Rainy Day
"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, and you wake up in your bed, and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more."
-Morpheus speaking to Neo in the Matrix
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Ever since the Maine Environmental Educators Association conference last Friday, I've had more moral questions about working with the school system. I went to a workshop there taught by an instructor from the Maine Primitive Skills School and his philosophy was an inspiring call to the freedom of our birthright as tribal people (because if you go far enough back we were all tribal people) and a call to unlearning the destructive assumptions and lifeways of civilization. He sees, as I do, the ways in which the system is so utterly broken that nothing but a fresh start can really address the problem.
This workshop re-activated all my old convictions as an unschooler, an anarchist, a thruhiker, etc. And it has far reduced my patience for working on lesson plans, for including the Maine Learning Objectives, for sitting inside, for colluding with the school system in any way. Sure, the lesson plans I'm writing will provide a bright moment in the students' year, a moment to be outside, to engage in a different way, to feel the wind on their skin again. But it is such a small band-aid for a problem that is utterly systemic.
I feel like I'm sitting here with the Red Pill in the palm of my hand. Its been there for years. I've examined it, smelled it, even rolled it around on my tongue for months at a time, but I haven't swallowed it yet. I walk thought the Blue Pill world glimpsing shadows of the real world, like a double exposure hovering just beneath the surface. Continuing with business as usual, working within the system to create infinitesimal change, is this really enough?
Maybe if I could see the looks on the children's faces I would think it was. But sitting here at my desk, doubts creep in.
-Morpheus speaking to Neo in the Matrix
***********************************************************
Ever since the Maine Environmental Educators Association conference last Friday, I've had more moral questions about working with the school system. I went to a workshop there taught by an instructor from the Maine Primitive Skills School and his philosophy was an inspiring call to the freedom of our birthright as tribal people (because if you go far enough back we were all tribal people) and a call to unlearning the destructive assumptions and lifeways of civilization. He sees, as I do, the ways in which the system is so utterly broken that nothing but a fresh start can really address the problem.
This workshop re-activated all my old convictions as an unschooler, an anarchist, a thruhiker, etc. And it has far reduced my patience for working on lesson plans, for including the Maine Learning Objectives, for sitting inside, for colluding with the school system in any way. Sure, the lesson plans I'm writing will provide a bright moment in the students' year, a moment to be outside, to engage in a different way, to feel the wind on their skin again. But it is such a small band-aid for a problem that is utterly systemic.
I feel like I'm sitting here with the Red Pill in the palm of my hand. Its been there for years. I've examined it, smelled it, even rolled it around on my tongue for months at a time, but I haven't swallowed it yet. I walk thought the Blue Pill world glimpsing shadows of the real world, like a double exposure hovering just beneath the surface. Continuing with business as usual, working within the system to create infinitesimal change, is this really enough?
Maybe if I could see the looks on the children's faces I would think it was. But sitting here at my desk, doubts creep in.