with our own children.
So we let them decide what they wanted to do. With the older ones that meant they spent a few months doing very little (we limited computer time to an hour a day, but they were allowed to watch unlimited David Attenborough videos!) until they were sufficiently “unschooled” to re-find the natural curiosity that school often suffocates.
Our ADHD/dyslexic kid (failing academically and getting into trouble aged 11) tried multiple things including photography club but the ones that stuck were forest school (it was a home ed group run by someone in a local woodland, about making fires and shelters and identifying animal tracks and fungi) and cooking.
At home everything was cooking. He watched cookery shows all day and started building up a folder of recipes which he cooked for us. We got him to cost out ingredients (i.e. some maths) and design menus (i.e. some design) once or twice, for the LEA (Local Education Authority) inspections but everything was food focused, because he’s a practical hands-on learner.
He got a job at 16 as a pot washer and through his obvious interest (asking the chef questions) was apprenticed the same day as his pot washer trial to be a chef trainee at that restaurant. 1 day a week day-release training at the local college. He went on to work in Michelin star and high class restaurants in London, France, and Australia.
Burned out after 10 years, he retrained as an electrician and is about to move to Portugal with his fiance to start running a place that, you guessed it, has 5 hectares of land and will re-activate his Forest School skills.
The other two just followed their passions too. One taught himself fluent Japanese and learned how to make clothes. He has more animal facts than anyone I know. Not a well-rounded education at all. But a passion-driven education decided on by the child, well-tuned to their natural proclivities, and purely facilitated by the parent (.e.g you want to go to an actual Japanese class to practice what you’ve learned online? No worries, we will find you one).
I would definitely consider home-education a completely sound education. Our experience of state school education in the UK is that it suits hardly anyone, and is actively psychologically damaging.
I'm thinking this through because I want to talk to Peter about this on our call, but I'm curious, what did your son who followed his Japanese passion wind up doing for work? And what did your third son wind up doing?
I tend to agree that students could self direct if given the opportunity (not that that opportunity is easy to scale...). Also have you seen the film Captain Fantastic? (You're making me think of this film and I absolutely love it!)
There is a school in the Netherlands that does exactly what you are describing, I think! It's called Agoraschool. They basically let children follow there curiosities/passions, but then have teachers try to use these self chosen pathways to also guide them to learn all the other things. While there are no grades or formal curriculum, the students do have final examen and as such also receive the regular school diplomas. There is of course also some criticism about their approach. I have no idea how well it works out in reality, but given the school has grown quite a bit since founding, it's probably not too bad. Here is a little article about the school: https://www.zinmag.nl/zinmag-editie-03-2018/bij-agora-bepaalt-de-leerling-het-reisdoel-de-docent-de-weg-ernaartoe/ (it's in Dutch, but certainly one of our future AI-overlords can it translate it for the interested :)
The principles are sound, at least. In practice it will very depend on the teachers. We sent our daughter to a Buddhist school that seemed very child-centred. But her favourite teachers betrayed and traumatised her when she started struggling with aspects of school (due to, we found out later, undiagnosed autism) and a classroom assistant at that school was recently jailed for historic sexual offences against several of my daughter's classmates; her only memory has blankspots concerning him, so may not be good. Somehow even "good-seeming" schools can be places where great damage is done to children. And yes, damage is done to kids in the home as well, but I have yet to find a school that beats home education facilitated by loving involved parents.
You both bring up a lot of good points, and a lot here is dependent on parents or teachers being attentive and "good." It's hard to come up with a one size fits all approach! But I've added this to ideas we'll further discuss in our live call!
Can you please point to the specific part you disagree with and share why? These letters are an open discussion with an anarchist thinker with the goal of helping us all learn, and I'm not sure this comment contributes to that learning in any way?
Just wanted to note the preferred lingo is indigenous peoples or Native Americans, not Indians :)
I have tried so hard to read and engage with anarchists and I always come away with the realization that it's idealistic wishful thinking that just would never work, not ever.
what are you comparing it to?
the totally ideal system that we have where nothing bad happens, ever?
i have had this conversation so may times, where nothing but the creation of utopia would validate anarchy
but heres the thing.... this argument expects anarchy to solve the problems that modern civilization can not solve.
how is modern civilization going to end violence? is it even possible for modern civilization to exist without violence? how many of the problems discussed here are created by modern civilization?
anarchy doesn't have to create a perfect world, just one that is better than what we currently have (... and thankfully its a pretty low bar)
Modern society is not a thing separate from humans, its not something imposed on us, it came about in part because of our nature. We created it. That's I think the part where I can't ever see anarchy working on any scale significant enough to matter.... i.e. it's always human nature that will get in the way. Modern society is not great, and there's too much violence, poverty, pollution, hunger, etc. But it is much better than it has been for thousands of years. To progress beyond what we have now we have to solve the problems in the system and account for human nature and bad players. This is where anarchism fails, it assumes the problems are because of modern society/ the systems and that if we get rid of that human nature is inherently peaceful, we are not though. You and I may be, but it only takes a handful of bad guys to screw things up. I think we will eventually progress beyond the modern system we have and hopefully get to something better. I have a sneaking suspicion that the internet, AI, and robots will play a factor in that and that the future anarchists want is not dissimilar from the future we all want, but it won't be anarchism that gets us there.
> Modern society is not a thing separate from humans, its not something imposed on us, it came about in part because of our nature. We created it.
modern society is created, but it is a creation of civilized cultures. it is not separate from the humans that formulate and reproduce it, but it is separate from the cultures outside of modern society (i.e. indigenous cultures) and for those cultures, it is an imposition.
it seems that you are confusing "human nature" with "the nature of civilized peoples"
Human nature created the nature of civilized peoples in order to deal with human nature.
"human nature" does not exist, we are empty containers than can hold so so much.
but lets pretend it does:
if human nature precedes "the nature of civilized peoples" then "civilized nature" is a subset of "human nature" and while a subset can provide a different perspective of its superset (the same way a subculture creates a perspective on the culture) but the subset does not define the superset
Ok well yes, I very much agree with that too!
Just want to name to people that this description of stateless "tribal communities" is simplistic to the point of racist. Indigenous societies are not homogeneous. Some are more permissive of physical conflict or punishment, some much less so, some are complete pacifists, some are the originators of practices of "restorative justice" that have been the basis of major alternatives to a criminal justice systems all across the world.
I don't think Elle actually read Anarchy Works (for starters it's a book, not a website) but it seems odd to say that I cherry pick when I engage directly with the kind of arguments E is making, and the examples I give are not to establish an alternate absolute vision of human nature but to disprove absolutist generalizations like Elle's. Between that and another book, Worshiping Power, I do my best to show that the arguments of some white academics that humans "naturally" tend towards war and violence is based on cherry picking and statistical majorities extracted from data that comes mostly from the accounts of racist colonizers and mostly after the beginning of all the violence unleashed by global colonization.
People who are interested in challenging these racist and simplistic assumptions that we're brought up with, which really just serve as an alibi for our complicity with murderous institutions, can find much more detail in the works of Sullivan and Tifft, for example.
https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-abstract/43/1/252/485897?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.akpress.org/anarchyworks.html
https://www.akpress.org/worshipingpower.html
I'm not being absolute at all. In this essay I'm agreeing with you that there were both peaceful societies and unpeaceful ones. I was just saying that sometimes the peaceful ones get taken over by unpeaceful ones and I'm asking Peter Clayborne (who recommended your work to me in a previous letter) how peaceful societies should protect themselves. Did that not come across somewhere?
The whole purpose of this series is me asking questions of an anarchist thinker so I can learn more so I would appreciate further explanation of where this question goes wrong for you?
> I was just saying that sometimes the peaceful ones get taken over by unpeaceful ones
but why is the impetus on peaceful societies here? imagine you were trying to elucidate a different way of living and every point you made i countered with "what if a superpower bombs your utopia into oblivion?" this is essentially what i see in these kinds of discussions, as if tyrannical states must be solved by peaceful ones.
can't we explore what peaceful societies might look like without hypothesizing their destruction by aggressive assholes in the same breath?
All good points, everyone, but I still can't help but feel that any polical system that on relies on "our better angels" is fragile and open to exploitation (and perhaps domination) by those who choose to not play by the cooperative rules.
My thoughts exactly.
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/
Oooh, very interested in interesting case studies. Will be looking more into this one for sure. Thank you!
Yeah. Archeology is finding that people invented weapons and began fighting with each other even earlier than originally thought. Apparently we are a species who just love to fight.
Incidentally, I was discussing this with someone the other day, does anyone know of a society that has gone more than a generation without some kind of war? My hypothesis is that every generation has some big war or other catastrophe to contend with. We, as a species, can't get away from this for too long. Anyone have proof to the contrary. (I wouldn't mind being proven wrong on this.)
Isn't that wild? I find myself thinking "why can't we all just get along" nearly constantly in my head. 😆
I frequently say, those who are not willing to fight for their freedom must be willing to be a slave. There is no third option. And why would that be a problem? Why would having a well established defense system be a threat to freedom? The answer is that a well established defense takes you most of the way to having a well established offense.
Those who over-simply the issues are more of a problem than a solution. The ultimate path to peace is totalitarianism, forced compliance to 'authority'. I want no part of that. No, I don't have a sure-fire answer, any more than anyone else does. But I will not be a slave.
The Mohists developed their own militia that was for defense only. They never once used it for offense!
I won't say that can't happen. But I still say that a good defense can be made into a good offense. We must always guard against that, but that's not easy to do.
Very, very true!
I just came across this quote on The Naked Emperor's Newsletter:
“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
James Madison
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.
Did you ever read The Fifth Sacred Thing by @Starhawk? It’s a novel with a powerful blueprint for living into the kind of society that’s needed now.
I have not, but I have put it on my list
She wrote it back in the 90s, as I recall. But it is so prophetic about the times we are living in… Similar to Octavia Butler in that way.
I'm reminded of the evolutionaey biologist E.O. Wilson's comment on Communism - "great idea, wrong species".
The more we understand about our closest cousins, the primates, it's plain to see that their "societies" aren't all peace, love and understanding. There is war, rape, infanticide, murder, jealousy, hierarchy, social exclusion, resource hoarding and unequal distribution, etc etc.
Any social and political theory that only works if EVERYONE is morally perfect, psychologically stable, and emotionally intelligent is laughable.
The broad sweep of History, and our own lived experiences, show us over and over that NONE of these things are true for ANYONE over their lifetime.
Everyone gets angry, lies, makes bad decisions and hurts other people at some point in their lives, and some make an entire lifestyle out of being that type of person.
Economics and game theory have loads of concepts like "the tragedy of the commons" or "the freeloader problem" or "deflection" (eg in "The Prisoners Dilemma") that talk about how expecting people to always choose the group over their own best interests is doomed to failures over the long run.
It depends on the primates, Stephen. We are as closely related to bonobos as we are chimps; bonobos settle conflicts with sex and grooming. As to chimps, it appears they aren’t as violent as originally thought; human intervention caused an increase in violence when people who wanted to study them built banana boxes, and some of the young males began to guard those banana boxes.
As to Elle’s comments about anarchism - we are looking at a very thin, narrow period of human history. We’ve been people for hundreds of thousands of years; recorded history begins with the agricultural revolution (where we built our own banana boxes and then had to guard them…) That guarding behavior led to concern about primogeniture, mate guarding, wives and children becoming equal to livestock, the rise of feudalism, and our current state of endless war.
I would like to refer you all to the book “The Dawn of Everything” - the way we are now is not the way we always have to be. We have been different.
There is also the conflict bias in history to consider. When we look back, we see the fractures and disruptions in culture far more than we see the billions of people who just got along nicely with mutual cooperation.
These are the true heroes of history.
The villages and towns that found balance, the cities that learnt how to distribute power and wealth and continue for centuries. These are lost to history because they were boring to story tellers.
Recently, in the carbon pulse, we have had cheap energy firehosing into our systems, destabilizing, amplifying everything. It does seem that we are a nasty bunch if we look at the last 100 years. It will not always be like this, cheap energy will leave us and we’ll need to rely more on each other again to resolve conflict.
Glenn - which history? This is the thing. We 'know' our history from about 6,000 years ago (a blip of time...), and the 'history' that we know was predominantly written within the last few hundred years. (History is written by the 'victors.')
As a child, I was taught that the native Americans sold Manhattan for wampum because they were so stupid. The natives thought the Europeans were stupid because, from their standpoint, no one 'owns' land. That idea was just considered absurd to the natives in the 1600's.
The European enlightenment and the thinkers of the French Revolution were largely influenced by the North Eastern native Americans tribes (you know, equality, egalitarianism, fraternity) - within our own 'modern' history, other's were living in ways and thinking in ways far more akin to anarchism than to 'capitalism,' feudalism,' etc.
The fractures and disruptions, 'tooth and claw' stories we are told support a narrow world view, and are told by people who benefit from that narrative. As mammals, and most especially as primates, we have succeeded through cooperation rather than through competition. This notion is grounded in science: we are too small and fragile to hunt in anything besides packs; we MUST use tools (and therefore depend upon toolmakers) because we are fangless, clawless, furless apes. We developed language because without the ability to clearly communicate with each other, we'd all starve to death - for an apex predator, we are physically ridiculous individually.
The vast swathe of human history tells a story of communication, trade, migration, community - with which we would never have survived as a species. It is written in our DNA and in the archeological record.
Those who would make us into wolves (again, that story is ridiculous too) who rely on individual prowess, competition, 'survival of the fittest' tell us this story only because THEY are 'wolves' - any native American tribe would have banished (or exorcised) those psychopaths as being ill-suited for living with human beings.
Re children not going to school but still being educated, home education is already an option. Three of my four kids were home educated for at least a few years (one of them for all but two early years) and they are all highly capable, intelligent and well-informed. If you met them you would think them well-educated.
The challenge with home education is that one parent has to be available at home all the time. The necessity for two incomes makes this impossible for many (even were one parent willing to be at home).
Yes that’s true, but I would still consider that an education, no? Like you are teaching them things and giving them a well rounded education, not just letting them experience “the school of life”?
A “well-rounded education” is a school concept. We quickly learned (after a few months of trying to “school” them) that it was irrelevant. We stopped setting them tasks, or giving them worksheets downloaded from the internet. With maths we paid for a website for a while, but they didn’t take to it. We couldn’t afford to get locked into battles with our own children.
So we let them decide what they wanted to do. With the older ones that meant they spent a few months doing very little (we limited computer time to an hour a day, but they were allowed to watch unlimited David Attenborough videos!) until they were sufficiently “unschooled” to re-find the natural curiosity that school often suffocates.
Our ADHD/dyslexic kid (failing academically and getting into trouble aged 11) tried multiple things including photography club but the ones that stuck were forest school (it was a home ed group run by someone in a local woodland, about making fires and shelters and identifying animal tracks and fungi) and cooking.
At home everything was cooking. He watched cookery shows all day and started building up a folder of recipes which he cooked for us. We got him to cost out ingredients (i.e. some maths) and design menus (i.e. some design) once or twice, for the LEA (Local Education Authority) inspections but everything was food focused, because he’s a practical hands-on learner.
He got a job at 16 as a pot washer and through his obvious interest (asking the chef questions) was apprenticed the same day as his pot washer trial to be a chef trainee at that restaurant. 1 day a week day-release training at the local college. He went on to work in Michelin star and high class restaurants in London, France, and Australia.
Burned out after 10 years, he retrained as an electrician and is about to move to Portugal with his fiance to start running a place that, you guessed it, has 5 hectares of land and will re-activate his Forest School skills.
The other two just followed their passions too. One taught himself fluent Japanese and learned how to make clothes. He has more animal facts than anyone I know. Not a well-rounded education at all. But a passion-driven education decided on by the child, well-tuned to their natural proclivities, and purely facilitated by the parent (.e.g you want to go to an actual Japanese class to practice what you’ve learned online? No worries, we will find you one).
I would definitely consider home-education a completely sound education. Our experience of state school education in the UK is that it suits hardly anyone, and is actively psychologically damaging.
I'm thinking this through because I want to talk to Peter about this on our call, but I'm curious, what did your son who followed his Japanese passion wind up doing for work? And what did your third son wind up doing?
I tend to agree that students could self direct if given the opportunity (not that that opportunity is easy to scale...). Also have you seen the film Captain Fantastic? (You're making me think of this film and I absolutely love it!)
There is a school in the Netherlands that does exactly what you are describing, I think! It's called Agoraschool. They basically let children follow there curiosities/passions, but then have teachers try to use these self chosen pathways to also guide them to learn all the other things. While there are no grades or formal curriculum, the students do have final examen and as such also receive the regular school diplomas. There is of course also some criticism about their approach. I have no idea how well it works out in reality, but given the school has grown quite a bit since founding, it's probably not too bad. Here is a little article about the school: https://www.zinmag.nl/zinmag-editie-03-2018/bij-agora-bepaalt-de-leerling-het-reisdoel-de-docent-de-weg-ernaartoe/ (it's in Dutch, but certainly one of our future AI-overlords can it translate it for the interested :)
The principles are sound, at least. In practice it will very depend on the teachers. We sent our daughter to a Buddhist school that seemed very child-centred. But her favourite teachers betrayed and traumatised her when she started struggling with aspects of school (due to, we found out later, undiagnosed autism) and a classroom assistant at that school was recently jailed for historic sexual offences against several of my daughter's classmates; her only memory has blankspots concerning him, so may not be good. Somehow even "good-seeming" schools can be places where great damage is done to children. And yes, damage is done to kids in the home as well, but I have yet to find a school that beats home education facilitated by loving involved parents.
You both bring up a lot of good points, and a lot here is dependent on parents or teachers being attentive and "good." It's hard to come up with a one size fits all approach! But I've added this to ideas we'll further discuss in our live call!
Elle, your questions are my questions. Let's see where this goes.
Can you please point to the specific part you disagree with and share why? These letters are an open discussion with an anarchist thinker with the goal of helping us all learn, and I'm not sure this comment contributes to that learning in any way?