As industrial civilization continues its descent; as unemployment expands over the next decade, perhaps to the point where jobs as we have known them no longer exist; as Peak Oil dictates dramatic constrictions in local and long-distance travel; as larger systems crumble and communities are forced to come together to save their local places or face extinction; as food production becomes intensely local, and as everyone is forced to downsize every aspect of life, we need to stop preparing youth for a world that no longer exists and start preparing them for a new economy and a new culture built around local cooperation and earth stewardship as opposed to global competition and endless growth.
Young people, and in fact all who are able, need to learn practical, tangible skills for navigating a post-petroleum, post industrial world. While many college-age people are opting to learn farming and food production skills, those represent only a handful of skills that will be needed in the Long Emergency. Training in natural healing, emergency response and first aid, permaculture principles of design, teaching basic education in home school or ad hoc settings, operating small businesses that serve and are supported by the local economy, metal and woodworking, electrical wiring and repair, bee keeping, ham radio operating, manufacture of clothing and shoes, water purification and storage, fuel storage, firearms and self-defense skills-all of these skills will be desperately needed in the future.
There is little time left to learn and hone these skills. Very soon they will be desperately needed, and few people will have them. For this reason, individuals of all ages would be wise to "graduate" from graduating from college and abdicate the American debt-dream in every aspect of life. However, if you are already in college and you feel compelled to graduate, and if doing so does not consign you to a life of debt servitude, by all means, complete your college journey. What matters most is that you do not become indebted and that you learn marketable skills that will embellish and fulfill your academic achievements-skills which will be saleable when jobs as we know them today no longer exist.
Training in skills marketable in the Long Emergency may require taking some college courses, but student loans and extraneous courses should be avoided. The problem is not college per se but the four-year college education pipe dream package which as the Long Emergency intensifies, delivers little except a very expensive ticket to nowhere.
In the 21st century, we are drowning in information, but dying of thirst for wisdom. I define wisdom as the ability to apply information holistically to one's life. It includes qualities such as discernment, far-sightedness, prudence, insightfulness, deliberation, tact, and frugality. It also includes intuition and the willingness to follow one's instincts even when they counter conventional wisdom.
I believe that the wisest, most astute, and most radical educator is nature. In The Great Work, Thomas Berry defines the ideal education as earth-centered and therefore "sensitizing of the human to those profound communications made by the universe about us, by the sun and moon and stars, the clouds and rain, the contours of the Earth and all its living forms."
World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms offers college-age youth accommodations, food, and opportunities to learn about organic farming. On and off-campus permaculture training opportunities abound throughout the world. Permaculture is both a science and a holistic perspective which can be applied to virtually any discipline or task on earth. As for acquiring other skills, any student motivated to learn specific skills needed in the Long Emergency can research opportunities to do so and weigh his/her options. Moreover, groups of individuals who have mastered certain skills have formed and are forming enterprises and education centers where they can cooperatively and profitably train others.
I see everywhere eruptions of Long Emergency education, but it is rarely found in corporatized institutions dependent on state funding and debt-dream dazed student consumers who subserviently think, live, and breathe inside the parameters dictated by industrial civilization. I am humbled and awed by the increasing numbers of college-age women and men I meet who are "graduating" from graduating from four years of college and a lifetime of unemployment and debt. The ivory tower is crumbling, but increasing numbers of innovative youth are constructing a new paradigm and new ways of utilizing their gifts. In the process they are redefining education and employment and revolutionizing our increasingly obsolete notions of what it means to become a "productive" citizen and an educated human being.
Last Updated ( Monday, 05 July 2010 )
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