Dancing in the Right Direction

I started an exciting new contract today and spent all day writing like a champion. I feel so invigorated and inspired after yesterday. For the second year in a row I volunteered at the local primary school for Art Attack day; just like sports day but for art, my sister Kate who also volunteered described it.

Just as it was last year, it was a great day of making, playing, dancing and singing. It was a great day but it was just one day. But why? Why is it that we still teach our kids the same things we learned and we learned the same things our parents learned? You'd think somewhere along the line we'd stop and think: Now hang on a second. We have fucked up the planet good and proper thinking this way, maybe it's time to teach our kids to think for themselves and to value what's vital, not what's going to get them a job in an economy that's sucking the world dry.

The other night in bed, PJ read me this passage from Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words:

A primary purpose of school – and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well – is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings – as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture – but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.

Art Attack day is a step in the right direction, but it's still one step forward in a straight line, when maybe what it needs to be is a dance.