Civilization: the building of a school ecology
Let's conduct an experiment. A thought experiment. You're going to be on your own in the wild for the foreseeable future. What is the one skill that you would like to have mastered in order to help you survive? It can be assumed that you have very modest other skills, even if you don't have much time for their application. When I pose this question to students, most answer either hunting or fishing, maybe a few suggest gathering, with the common purpose being the acquisition of immediate calories. Then we imagine that a second person is going to join you. What skill would you like them to have? Again, most think food but shift to long-term production: a farmer. We continue, with skills for the next memebers of our budding society being homebuilder (carpenter), doctor, tailor, tool maker, shepherd, and then quickly gettting into either redundancy of food production or perhaps variety or specificity. Play this game with yourself, your students, your family, a...