There was a proposal at one time shared widely in education, that children should be encouraged to grow through all the earlier stages of human development as a means of fully grasping technology, and as a means of understanding human culture and each other. G. Stanley Hall was one of the proponents of this. The idea was that the development of the individual would best parallel the development of human culture. With that proposal having been ignored in most schooling for the last century you can look around and discover for yourself that many folks are "out of touch." I had written about cultural recapitulation theory in education at an earlier point in the blog. And so it may make some sense for new readers to dig back into the whole of this blog from its early days.
It makes even more sense to dig into the early culture of man so that we may know where we came from AND sense the vector of human destiny. Are we to be disembodied observers of man (unnamed) on a youtube channel, or are we to become more? Can we move from passivity to action and evolution? Here I'm not proposing adoption of new technologies, but that we use skill and craftsmanship consciously to reshape the human spirit.
It does not surprise me that modern man would be fascinated by the ancestral means through which the human species developed. Various episodes of Primitive Technology have been viewed over 5 million times. We have a longing, particularly in this age of abstraction, to sense our origins asconcrete relationships to the environment. The question remains, however, whether we will be voyeurs of reality or engage in our own concrete creativity.
Today I have a Xmas holiday sale of work at Lux Weaving Studio from 4-8 PM, 18 White St. Come see me. Buy books and buy work.
Make, fix, create, and encourage others to discover the joy and effectiveness of learning likewise.
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