Telling and Doing

While reading Gary Snyder's book of essays, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (1995), I happened on one called "Amazing Grace," in which he talks about two kinds of learning: hearsay and experience.

The essay was originally written as the preface for Donald Philippi's translation of Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu (an aboriginal tribe in Japan). Snyder's primarily interested in the role of the oral tradition in preliterate societies, noting that it is "not memorized but remembered" (his emphasis) and thus that

. . . every telling is fresh and new, as the teller's mind's eye re-views the imagery of origins or journeys or loves or hunts. Themes and formulas are repeated as part of an ever-changing tapestry composed of both the familiar and the novel. Direct experience, generation by generation, feeds back into the tale told.

This "together hearing" partakes of both aspects of learning, bringing hearsay into the realm of experience, in the context of the group of listeners.

Of course, in many such societies, myth and "actuality" also meld, so that "myth" doesn't mean "lie" as it does in the technologized West. It's part of experience in that it helps a people understand who they are, how they became, and how they are related to the space they occupy. The process is, in fact, far more intellectually challenging, I think, than the kind of rote learning we teach our kids: memorize "facts" out of "textbooks" removed from history and experience and unrelated to what we do, except by some theoretical thread that asserts: "You'll need this in the real world."

In fact, mythically grounded people often seem to be much more learned about their environments and their traditions than we in the ultra-modern world are. I frequently ask my students how many of them could survive for two weeks in the wild, how many know anything about local flora, how many have ever seen the Milky Way or would recognize it if they did. Every time I ask, one or two answer positively, down from five or six a decade ago. While more of them seem to understand why we should recycle, and why fossil fuels are problematic, few of them understand the underlying problems themselves very deeply. Throwing plastic bottles into a recycle bin, and turning thermostats up in the summer and down in the winter are about as far as the real recognition goes.

Any education for the future must, therefore, involve re-familiarizing children (and all students) with the natural world. If we keep losing the connection--covering up experience with cloaks of synthetic fabrics or artificial heating and cooling--we lose one of our most important ways to learn. Not only that, but hearsay can't fill in the gaps, because the tellers have already removed themselves from first-hand experience. They've been driving cars and air conditioning their homes all their lives. One would hope that there have been a few camping experiences or walks on the beach, but in our increasingly urbanized and sub-urbanized environments, even those experiences are becoming less frequent.

One of my fondest memories when my son was young was a week-long stint as a counselor at an outdoor camp run by the school district. In order to make sure that he got to go, I volunteered to herd seven prepubescent boys through the week's activities, and to share a screened in cabin (open to all the elements but bugs) with them. For the entire time we walked everywhere, ate minimally prepared foods, picked apart owl pellets, swam in a lake, and learned about the prairie environment we all inhabit. There was more of it then, but the children came away with a much stronger physical sense of where they lived then. I hope it's still with them, as it is with me--but only a select few got to enjoy the experience, and I'm not sure it's still available to kids today.

Gas prices are currently limiting car travel, which in most cases is a good thing--but the situation is also driving more children into movie theaters and air-conditioned game rooms during the summers instead of allowing their parents to take them on camping trips or visits to national parks (like the one to Yellowstone I got to take with my grandparents when I was about seven). People's lives are now generally more crammed with work and scheduled activities as well, which diminishes the time kids can spend out of doors simply goofing off. And very few children have even the foggiest idea of where their food comes from, because they've never had a real garden--or if they did, it was filled with flowers and ornamental shrubs for reasons of property values.

I think this is why efforts like that of Alice Waters's Edible Schoolyard program are so encouraging. If more children are provided with opportunities for first-hand experience in learning vital skills and ways of living, they will encourage their parents to do so as well. Just as the neighborhood kids in my town are significantly responsible for increasing their folks' participation in local recycling efforts, kids who learn about food production and growing processes can help re-introduce their families to traditions and values that are falling by the way as we insulate ourselves more and more from the natural world.

There's even a neologism that covers the phenomenon: Nature Deficit Disorder. Gardening is a great remedy for the affliction, and I can't think of anywhere better to start than by looking into what Alice Waters is doing, and taking a look at the gardening-with-children segments of the Heirloom Gardner blog.

If our kids can gain experience in providing real basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, and community, they will learn more from acquiring the skills involved (such as soil preparation, cultivation, plant recognition, measuring and building, cooking, sewing) than they can from reading even the best textbooks in math and science. If they can learn to explore their own backyard environment, and spend some time looking at the night sky (both with the naked eye and with with tools such as binoculars and telescopes), they will be far richer than if some textbook author predigests the information for them and they have to spit facts back on a test.

Here's my homework assignment: invite Grandma or Grandpa or Great Aunt Matilda (or an elderly neighbor if you don't have grandparents handy) to dinner, and urge him or her to tell your children what it was like when they were little. Ask them what kinds of stories their parents told them, and what big events occurred when they were young. This probably won't work with your jaded teenagers, but the ten- and eleven-year-olds I shepherded through a week of outdoor learning were wide open for experiences and stories. There will never be a better time to start opening them up to different, more enriching possibilities.

And then, go out and plant a garden.

Image credits: John Everette Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh, 1870 (Tate Museum). Raphael depiction of the original bard, Homer, from the Parnassus, in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. Both from Wikimedia Commons.