We Don't Need Them

Adventures in Unlearning at Swaraj University in Udaipur

Last week I met one of my long-time hero’s. It forced from within an arising of nostalgic reflection. I recalled those glorious naive early days when all I cared about was snowboarding and seeking adventure. I was traveling regularly through the developing world then. My well-intended Christian upbringing, mixed with my nations patriotic tendencies to police the world had seeded in me the desire to “help” those I deemed less fortunate than me. It seemed logical from my comfortable vantage point that education was how I could best assist in empowering those whom I perceived to be poor while backpacking through “exotic” regions of the world with my fancy REI attire in an endless effort to “discover myself”. Me, being a good-hearted white man possessing a U.S. Passport had been so (hashtag)blessed. I wanted to do the right thing and return the favor. So I began generously teaching english regularly in various regions of the world in an effort to help people learn how to access what I was able to experience. Ah, but all that saving the world gets exhausting after a while! So I was taking a break from voluntourism one winter in the elite resort town of Telluride, Colorado when, as fate would allow, I stumbled into Mountainfilm and came across a handful of people there who would forever change my life, namely, Wade Davis, Vandana Shiva, Helena Norberg-Hodge and the visionary man I finally met in person last week, Manish Jain. And the blissful bubble of innocent arrogance thus popped.

Manish Jain

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The only one I actually met in the flesh that fine day was the legendary ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who I was fortunate to have several lengthy conversations with then regarding the ways in which we travel, how we perceive other cultures and what is at stake as we move ever deeper into modernity and further away from the light at the edge of the world. The others I met via film. Thank god for film! How fortunate we are for this fantastic medium powerful enough to transport us, right from our own living rooms to the most seemingly remote corners of the world and gain an alternate perspective.

The film was entitled Schooling the World, produced by Carol Black. It elegantly critiqued the dangerous consequences of offering aid and education in the curious way such seemingly noble efforts are understood by affluent nations of the so-called “developed” world to places that navigate from an entirely different place of origin and as such require an altogether alternate means by which to make since of the world we live in and how to coexist with the ecosphere, both in terms literal and mythical.

The movie struck a chord in me that vibrates still. I have shared this film with nearly every group of students I have worked with since. How desperate the need to examine how we define “help” and “education”! How arrogant to ever think that another people aren’t educated in the first place! If we wish to truly offer aid, it behooves us to humbly ask ourselves, how genuinely beneficial is “western education” when virtually all its means and outcomes result in atrophy of the senses and a violently unreciprocated excavation of both earth and culture? And furthermore, even if these efforts didn’t cause irreparable damage to the environment and traditional understandings, can they actually offer the “upper mobility” they claim to provide anyway? Think about it. Have you ever actually bent over and tried to “pick yourself up by the bootstraps”? It can’t be done.

Every scene in the movie humbled the hell out of my naïve albeit good-intended, white-savior ass. But one scene in particular shattered me. In this scene Manish was sharing how he spoke with his grandmother, whose traditional education was quickly become an endangered artifact. She felt embarrassed and “backwards”, convinced as she was by modernity that she was “uneducated” that all she knew about was mere plants and how to cook and how to spin cotton and weave clothes; simple peasant handicraft works, nothing useful. She felt ashamed and stupid. I felt like a lightning bolt had incinerated my heart.

But what is more important that the skills grandmother had? What happens to the person who knows nothing of the natural world, who has invested all their time into understanding elite concepts but cannot cook one simple meal? What of the man with the fancy degree from Harvard (incidentally Manish himself, a recovering academic, holds a degree from the revered university) who knows not how to spin sheep’s wool into thread and from it weave a sweater? What happens thus when the global economy fails, the pandemic has us all in lock-down and winter comes? Does modern education inform us of plants offered freely around us all that can provide us with the medicine we need to heal? How to prepare them? How to keep them alive? Are we adequately aware of what reeds can be turned into flutes which can offer us joy in times of great despair? Do we even know how to play a musical instrument anymore?? Or do we only listen to Spotify? Who among us has learned how to commune with the more-than-human world well enough to properly interpret dreams? Who among us, the well-educated ones of this brave new world who are so excited about what AI has to offer, have even been taught to but fathom the possibility of possessing such advanced skillsets as navigating via stars and subtle winds? Turns out it may not be the poor villagers who are the uneducated ones.

The caravan I am now riding with via bus through the mighty Subcontinent of India made its way from Jaipur to Udaipur where we were met warmly by Manish and his family at Swaraj University last week. This kindhearted man who has made such a great impact on me over the years, who has worked for many of the most powerful organizations in the world could have easily had us all kow-towing at his feet (which is indeed very common throughout Asia) but instead, upon our arrival to his home, he literally washed our feet and thanked us one by one for being exactly who we are. After which his community invited us into their humble kitchen and fed us a warm meal. It was obvious he has been doing a lot of unlearning over the years, and for the better.

I was deeply touched. Even now, as I recall that evening, I hold back tears. Here was this man who I have held on a great pedestal for over two decades, sitting on the ground before me, rubbing my dirty, tired feet with essential oils. Imagine if Trump, Modhi, Musk or Zukerberg greeted people this way. How different the world be if our leaders were actively humble! How different the world would be if we were too. What would society look like if we re-imagined education and saw each unique pathway as equally valid, the goal of education being to birth wisdom and compassion in a regenerative way?

Keshav Chander Jaini, an elder in our caravan community, a legendary master of proper waste management (a subject everyone should be fluent in) from Delhi, in the “classroom” at Swaraj University.

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Manish is one of the co-founders of the Ecoversities Alliance, a global network of visionary dreamers actively engaged in changing what it means to learn. In addition to his work with Swaraj university, Manish is also the coordinator and co-founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development as well as numerous other projects focused on reorienting how we define what education is for. Within this vast, growing net of interrelated, decentralized centers for what he calls “unlearning”, marginalized members of the world are being invited back into the dialogue regarding how we address many of the worlds biggest challenges.

Farmversities, another project branching from the seed of Swaraj, centers around farming itself as a form of higher education and regards indigenous woman in particular as the most advanced in this specialized field. It should seem obvious enough that those who live with the land intimately would know the most about it, yet modern education strangely doesn’t view it this way, opting to have people who have virtually no interaction with the natural world oversee some of the worlds most vital ecological decisions. The result of such backwards thinking makes me strongly reconsider which nations are indeed “underdeveloped”. Strange days we live in. Days that require a wildly different kind of education, or rather, a return to the type of education that has traditionally been lived into experientially for most of human herstory.

For the two decades since first seeing that film, I have been unpacking what I learned from it about how we travel and how those of us who seek to do good in the world need to, arguably more than anyone else, take a long hard look at our inherited privileges and re-examine what it means to be of service. Some of you may have read my piece “Hiraeth: Confessions of an Educational Hitman”, a piece (soon to be a book, gods willing) that began looking at my personal journey into this riddle, how for me it was ultimately an encounter with my Thai wife’s mother, in her native Utturadit village, that had me come face to face with how ultimately unuseful most of my fancy education was for facing the genuine challenges of these post-apocalyptic times. Whereas my wife’s mom, having never gone to school, knew how to do all necessary things well, and did so with great elegance, always with a calm grace. She is free in a way most in this hyper modern world can only dream of. Her education was delivered to her not from a classroom but from a long lineage of grandmothers, rivers, starry nights, monsoon seasons, Grief, long walks in the forest, learning how to keep a machete sharpened and knowing how to use it wisely.

I spent several months by her side during the COVID lockdown, just after the birth of my beautiful daughter. She did not depend on anything from the city that entire time. She was educated in the ways of the forest and as such the challenges faced by those who have adopted a more modern, city life did not affect her(us) at all. We never went without food or medicine, shelter or clothing that entire time. Furthermore, we lived comfortably, shrouded in beauty, and did so with ample time to rest. It was one of the most peaceful times of my life.

We only had a few days with Manish last week, as our caravan has a lofty goal of visiting nearly 20 ecovillages over the course of 4 weeks, but in those three action packed days my understanding of our human capacity expanded considerably. We are taught that we have a lack of virtually everything, that we need to invest more in the economy, to devote all our energies to a certain type of top-down thinking, to pursue careers in the business-as-usual realm and place our trust in advanced technologies. Yet as we interacted with “uneducated” artisans, farmers, healers, chefs, community organizers, musicians, etc., many of whom are members of the so-called “untouchable” caste in the Swaraj ecoverse, it became clear that this type of thinking is the result of modernities grand plan to keep the masses disempowered and increasingly dependent on the state, all the tragic result of a deliberate intergenerational effort by the colonizers of the world to keep the masses unaware of a truth that is believed by them to be the most dangerous truth of all; WE DON’T NEED THEM.

Many the world over are starting to realize this. This realization is taking on many forms as we grapple with what this awareness entails. It will take great organizational skills and a grand, noble courage for us all too actively step away from the illusions of security modern education has afforded us and regenerate again our ancient ability to live well, in community and with the land. Yet as the old saying goes, and as I have witnessed myself again and again on this infinitely meandering road,

Jump and the net will be revealed.

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#maypeaceprevailonearth