WHERE HAVE ALL THE ELDERS GONE?

This is a long one but I need to get it out of my system. It sets the table for what’s to come. I hope you’ll join me or just know its here to refer back to in case you wonder what I’m rumbling about later on…

I am excited to share the ethos and vision of Wild Education. I'm itching to explore its impact for society at a threshold. But before I can dive into such topics, I feel that a little scene setting is in order. I must begin at the beginning and share the landscape (as I see it) so that W.E. can be situated properly in context. For the purposes of brevity, I am speaking in generalizations here—there's a lot of ground to cover. I'll dive into detail and nuance in future articles, but for now, I'm taking an aerial view, so I hope you'll bear with me as we go...

First off... Wild Education is not about to homeschooling. Though it’s not unrelated either. This is not for children, it’s about reclaiming the wonder of curiosity and weaving learning into the fabric of our lives both for our personal edification and growth and as a necessary bulwark against the onslaught of changes and confusion in our swirling world. It's about self leadership in a world that externalizes both decisions and blame. It is, in part, about maturing into a wisdom keeper.

It’s about the education of a society. What are we learning? How are we growing— or not growing?

Here we are…

In our society we’ve relegated learning to early life and largely handed it to institutions.

And those institutions are crumbling under the weight of “the culture wars”. I don’t often quote the Bible but it directly applies here, “raise up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he shall not depart from it.” To quote Aristotle, “Give me the child til the age of 7 and I’ll show you the man”. Humans have always known that early education is foundational to the thoughts and behaviors of an adult… and what is society but a group of adults bumping into one another?

Once we’re out in the world as adults the sentiment is that we’re fully baked and should just know how to proceed or figure it out. Perhaps we train for a new role, job, or career pivot but beyond that we should just know.

The online education industry is a symptom of our rapidly changing world. It’s set to top a gagillion dollars by 2030 (on track to triple to half a trillion dollars). There is so much to know in so many directions that we must always be learning or we risk being overwhelmed by all the changes we must navigate.

Our world is changing at an accelerated pace and with the birth of AI, it won’t be slowing down any time soon.

Our educational center is not holding.

Our politics is seemingly divided by ideology, but scratch barely beneath that surface and you find it divided along educational lines. "The gap in partisanship between college graduates and those without a degree has been wider than at any previous point in Pew Research Center surveys dating back to the 1990s."

In America, the party crying out to Make America Great Again has grown and claimed power. If we set aside the unspoken misogynist and racist implications for a moment and ask people what that means to them, overwhelmingly the response is a yearning for a simpler time when things were steady and certain in their collective memory.

Previous generations set in motion circumstances in climate, ecology, economics, government, and culture of which we are only beginning to understand and unpack the repercussions.

Our political center is not holding.

Where we once clung to religion or family we are now adrift. Organized religion is experiencing a precipitous decline. Where families once lived next door or at most across town, we’re now scattered to the four winds, requiring the occasional phone call and roadtrips or plane rides at holidays, if at all.

Marriage and birth rates are down across western developed nations for myriad reasons from difficulty finding a suitable mate, difficulty establishing financial security, uncertainty about the moral implications of bringing a child into such a fraught world, to climate insecurity and fears of war, to a generation of women who, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, have the option to not be property and a brood mare.

Our relationship center is not holding.

Our modern era is undeniably fraught, complex, rapid, uncertain, unpredictable, and overwhelming.

Disorders of anxiety and stress are pervasive. Life expectancy in western society took a step backwards for the first time in recent years.

In his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler warned in the 1970s that our future would begin to come at us too fast for us to absorb. The way he described it aligns with our modern understanding of trauma… too much, too fast, too soon.

Take that in for a moment; to exist in modern society is to experience trauma.

Our social center is not holding.

So far I haven’t told you anything you don’t already know or sense at all deep level.

I haven’t even gone into economics, ecology or a dozen other topics that are unclear or uncertain in these fraught times.

We are living in what polymath Daniel Schmachtenberger calls the Metacrisis. Where there’s not just one or two crises, but where everything is on effing fire. (I’m paraphrasing).

I say all of this not to frighten or alarm but to acknowledge the reality of the world in which we exist. To set the stage. To propose an approach that is not new but I believe must be revived and updated to meet our modern experience. If ever there was a time in which we collectively and individually needed wise guidance it is now. But for a myriad of reasons there's a dearth of leaders and guides. Ones that haven't been swept into the systems and structures that are actually problematic.

One main goal of Wild Education is to unpack and recreate systems without replicating the harms of the crumbling systems that brought us to this moment.

I’d like to take a moment to look back on earlier societies to see what we can learn from them and what patterns of cohesion we can learn from them to update and apply to our modern world.

I realize that to go back to small tribes living in huts and eating only what’s foraged, hunted, or grown is not feasible or desirable.

It’s the structure of their society that piques my interest.

There were defined stages of maturity. The children played and roamed freely until such time as they were ready to move into the next phase of maturity. At which point there was a rite of passage. They were set to some challenge where they shifted identity. On the other side they were recognized by the group in a new way— often with a new name.

The closest equivalent in our society is graduation. And yet, in our society graduates frequently report feeling lost, uncertain, and adrift upon graduating rather than emerging anew.

Mating and parenthood soon followed. This was less about love and our modern rom-com understanding of marriage and more about basic biology. It was natural to reproduce. And children weren’t viewed as the precious little beings they are now. They were respected as human lives… but bear in mind, to survive to adulthood was a gauntlet. They were an opportunity for the tribe to perpetuate. Everyone participated in their upbringing. “It takes a village”.

In our modern world, for a child to reach adulthood is an expectation not an achievement. One child equals one adult. Six children equals six adults. That was not always the stat.

And yet, in our society the responsibility is left largely to the parents alone. Grandparents are less and less involved as generations roll forward. Stranger danger has replaced a village mentality.

In preindustrial and ancient societies, work was for the young and wisdom was the role of the aged.

Those who raised their children imparted their knowledge to those who were in it. Those who lost their children shared their lessons of loss and grief.

The elders who had lived through the seasons freely shared their lessons with others… imparting lessons for everything from animal migration patterns for successful hunting to tool and weapon making to lessons of patience and persistence.

Our modern fears of being different and therefore rejected are rooted in the evolutionary fear of being rejected from the tribe. That meant almost certain death… not only because it’s hard to live life alone in the wilderness but because there’s so much you don’t know… and don’t know you don’t know.

I posit that it was the loss of elders that was the great danger in being expelled from the group. It was being cut off from the library of living knowledge that put you at greatest risk.

And we have lost our elders. Our society is structured that for the average person, once you’re done being productive you’re shuttled off to retirement in an RV and sent to wander or relegated to your flower garden until you eventually end up quarantined in a nursing home, away from society so they don’t have to face the specter of death they see in aged faces and rickety, hunched gaits.

To grow old is seen as a hazard. We have lost our collective reverence. It’s commonplace to take bottles of supplements and inject Botox to fend off aging. And we send away our aged members so we aren’t reminded of our eventual end.

There's also another aspect to consider here. As our life expectancy has increased over the generations and (in American at least) our work has shifted from physical to knowledge work, people are working later and later in life. The wisdom and institutional knowledge has afforded them an edge--a power they don't want to relinquish. An uncertain world pushes us towards wanting someone with age and experience to be in roles of leadership... a hint at our evolutionary desire and need for elders. But by leaving them in these leadership roles for the remainder of their lives we lose the knowledge transfer that we so desperately need.

It seems contradictory but it is true. We both discard and sequester our elderly while simultaneously leaving some few in positions of leadership without any plan to transfer the wisdom and insight they've gained to prepare or train a next generation to face cyclical challenges and adapt to the needs of those who will live to experience the consequences of their decisions.

We have lost our elders.

Thank you for being here and reading this far. I know it's a lot. My aim is not to overwhelm or be a doomsayer. My aim is to take stock of where we actually are... to be realistic about the challenges we are faced with each and every day. We can't hope to reimagine a new world unless we look at what has gone awry with the one that currently exists. We must face these challenges with courage and unflinching hope and optimism that we can learn the correct lessons as we endeavor to make society anew without replicating the harms of the past.

While not quick work, it is rewarding. I hope you'll join me in the endeavor.

Next I'll dive into the role of the elders... I'll meet you there.

With wild hope,

Laura