What is Modern "Education" Even For?

Searching for wisdom in the era of "post-truth"

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If you could kindly tap the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this newsletter it will make it easier for other people to find this publication. Ahéhee'! བཀའ་དྲིན་ཆེ།! 謝謝! Thank you! ขอบคุณ! شكرا ! תודה! Спасибо! धन्यवाद! Merci y Muchisimas gracias!

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My wife and I recently welcomed a lovely group of educators from an affluent school in the States to spend a week with us learning about food systems here in Thailand. In recent years, there has been a rise in awareness as to how little most Americans know about the world outside the confines of the U.S. ( i.e. only speaking one language, not being able to find most countries on a map, not knowing the names of any artists outside of American pop culture, not knowing about anyones history apart from the recent American history as seen by the winners of wars, etc.). And in an admirable attempt to remedy this embarrassingly accurate truth, an increasing number of schools are sending there teachers abroad to ensure that they genuinely know what they are talking about when they engage their students in matters pertaining to global culture. I find this refreshing, a much needed dollop of action-based wisdom in a staggeringly ignorant era often rightly referred to as the era of “post-truth”.

I was delightfully encouraged by the fact this group of teachers chose such an important topic to focus in on. For if we were to attempt to pinpoint the root cause of why modern people have become so disconnected from reality in recent times it could likely all be traced in one way or another to our severed relationship with food, the soil that grows our food, the ancient agreements long ago made between the fruits of Earth, indeed, the Goddess of the Earth Herself, who so graciously continues to give us life even as we neglect said agreements in the same way we never followed through with honoring the treaties. (Hmm. Interesting.) I dare say most of us haven’t the slightest recollection any longer as to what these agreements even are. (Just like most have no memory what the treaties declare. Convenient!) Hell, most don’t even know where a pineapple comes from, or that all food doesn’t just magically appear at the corner store, or that cashews come from the tip of a sour fruit, cinnamon from the bark of a tree, and lettuce grows to great hight’s before she offers seed. Ours is indeed a “culture” of disconnect and forgetfulness. So in this time, to have the courage to care to remember our food, is a heroic, revolutionary act. I was both touched and impressed.

image of our seed garden.

The severing of the relationship humans once had with Land is the root cause of virtually all our struggles. Not only do we not have access regularly to an abundance of delicious nutrient rich foods if we no longer know how to care for such foods in a good way, but we also cut ourselves off from the very things that for thousands upon thousands of years gave us purpose, meaning and filled us with awe. Modernity, having decided to foolishly attempt to tame the Wild and organize the entire planet in such a way as to make everything efficient and convenient to a certain type of man that views rational thinking, structure, and punctuality as noble traits has, in the process, radically redefined what it means to be human. No longer beings who ritually engage with natural cycles in delicate ways that keep Land healthy which, by default, keeps the people healthy while sculpting within them deep character and slowly initiating within their hearts an elders understanding of how to properly care for the generations yet to come, instead, with all the extra time on our hands that “convenience” affords, “liberated” from needing to “work the land”, we now spend all day and all night staring into screens, wondering why we are so lonely, unfulfilled, anxious and depressed as we fearfully observe “the other” from afar, creating all kinds of insane narratives, while never actually interacting with said “other”, never touching the soil that grows the food we eat, never seeing the stars or reflecting how all this came from that and thus… never feeling awe.

So, suffice it to say, I was elated when a group of teachers from the heart of the very nation responsible for exporting the strange educational systems that have resulted in a disastrous global spread of apathy, amnesia and atrophy of the most basic of human senses chose to spend a week with my wife and I visiting with relatively in-tact communities of land-based peoples throughout Thailand. We only had a week and there is only so much that can be done in one week but I found our conversations together to be enriching and telling. I learned as much from them as I hope they learned from us and the good hearted people who generously hosted us here. Had we only gathered via zoom, it would have been considerably different. For life, as it turns out, requires actually showing up. Seeds can’t grow in cyberspace.

While our new friends were with us, we looked of course at how food is grown, how to save seed, why to save seed, etc. We ate well as we debated which approach was best; small-scale organic farming, indigenous methods of “rotational farming”, chemical-based “industrial farming”, etc. We explored the supposed "pros” and “cons” of these diverse practices and reflected over the immediate and long-term consequences of each approach. Knowing where our food comes from, how to grow a garden and save seeds is extremely valuable information, arguably the most important information we ought seek an understanding of. Yet strangely, as modernity nonetheless doesn’t actually value such things, foolishly believing it is somehow above nature, most of our teachers knew very little about what we were discussing, and as they graciously informed us, their students knew even less.

In addition to an increasing interest in the west to level up on their understanding of the world, there is also a growing desire to learn more about food. This is good. Yet, it is a rare privilege to be able to attend a school that can afford to explore such oddly fringe topics in appropriate detail. Government funded schools do not place great emphasis on food matters or natural history (or even genuinely well-rounded and accurate U.S. history for that matter!). All this begs into to question then a much deeper matter, one far deeper than where our food comes from.

The biggest question that arrises from realizing how few people in the modern world can, for example, name the names of but 5 native plants in ones local bioregion, know how they can be used, what their cultural significance is, etc. is… What is our education even for? If we don’t value the most important and universally necessary part of the human experience enough to ensure young people graduate with a solid understanding of what gives us life, how to make sure She stays healthy so that we, and our planet continue to be able to thrive, than what is the point of education in the first place??

As several of the teachers who visited with us shared, even though it is increasingly common at wealthier schools to find organic gardens on site and healthier meals being provided, the majority of students are still being indoctrinated into believing that ultimately, money is the most important thing. Thus, most kids are not learning how to be farmers or seed savers but are being bred to become doctors, lawyers, and the like. And they are not doing so because they have discovered an unshakable calling within them to heal people or seek truth, but purely because such professions pay well. That’s it! This seems to be the goal of modern education. Knowing about seeds or tending to an “edible garden” is a nice hobby, a cool extra curricular activity for rich kids to do on the side, but ultimately, the goal is to learn how to make money.

The arrogance of the civilized world is cleverly disguised as being helpful. It behooves us to feel into this. For most of us, merely thinking about it won’t reveal the depths of this truth. We need to revive dormant sensations and re-member what it was like before the comfortable numbness took over. We need to stop justifying modernities madness by suggesting that, “…well, yes, but… there are great things it has offered!”. None of the fancy fruits of modernity, such as iPhones, laptop computers, cars, instant noodles, home delivery, drones, etc. come close to weighing up to the majesty of Right Relation, clean water, clean air, healthy soil, wild lands, of having a deep-seated understanding of ones place in the world; the serene, content feeling one receives from being a part of something bigger than themselves that isn’t based solely on the acquisition of monetary wealth but is instead motivated by the noble longing to keep alive the many lifeways that will ensure the well being of a land and people one will never live long enough to meet.

Rest. Breathe. Can you hear the still, small voice of your ancestor’s whisper? “Remember? Remember, my beloved??? We use to do it like this…”

I write these words now from within a small village near the border of Laos where (those who read my work regularly will already know) my wife and I have come to tend to my father-in-law as he prepares for death. My wife has been sharing with me stories of her childhood here, before the Christian (and Buddhist) missionaries came to town and told everyone they were “uneducated”, “poor” and that their “backwards” ways of relying on Land and Her spirits was “superstitious”, “outdated” and “holding them back”. With tears in her eyes, staring into the barren, lifeless field before us where once a lush forest filled with countless foods, materials for making clothes, baskets, and Story once stood, she tells me how now little remains. After the “aid” groups and schools came, she tells me, everyone went crazy, got drunk on modern ideas and quickly forgot how to live well. My wife’s aunt, hypnotized by the idea of getting rich, cut all the trees down, covered than land with toxic agrochemicals and planted a bunch of GMO corn in its place, as instructed by the fancy, “well-educated”, corporate ambassadors who told her how to be smart. Well, long story short, the corn didn’t grow well, she went into debt, and with no more food to eat because she cut all the trees down, she freaked out, became an alcoholic and, in order to pay off her debt, she moved to Abu Dhabi (Where she still lives) to do shit work for low pay in some factory there. The grief is unbearable. Her tears flow like the mighty mother river that once passed through here before the dam altered all life, before the remaining fish were killed off by chemical runoff.

And yet, as the contagious spread of modern view has only recently infected this community, vestiges of memory can still be found, embodied in the daily lives of a people who not long ago were educated by The Land, by actual life and a ritually centered existence. Modernity doesn’t like to think about things that actually matter. Things that actually matter are usually inconvenient and, time is money after all. This gross reality seems only to become apparent to us when suddenly we welcome a child into the world and realize that, very few people around us have the time or any clue what to do with a baby, much less what to do with a teenager! To reference our reality here now, so too do modern people have virtually no understanding of death. So-called “developed” nations seem to think death doesn’t even happen, or aging for that matter, selling all kinds of pills and curious narratives suggesting one can somehow avoid the inevitable. And when, lo and behold, the inevitable comes to greet us, we still ignore it by shipping our old ones to “nursing homes” for someone else to deal with until finally they die and we pump them with chemicals to make it look like they are still alive, place them in an expensive box and stand around and have a nice chat. This is what we have been taught to do. All this being the result of a very curious form of education that is spreading like COVID currently throughout an already sick world.

Food. Birth. Death. These are the most foundational of all subjects. Far more important than “the three R’s”. And for most of human history we knew exactly how to dance with all these magical happenings. We did it well! Yet nowadays people jokingly say “The baby doesn’t come with an instruction manual!” suggesting no one knows what to do with babies, that you have to just “learn on the fly”. Nonsense. Our ancestors knew extremely well how to care for babies. And for children. And teenagers and elderly and even the dead. They had all kinds of magnificent ceremonies and rituals for lifes many passageways. No one was simply left to “figure it out!”. Our educations were highly developed and we had experts all around us making sure the transmissions were properly made. Yet modernity has decided none of that is necessary anymore. We’ll just hire someone to take care of all that. Riiight.

Without a deep understanding of the intricacies of birth, feeding and death, how to relate and participate with, to make sense of these auspicious gifts and how to apply what lessons sprout from them, what then is the purpose of anything at all? Arguably, there is none. And what is the result of having no purpose? Just look around. observe the general atmosphere pervading this zeitgeist. Anxiety, fear, frustration, boredom, apathy, greed. Take a flight over the “United” States and gaze toward the earth below; enslaved wildness arrogantly forced into convenient little grids for the sole purpose of making money. The sole purpose of making money. Sound familiar? We have learned well. We are doing what we were told. We passed the test.

Thankfully however, it is not only our ancestors who knew how to deal with life’s most important matters. The “uneducated” people in the village where I am currently still know how to care for the dying! To be sure, there are many in the world now who still know how to. Who aren’t unwilling to wipe the ass of an aging man if they aren’t being paid, who are capable of tenderly holding a dying grandmothers hand for hours at a time, with full presence, knowing what songs to sing, what stories to tell. Additionally, there are, scattered throughout the world many whose education taught them to not be inconvenienced by being asked to care for someone else’s children unexpectedly, who see farming and raising children as one and the same, an act that requires great skill, artistry and reverence. For these are the ones who were taught that these are the things that matter most in life. For this is, everything, the whole Story. The mundane, is not mundane at all. If it seems as such, time to return to the Spirit Tree…

Even after having lost nearly all the surrounding forest, the “Spirit Tree” still stands in the center of life here in the village, and the Holy residing there is still fed daily. Even as karaoke and bad speakers have made handmade, three-stringed guitars virtually obsolete, in front of each house there is to be found still another, exalted tiny house on stilts where within can be found little dancing spirits of the hearth who are ritually fed each day at dawn. And when bees come around they too are welcomed as holy guests, and ritually fed. When the honey is harvested, which everyone knows how to do, the sweetness of life is not simply taken, but borrowed.

My dear siblings, the old education hasn’t entirely faded yet. Because the old education is Natural Law, and by design it is more durable than anything we are toying with now. Yet, if we aren’t careful, it may decide to leave us soon in search of kinder kin. It is estimated that around 98% of the earths seed diversity has gone extinct in the last 30 years. But 2% still remain. There are unsung heroes working tirelessly the world over to keep these seeds alive, for the benefit of future generations. And the same is true of the worlds many lifeways, the myriad ways of seeing and being. We are dangerously close to losing it all, in favor of a narrow worldview that sees nothing as sacred and only values money. But 2% still remains! If we can keep this alive, the people might just make it after all. It’s unlikely, but what isn’t in this fragile, fleeting, achingly beautiful world? How unlikely that any one of us, with all the infinite other possibilities, happened to be born a human?! Amazing.

Let’s not waste this precious, passing moment. We were born as human beings! REJOICE! Instead of worrying about A.I. or scrolling mindlessly through facebook, or dedicating our lives to making money, why don’t we learn how to be real people again, unafraid and fully present! There is an ancient living education still pulsing around us, outside the classroom walls and far from the computers eerie glow. All we have to do is walk away from modernities deceptive nightmare and enter again into the actual world. We have to learn how to ask the right questions and learn how to live into the answers. We have to stop being so friggin’ modern and humbly surrender to the awe-inspiring bigness of That Which Gives Life. I know it’s hard to do, especially when you’ve already dedicated most of your life to an entirely different story, but what do you have to lose, your depression?

We have been blessed with the rarest of rare opportunities; to participate in the grand cycle of birth, death and all the miraculous variations of feeding, and being fed, that blossom in the in-between bardos. Learning how to do this well is what a real education is. And the point of any real education, is Beauty.

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Dedicated to all the children of the world being needlessly killed as a result of bad educations.

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An extra special thanks to those of you who became paid subscribers this last week! We are inching ever closer to my goal of having ten percent of my readers become paid subscribers which will ensure that this newsletter remains fully accessible to all, i.e. no “paywall”. I only need 9 more paid subscribers to meet this goal! Please, if you have been blessed financially, consider becoming a founding member or a monthly subscriber. Your generosity keeps these words accessible to those not currently able to pay for them. We’ve all been there. All blessings.

-Gregory Pettys

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