#6 Faith in a Seed, Hope for the Next Generation

 Inspired by John Dewey and Henry David Thoreau, Matt Schlein, outdoor educator and founder of The Willowell Foundation and the Walden Project in Monkton, Vermont, calls out the many ways the indoor classroom-model of education fails all who participate in it, particularly students, and calls for alternatives that are alive with hope, compassion, wisdom, and respect for integrity of all who engage the educational enterprise.

In Schlein's words, "We need young people to feel hope, instead of the quiet desperation that pervades their daily experience. We need systems that go eyeball to eyeball with the challenges of this moment, responding with compassion and wisdom. We need to delight in this creation, to ask why, to dream, to create, and to envision a future replete with possibilities and hope."

Visit https://doi.org/10.57968/Middlebury.27655089 to read this pamphlet.

Visit https://www.newperennials.org/ for more information.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Welcome to Radical Pamphlets Here and Now, an audio production of the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College. For centuries, pamphlets were utilized to demand reform, equality, and justice. Sadly, it is the necessary work that must be taken up with every new generation. Our pamphlets are rooted in the local and written by teachers, farmers, students, artists, community caretakers, and neighbors. They offer common sense and practical advice to slow down and attend to the here and now wherever you are. Enjoy.

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Faith in a seed, hope for the next generation. Written and read by Matchline.

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There is more day to dawn. Thoreau famously observed, surely joy is the condition of life. While this may be true, discerning this amidst the 21st century proves no easy task. Time and again we eskew joy, preferring order, predictability, memes, and likes on our social media posts. In our quest for attention and linear perspective with a clear beginning, middle, and end, we forsake surprise, mystery, and wonder. Nowhere is this calculus so evident than in our public school system. Following the dictates of authority, we allow our minds and bodies to be subjugated over and over to a thousand indignities, great and small. To be docile and compliant in this system gets you rewards, commendations, and badges of merit. To question this, however, leads to marginalization and demerits, as well as a reputation that follows you around like a dark cloud. Hiding behind the word education, the hyper-regulated panopticon called public school rarely finds place for creative free thinking. Our world is hurting. Suffering in some form is revealed at every turn, and yet we are trapped on the wheel of endless pain, in part because of our slavish devotion to outdated systems, conceived to efficiently sort workers and managers, preparing them for the futures of factory life. Meanwhile, millions of youngsters suffer silently, enduring their schooling with anguish, ennui, and confusion, being told it is an essential truth to forsake your own idiosyncratic and singular heart, or else face a path of alienation. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than four in ten students felt persistently sad or hopeless, and nearly one-third experienced poor mental health. In 2021, more than one in five students seriously considered attempting suicide, and one in ten actually attempted it. We do the same thing to the caring teachers who populate these systems, where 57% who enter the profession leave within five years. The schools are a cauldron of anxiety and discontent. And so? We birth generations of anxious conformists, unable to think their way out of the challenges manifest on the micro and macro levels. And yet it is this desire to listen to the suggestion of one's genius in spite of external messages saying otherwise, that allows for a hope and possibility which truly honors our place within the cosmos. And where better to start than with the younger generation? These times call for the authentic, vibrant, and real. I want this truth proclaimed to everyone. I want to shake the tree, wake up the synambulent. I want to remind them of the truth in the tint of light on an October afternoon, or the prisms on a drop of dew, or the spider web at dawn in a meadow on a summer day, reminding us of the vast web of interconnection which binds us to the creation. I want people to remember their place in our culture involves more than their social security number. I want to tell this to everyone who strives to be the most authentic version of themselves. Victory, defeat, success, failure. Our lives are bigger than these false binaries. I have been in the trenches of public education for the last 30 years, 24 of them as an educator in the peripatetic Thorovian tradition. I have eskewed comfort and predictability in the name of adventure and challenge. I've walked side by side with hundreds of adolescents groping for meaning and place in an apathetic world. I have been a gadfly who encourages my students to think for themselves, to realize that knowledge is not bound in a book or a lesson plan with handouts and defined learning outcomes. Rather, it lives when curious minds awaken to the complexities and dimension of being alive in this particular chapter, and our current journey to find balance and harmony within the larger ecological whole. Knowledge is everywhere if we're l willing to look. As the aphorism says, you can't hide from the truth because the truth is all there is. The laughter, the smiles, the questions, the looks of wonder, the smell of wood smoke, the voice of a student reading their original poetry, discovering the power of their voice. These are the outcomes I seek. I contrast this with the sterility of the climate-controlled box with fluorescent lights and rows that mirror the power dynamics being imposed again and again. I see works of art, photography, essays inspired by a connection with something more than just power, control, and petty hierarchies that justify themselves with assessments that fragment meaning rather than co-create. These responses are rejoiners to the systems of control, the hierophants of predictability who gladly sacrifice life force for a checked-off box. I want to suggest that more is possible, that conformity and consumption lead to sterility and stayed mediocrity. We need people to dream about brighter roads where success is measured in smiles and heart spaces. We need the broken systems to be identified for what they are and to cede ground to a new way of being that respects the integrity of the individual and the world that they inhabit. We need young people to feel hope instead of the quiet desperation that pervades their daily experiences. We need systems that go eyeball to eyeball with the challenges of this moment, responding with compassion and wisdom. We need to delight in this creation, to ask why, to dream, to create, and to envision a future replete with possibilities and hope. To quote John Dewey, education is not preparation for life. Education is life itself.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

To learn more about the New Perennials Project at Middlebury College, visit NewPerennials.org, where you can download free versions of all of our books, pamphlets, and educational materials. Special thanks to audio engineer Johnny Melli and to our authors and readers. Music composed and performed by Caitlyn Miss Adams. Introductory narration by Caitlyn Miss Adams. You can contact us at newprennials at middlebury.edu. Thanks for listening.