Toward A More Meaningful Life

  

“School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff school teachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.” - from John Taylor Gatto’s article, “Against School,”  in the September 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Have you ever read The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the novel by Daniel Defoe, published in 1719? This novel is about a young man who decided to go off on his own adventure, against all advice from everyone, and who used his wits and his own genius to survive, ultimately learning how to have a more meaningful life. 

Project Gutenberg offers this book for free to all readers in its online e-book editions of Robinson Crusoe’s tale. Take the time to browse Project Gutenberg to see all the free e-books you can read from this wonderful source. Yes, our libraries are finally opening a bit. I just received notice that a book I had reserved is available for pick-up. I must phone ahead and give the library branch a time when I will show up to pick up my book. So we can get books from the library. But I have also taken advantage of the many e-resources available from the library and from other online sources. Project Gutenberg has been around since 1971 “to encourage the creation and distribution of e-books.” If you and your family have not used this wonderful resource, please take the time to explore Project Gutenberg and select a book or two that might enhance this period of COVID-19 confinement we are all enduring. 

Perhaps your family would enjoy reading Robinson Crusoe’s tale together. From this reading, family members could create projects that relate to the many survival skills the character Robinson Crusoe faced during his journey. Some students who like writing might enjoy creating their own survival adventure tale. And families might find other good books that tell similar tales. One that my daughter especially liked was Never Cry Wolf!, an semi-autobiographical novel by Farley Mowat. This story is based on a true experience by the author, a Canadian naturalist assigned by the Canadian Wildlife Service to investigate why wolves were killing arctic caribou. Mowat lived in the arctic tundra alone and recorded what he observed while he studied the wolf population and while he faced his own journey of self-discovery. 

“Never Cry Wolf!,” is available as a book or as a movie from the library, as is “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.” I enjoyed reading these books first, then after finishing each book and exploring a variety of learning projects based on the books, watched the film version. You might want to reverse this, but both the films and the books provide plenty of possibilities for learning projects for students of different ages and different interests.  You might find other books and movies that spark the same kind of interest in your families.

Another book and series of films that deals with this same theme is “Alone In The Wilderness,” the story of Dick Proenneke’s years spent living alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Dick filmed his adventures so he could show his relatives in the lower 48 states what life was like in the Alaskan wilderness. These were made into a book and a series of PBS films covering how Proenneke hunted, fished, built his own cabin entirely by himself, and how he explored the area surrounding his cabin. These films and Proenneke’s book are available from the library and you can also find segments of them on YouTube. 

I hope these will inspire some to explore these and similar stories about what can happen when individuals face being alone in challenging situations. Perhaps some will discover that the pandemic, though it has brought hardship to many, has also provided us all with the opportunity to face being alone and how we might find a more meaningful life from these types of explorations. 

Norma Curry

Co-founder of Education Without School

 

Resources:

“Against School” by John Taylor Gatto, as published in the September 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

https://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

The Gutenberg Project, free to read e-book of Robinson Crusoe:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/521/521-h/521-h.htm

“Alone In The Wilderness,” on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss

Rotten Tomatoes review of “Never Cry Wolf”:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/never_cry_wolf