As our society becomes more technology based with people living in the Metaverse and completely disconnected from reality with video games, artificial intelligence, and smart devices and children are being sucked into artificial realities like never before. This is motivating many families to get back to nature with Homesteading which is seeing a major resurgence in popularity. These families are done with the materialistic consumerism culture and want to rekindle what really matters in this world and give their children real life skills in creating their lives rather than being part of the toxic all-consuming culture, they value self-sustainability.
We are fighting the same battle as Mother Nature…
School is monoculture
Unschooling is permaculture
“We traded roosters for alarm clocks.” ~ Unschooling.com
“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” ~ Mark Twain
When you truly think about it, the American landscape hasn’t really changed all that much…
We just went from farmers herding cattle to politicians herding humans on a tax farm. And we’re progressing to solely herding humans by killing all the cattle. Human Livestock!
We moved from an agrarian based economy where cultivating the land is the primary source of wealth to an industrial based economy which included industrializing agriculture leading to the #4 reason kids are failing and the greatest heist of all time. Just as everything was being industrialized, we made the grave mistake of industrializing and institutionalizing childhood. Then we moved to a service based economy where the entire economy was based on providing services without anyone actually making or creating anything. This is why most all American manufacturing was outsourced to countries with cheap slave labor. Today, we live in a technology-based economy that is rapidly evolving to the point it is causing massive widespread disease while disconnecting our society from our roots. Cities are filled with constant noise and light pollution that are toxic to our health and well-being instead of hearing the sounds of nature and surrounding ourselves with the true beauty of the natural world. Most children today spend most of their childhoods living sedentary lives sitting in classrooms which is incredibly detrimental to their health and well-being.
“Maybe a person’s time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.” ~ Frank A. Clark
“Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man." ~ Daniel Webster
“The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.” ~ Epicurus
“Family farms work when the whole family works the farm.” ~ Adam Klaus
“You can solve all the world’s problems in a garden.” ~ Bill Mollison
“Do you see how hard the ants and bees are working to make the world a better place? And you are not willing to do your job as a human being? Why?” ~ Marcus Aurelius Meditations
Throughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive… our word “school” - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning “leisure.” ~ Peter Drucker, [1909–2005, Austrian management guru]
“It is natural for anyone seeking to live a simple life to have concern for the origin and purity of their food (and clothing).” ~ John Lane, Timeless Simplicity
"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.” ~ Theodore John Kaczynski, [Industrial Society and Its Future]
Moving is on our Self Care post:
“If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would create something like a classroom.” ~ John J. Medina, Author of the New York Times Bestseller, [Brain Rules]
“In an agricultural society, or during a time of exploration and settlement, or hunting and fathering–which is to say, most of mankind’s history–energetic boys were particularly prized for their strength, speed, and agility. […] As recently as the 1950s, most families still had some kind of agricultural connection. Many of these children, girls as well as boys, would have been directing their energy and physicality in constructive ways: doing farm chores, baling hay, splashing in the swimming hole, climbing trees, racing to the sandlot for a game of baseball. Their unregimented play would have been steeped in nature.” ~ Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
"Convincing the peasants to stop growing food in their yards and replace it with inedible grass that they mow every week gave the ruling class a hell of an advantage.
Now the peasants largely feel they’re too good to grow food. Incredible." ~ Astrid Alderleaf
https://twitter.com/AstridAlderleaf/status/1528459320244830209
"The United States is enormous.
332 million people live in the USA. There are 2.25 billion acres of land.
If every American was perfectly spaced out, each person could have 6.7 acres to themselves.
Alaska alone has about 365 million acres, which means we could have every American move to Alaska, give each person one acre of land, and still have room to spare." ~ James Clear
https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1651028323475292160
https://twitter.com/Tao_Orion/status/1493718547003895810
https://twitter.com/RizomaSchool/status/1487093791458799616
https://twitter.com/ploughmansfolly/status/1486886372992552966
https://twitter.com/ploughmansfolly/status/1486888062353301509
https://twitter.com/ploughmansfolly/status/1486890301218242568
https://twitter.com/ploughmansfolly/status/1486891907900973061
Original Ancestral Exercise Equipment
If your area was not sustainable in 1880’s probably not going to be sustainable in a grid down.
In the following post, Peter Gray discusses the wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers and how children are designed by nature to educate themselves: