The Stupidity of Thinking We Can One-Up Mother Nature

We often think of ourselves as being x years old, but that is only the age of the unique mind-body we call our "self." When considering the full miracle of existence, the fact that we are entities capable of the self-awareness to even consider such a calculation, it's more accurate, as neuroscientist Patrick House suggests, to consider that we are really our "age plus three billion years." 

Mother Nature has been growing her garden for a very long time and everything, including us, is the product of eons. 

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does." And that's because it doesn't seek to "manage" it's affairs, but rather to simply live, to pull sustenance from the soil and air, to photosynthesize, to grow and propagate, to change according to the seasons, to "listen," and to respond as well as possible to environmental changes both large and small. In other words, the tree isn't managing at all, but rather engaging in life itself.

Modern humans, as Shaw suggests, have a real problem with thinking we can somehow one-up Mother Nature. The most grotesque example is idea that we can somehow, through managed "breeding" (eugenics), create a race of super humans. At the most extreme are those who seek to create a "master race." Decent people are appalled at both their idea and their efforts to make it happen, of course, and cast them from our midst, but that doesn't stop the rest of us from thinking we are capable of improving upon nature through our "management."

Schooling is a case in point. For those billions of years (4.5 billion, in fact; I don't know where House got his 3 billion), humans have, like trees, educated ourselves through the process of life itself. And that's been more than enough, yet, in our hubris, we've created institutions that pretend to be an improvement upon the system by which the entire rest of the universe educates itself. Our species has evolved in a way that means our young are born too soon to fend for themselves without the support and protection of adults, that's true, but this responsibility is too often interpreted by us as a superiority that allows us to dictate to them. Most of our young now spend the first couple decades of their lives forcibly separated from life itself and are instead compelled to attend to our best guesses about what they will need to know in order function once we finally set them loose to finally engage with life itself. 

The argument most often put forward for why we must do this is that modern human society is too complicated and complex to leave them to their own devices. But that is to suggest, once more, that we've outdone Mother Nature. What arrogance. There is more complexity in a single leaf on a single tree than in all of our civilizations put together: that's what happens with a 4.5 billion year head start.

I'm sixty-three years old and, yes, those years of experience can prove useful to those with marginally less experience, but the moment I step outside of my responsibility to support and protect, I risk adding a dose of stupidity to nature's time-tested educational model.

Education isn't the only place where we try and fail to one-up Mother Nature. The treadmill is a poor replacement for Mother's Nature's fitness plan of life itself which challenges our bodies with terrain, weather, risk, and purpose, to move our bodies in novel, creative ways, with the full engagement of all of our senses. Our methods of manufacturing and distributing food is leaving us weak, hypertensive, and diabetic, when Mother Nature's nutritional plan for every other living things is the fruit-of-the-vine and fat-of-the-land. Social media is a poor, poor replacement for actual community. Recorded music is a far cry from making music ourselves. The farther we get from life itself, the more sickly, bored, and unhappy we become.

“Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change," writes Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "you just need to learn how to ask. I smile when I hear colleagues say 'I discovered X.' That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating knowledge.”

This is how the rest of Mother Nature learns. We aren't meant to waste our childhoods isolated within walls, attending to task-masters. Nature's curriculum wants us out there in the midst of life itself, actively engaged, and listening -- with our ears, eyes, bodies, hearts, and minds -- to those things that demand our attention and spark our curiosity, those very things that standard schooling labels as "distractions." Our school walls are there both literally and metaphorically to shut our children away from life itself, only accessible through pre-packaged lessons made from the dried husks of real things, sterilized and disconnected.

Yesterday, I read an article by an educator who was offended by someone who had called out standard schooling for its reliance on direct instruction, rote, and memorization (the treadmills of education: what schools use as a stand-in for actual thinking). He huffily defended this approach, insisting that brains first need a "stock of knowledge" from which to draw in order to ever think clearly. He's not wrong as far as that goes: experience is important to cognitive development, but the hubris is that he believes that his "stock of knowledge" and his coercive, tedious method of delivery is superior to that of life itself.

When we see our role as supporting and protecting children as they play, we are educating our children alongside, rather than in opposition to, Mother Nature. As the great John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

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