This is my favourite article Ive read in a long time. I had a whole lot of trouble choosing what quotes to pull from it! Its older, but I just love the important connections being made. In developed societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – education – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. We allow remote “experts” to dictate what we must learn, when we must learn it, and how we must learn it. We grant them the right to test us, to measure the contents of our brains and the value of our skills, and then to brand us in childhood with a set of numeric rankings that have enormous power over our future opportunities to participate in the economic and political life of our society. We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn. The crucial confusion here is between the idea of publicly supported education and the idea of centrally controlled state-administered education. To really get your hands around this distinction simply replace the word school with the word radio in the following sentences and see what you get: I am in favor of publicly supported radio. I am in favor of centrally-controlled state-administered radio. Not the same thing, are they? And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures? If the internet is the collective intelligence of human beings connecting across the dimension of digital space, then indigenous wisdom is the collective intelligence of human beings connecting across the dimension of time. Every ecosystem in the world at one time had a people who knew it with the knowledge that only comes with thousands of years of living in place. A tribal person in New Guinea can still identify 70 species of birds by their songs; a shaman in the Amazon can identify hundreds of species of plants and which preparations will enhance their chemical potency in the human body; a traditional Polynesian navigator can detect an island miles beyond the horizon by a pattern in the waves and the behavior of birds. This kind of knowledge seems almost supernatural to a modern person stumbling noisily through the forest; but it’s not supernatural. It is human intelligence honed over millennia, through unimaginably vast numbers of individual observations, experiments, reflections, intuitions, refinements of art and experience and communication. It is the indigenous equivalent of a spacecraft sent to Mars; it is human intelligence shaped and perfected and then shot like an arrow, like a ray of light, deep into the heart of nature.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 17:07:28 +0000
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