Harry Potter: A Hero for our times

Harry Potter is written in modern times but it's actually a very old story.

In the series the hero, Harry and company live in the 1990s and yet the themes that infuse these books come from out of a chivalrous past (chivalry being the hall mark of the Gryffindor House to which Harry belongs at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry).

Loyalty, bravery, sacrifice, taking responsibility and self discipline are other significant themes. Lots of qualities that are not given much value in our harried times. An old fashioned love of family. Have you noticed there are no single parents, no divorced couples? Interesting. People get married very young, don't they and they stick together.

Again and again, i have to remind myself that these characters are modern day folk.
Yet they write to one another other on pieces of parchments- not though text messaging, or email-how intimate.
They live in community, the sort that is sustainable,vibrant, exciting and diverse- where all kinds of witches and wizards mingle with other magical beings.
Take the vibrant and colourful streets of Diagon Alley or Hogsmead.The author, J K Rowling glories in the eccentric, reveling in their differences and distinctions. The environment is one in which young people aspire to become like their elders-full fledged powerful adults with real skills to offer rather than the adults striving to be like the young .

The teachers are mentors, teaching kids things they need to know in order to become wizards. They look up to them because they need them- the expectations are clear.

In our Muggle (non magical) world on high speed everything, children sense our utter confusion as adults. They know that we do not know where we are heading. When it comes to technology our kids often know more than we do!

Is it any wonder that the appeal of Harry Potter and co is so magical? Old and young alike, we seem to be pinning for this stuff-lapping up the books and movies hungrily.
It's the need again for purpose in our lives, for excitement and yes, danger.
Confronting fear, overcoming challenges and 'keeping going' when the going gets tough.
I often think about climate change and it's repercussions as the big 'Voldermort' of our time. That's the darkness we have to challenge, younger and older alike.
Voldermort is a metaphor for the evil that is overtaking the world. Minister Fudge is ever in denial- a parody of what many people today cannot face; he refuses to believe Voldermort has risen. We refuse to believe climate change is here.
Will we be the brave wizards and witches that confront climate change? Will there be leaders like Harry; wedded to Voldermort as we are to climate change- we caused it-willing to turn it around?
Who will sacrifice herself or himself as Snape does? Who will be prepared to go to the end; to die as Hary was prepared to do in order for others to have a viable future?
These are the values that live on and that many of us long for-instead of consumerism and greed,peer pressure and entertainment land.
The world needs more Dumbledores, more Herminones more Rons. And we could use a Harry-every movement loves a hero.

Jesus Camp

We watched a very disturbing documentary this weekend about the rise of Conservative Christian Fundamentalism in contemporary USA.

The documentary portrayed children from the ages of about 4 to around 13 at a summer camp called Kids on Fire that has as it's goal the creation of a children's army for God. Kids that young are asked to pledge to fight abortion! They are clearly being traumatized by being told they are sinful and that they are hypocrites that must be made pure and holy in Jesus. They babble away in tongues following the example of the fanatical Pentecostal pastor, Becky Fischer (undoubtedly, she would have been a witch hunter in past centuries). She mentions in passing that had Harry Potter been in the Bible he would "have been put to death," because all warlocks are evil." This women is totally cracked but the influence she has over the children is petrifying.
What is really scary is that the parents support this abuse; and get this. In the US 75% of homeschooling families are Evangelical Christians!!
What really caught my attention was the fervor and passion of these kids. It shows us that kids want a purpose in life. The want to feel useful. They want their lives to have meaning. They deserve that with out all this cruel, disgusting crap.

The Real World?

What is this?

I was at the doctor's office with B leafing through a recent Mcleans Magazine article while we waited to be called in.

The article was about how a survey conducted by UK National Trust, a conservation agency, revealed that of 1,651 children aged 10 to 12, half could not tell the difference between a bee and a wasp, and only 47 per cent could recognize a barn owl.

Only 53 per cent were able to recognize an oak leaf. But what could they recognize easily? Nine out of 10 could identify Star Wars characters like Yoda and Jar Jar Binks. It's just as bad over here in North America, the article went on. A study showed that kids were cognizant of up to 1000 corporate logos but couldn't even identify 10 common backyard plant and animals.

And to think, some people get all uptight about home educated kids because "how will they manage in the real world?"

The real world being ..what? Corporate America? Let's just say that world is not the real world folks. Wrong. The real world is the world that we stand on; that we breath in, that we eat from. This real world is fast becoming inhabitable for many of the real inhabitants (animals, plants and people) because of the very real nasty things we do to it. That's the world we need to attend to.

Yes, home educated kids do get inundated with corporate culture and its artificially created desires, wants and needs. No one is safe from that far reaching and damaging grasp.
All we can do is continue working hard to keep the real world Earth in full view.

Words of Wisdom

We have a friend who keeps First Peoples' wisdom coming to us via e-mail. He must get them of a website himself. Anyway, these nuggets of gold in the form of 'Elder's mediations' often suffice for part of the day anyway, to keep me remembering what I already know but regularly forget- and rarely act on.


Elder's Meditation of the Day

"No individual or group can block
another individual's path or change it
against what fits his nature and his
purpose. It might be done for a time, but
in the end it won't work out."


Rolling Thunder, CHEROKEE


Every person is born for a purpose. We may know our purpose very early in our lives, or it
may take us some time. Very often we need to experience many things before our purpose is
clear to us. Sometimes we pick our goals to please others. Sometimes others pick our goals
to make themselves happy. Often this makes us unhappy. We need to pray to the Creator
and ask Him what our purpose is. When we live outside our purpose, our path is full of
obstacles. When we live inside our purpose, our path is smooth. When we are aligned to
our purpose, we are happy and content.

Great Spirit, whisper to me,in terms I can understand, what You would have me do and I will do it.

Open Source Learning

You can not teach a person anything. You can only help him find it within himself.
Galileo Galilei

Philosopher and historian Ivan Illich defined school almost forty year ago as "an age-specific, teacher related process requiring full time attendance at an obligatory curriculum." Not a very flattering definition, but honest none the less.

Despite heroic attempts to create 'stimulating educational environments' plastering walls with colourful illustrations and graphs ('teacher/expert approved' naturally), even though we scramble to provide classrooms with computers, spend millions on revised text books and curriculum, and introduce novel concepts such as 'citizenship education,' education is still about getting schooled rather than getting educated.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste le meme. The more things change the more they stay the same. We're still acting as if a young person is an empty vessel to fill.

Worse, our micro-managing of children's time can lead to intellectual timidity, over-cautiousness, fearfulness and lack of entrepreneurship.

This in the face of all the knowledge we have gained concerning how the human brain works.

"Genius is as common as dirt," is one of my favourite quotes by former teacher and author John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and The Underground History of American Education).

But six hours a day, five days a week, most weeks of the year for twelve years spent warming the old school bench does little to support individual talents. It's a sobering thought to think we might be "educating people out of their creativity." (Sir Ken Robinson).

Kids know they can do better than this. We know they can.

Thankfully people are doing something about it. They're putting aside the cookie cutter, one size fits all, standardizing, compartmentalizing, institutionalizing approach in favour of ways of learning through living and doing.

Proponents advocate mentoring self-directed, interest-based learning, initiative taking, questioning and inquiry in contrast to the inane habit of force feeding curriculum on schedule; the doling out of information in small portions less, God forbid the child become ignorant in one area and too knowledgeable in another.

Nobody can know everything- and as knowledge is forever changing the important thing is to know how to learn. As educator and author John Holt wrote "the true measure of intelligence is not what you know but what you do when you don't know something."

What needs nurturing is the intrinsic motivation to learn; it's already in born. Does a gardener keep uprooting the plant to measure and test how much it's grown? Rather than hindering and bothering young people with grading and testing, allow them accessibility to the community's resources.

In a nut shell the kind of education that's stirring in the Zeitgeist, that's taking hold of the imagination is called open source learning.

We have heard of the concept 'open source' in internet circles; anything can be learned over the internet. There is a new openness to educational resources; for example MIT (Open CourseWare) is now offering up to 1800 on line course materials for free - their motto being "unlocking knowledge, empowering minds."

Open source learning as coined by Taylor Gatto is based on extending this idea to all learning, to everyone. The underlying premises of open source learning is that learning is available everywhere in life and not restricted to 'places of learning'-namely schools.

Resources are every where to be found in the day to day world; people, art galleries and science centres, businesses, professional schools, museums, community centres,libraries, the internet, and so on. Much learning happens incidentally and by doing; through games, work, and living. You learn fractions by cooking, history by watching movies, writing by reading books.

Forget Montessori versus Waldorf or homeschooling versus private school. Rather think of it as an alternative vision of the pursuit of knowledge and education. Much deeper than simply another novel way of doing business, it is a different business all together. Open source learning is a shift in consciousness- a fresh wind that is sweeping out the old ideas of what, how and when one should learn.

Questions arise that challenge the entire concept of education at it's roots; whose education anyway? Do we even have the right to impose on another human being our own ideas (the states ideas, the religious establishments ideas...) of what another person should learn? Crazy? Going too far? Still it goes to the roots of freedom. And it's happening the world over.

As John Gatto says, "Nobody can give you and education. You have to take an education." And that means taking here, there everywhere from the world around us, according to what we are interested in, passionate about and not what some one prescribes for us.

"We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."