If you've ever looked through the wrong
end of a telescope, you know that this
instrument has opposite effects, depending
on how you use it. What may be less
obvious is that even normal use of the
telescope can be rather paradoxical.
We marvel at the incomprehensibly remote
galaxies brought near to us by the modern
telescope, and know that our existence on
earth would be sadly impoverished without
their austere majesty. And yet, by
expanding the universe without limit,
isolating our vision from our other senses,
and encouraging us to view ourselves as
chance objects among billions and billions
of objects, far from the center of things, this
same telescope has whispered to many:
You are an accident, lost in a vast,
wind-blown desert where the grains of sand
are stars.
Things, apparently, can be brought closer
while at the same time becoming more
remote, more disconnected from us. We
had to travel to the moon in 1969, surmises
psychologist Robert Romanyshyn in
Technology As Symptom and Dream, not
because it had come so near to us, but
because it had gone so far away.
Did we, like the middle-aged man seeking
the long-lost love of his youth, travel to the
moon in order to see whether, in our state of
alienation, we still had a connection to it?
Did we vaguely hope that the magic, the
dying coals of an earlier flame, might be
rekindled through this reunion? If so, the
question is whether our chosen instruments
of approach were self-defeating. If the
telescope not only brings things nearer, but
also transforms and objectifies space in a
way that can easily make us feel like chance
intruders, it is not at all clear, for example,
that the rockets within which we fling our
bodies through this alien space are vehicles
of reconciliation and homecoming.
Home, is where every child belongs. But a
world that feels like home is increasingly
what we deny our children this despite
the televisions and Internet connections that
bring the world into their bedrooms. Such
devices, only accentuate the central
educational challenge: how do we help the
child find his own connections to the world?
The Loss of Significance
I don't think modern technology necessarily
alienates us from the world it mediates. But
a lot depends on our recognizing how it can
do so. And the first thing to say here is that
the problem is not and never was one of
scale. It is badly mistaken to think: The
telescope reveals the earth as a mere
flyspeck in the cosmic infinitudes, so of
course we can no longer consider ourselves
significant in the old religious sense.
That's as confused a bit of thinking as any
nonsense for which we ridicule the ancients.
As C. S. Lewis reminded us, Ptolemy knew
just as well as Eddington that the earth was
infinitesimal in comparison with the whole
content of space. Nor, Lewis adds, do we
really believe that a six-foot man is more
important than a five-foot man, or that a tree
is more important than a human, or a leg
more important than a brain.
Spatial dimension has never been a measure
of significance. When we argue today that
big is significant and small is insignificant,
we merely testify to our loss of any sense
for what is significant. Size, after all, is a
matter of quantity, but significance is
qualitative.
So if telescopes and other instruments of
modern science express our alienation from
the world, it is not because of the
dimensional scales they introduce, but
because we have tended, with their
encouragement, to substitute dimension for
the things that count. Employing such tools,
we are invited to ignore our own significant
connections to the world, which are never
merely quantitative.
But it is not only the moon and planets and
stars that have come to seem remote from
us. The historical psychologist, J. H. van
den Berg, has traced the alienation of
Westerners from their own physical
landscape. He offers a fascinating survey of
the past several centuries, and after
characterizing the nature-ecstasy of the
Romantics, he considers the altered
experience of our own day: Many of the
people who, on their traditional trip to the
Alps, ecstatically gaze at the snow on the
mountain tops and at the azure of the
transparent distance, do so out of a sense of
duty. They ... are simulating an emotion
which they do not actually feel. It is simply
not permissible to sigh at the vision of the
great views and to wonder, for everyone to
hear, whether it was really worth the
trouble. And yet the question would be
fully justified; all one has to do is see the
sweating and sunburned crowd, after it has
streamed out of the train or the bus, plunge
with resignation into the recommended
beauty of the landscape to know that for a
great many the trouble is greater than the
enjoyment [The Changing Nature of Man].
Harsh as this may seem, I suspect that most of us would have to admit to our own experience of the tour bus syndrome. It's as if we knew somewhere within us that we ought to feel a powerful response to the wonders of nature. And we do feel something but it is all too often vague,
without specific content. Somehow the
threads connecting us to our surroundings
have grown so tenuous that we find
ourselves facing a forlorn blank. We want
the powerful experience we may even
feel guilty for not having it but it's not
there.
So what do we do? We capture the
experience on film. I've seen people in the
Everglades come onto the walkway with
their video equipment, take a picture, and go
away, says Massachusetts naturalist John
Hanson Mitchell.
We take much the same approach toward
births, graduations, marriages, and the like.
It's as if, not trusting our vague, subjective
experience of the event, we need to freeze
and objectify it in the hope that we can
come up with a more fitting appreciation
later. Of course, what the stored image will
enable us to recall and appreciate most
vividly is the experience of picture-taking.
Living in a Virtual World
There are many other symptoms of our
estrangement from the world. I once spoke
to an extremely intelligent high school
graduate who was not sure in which
direction the sun rose. Bill McKibben tells
of a camping trip during which he learned
that adolescents who had lived their whole
lives in the Adirondacks did not know there
was such a thing as the Milky Way. I've
heard an astronomy teacher lament that,
since Star Wars, students are not very
interested in the boring view through a
telescope, and a naturalist complain about
the television generation's disinterest in the
not-sufficiently-exotic local flora and fauna.
None of this reflects a shortage of
information. The problem is that today
something is substituting for the child's
intimacy with the world. And if you want to
know the nature of the substitution, consider
the lenses, video screens, instrument panels,
windows, phones, loudspeakers, books,
faxes, billboards, newspapers, magazines,
and various protected environments through
which we gauge our relations to the world.
How can the child possibly feel that the
natural world counts for much of anything at
all?
Michael Crichton tells of a young boy who
looked at all the sea creatures in a public
aquarium and asked, Is this virtual reality
or real reality? The audience, I think, was
expected to be disconcerted by the boy's
cluelessness. Rightly so. But let's picture
the situation for a moment:
After a couple of hours watching Saturday morning cartoons, the boy is handed a lunch extracted from various cans, bags, and cartons and cooked in a microwave oven. Then he leaves the house with his parents and gets into the family station wagon. Driving off with the radio playing, they pass blindly through the local environment at fifty miles per hour, and then negotiate the traffic and lights of downtown, where virtually everything to be seen has been constructed. Eventually they park their car in a huge lot near a large, concrete building, enter the lobby of the building, buy tickets
at a movie theater-like ticket window, walk
through a large hall filled with weird,
eye-catching promotional posters, go down
some stairs, and then, along with a crowd of
total strangers, they enter a series of rooms
whose glass walls display the brightly
colored forms of exotic fish dredged up
from the bottom of the Atlantic.
Now, ask yourself: Is this boy peculiar for
having some uncertainties about the
reality he is being hustled through? Or
are we the ones hopelessly out of touch,
failing to appreciate the problems of
disconnection and incoherence written all
over the surface of our daily lives?
In my opinion, the most revealing thing
about this story is our own surprise at the
boy's puzzlement. The degree to which we
have subjected him to a manufactured,
chaotic, and disconnected sequence of
images and experiences simply escapes our
notice.
Now, I happen to believe that the
construction of truly human environments is
no bad thing. In fact, it is one of our
highest callings. But there is no denying
that what we have constructed so far is more
an assault upon the world and a
fragmentation of it than a crowning of it.
Realistically, I think we should have
expected the boy to exclaim, Wow!
Where'd you get those awesome 3-D
screensavers? But whatever the child's
response, we can be absolutely sure of one
thing: his experience had almost nothing in
common with that of the young Tom Brown,
Jr., who was mucking about in a local
stream, entertaining the crawdads, at the
fateful moment when he met Stalking Wolf.
That stream became a teaching resource for
Stalking Wolf because it was connected via
a thousand pathways to Tom's interests and
daily existence. It was there.
Those of you who have read Tom Brown's
books know that Stalking Wolf, the old
Apache scout, had a peculiar way of
teaching his young student during their
ten-year partnership. Stalking Wolf was no
citizen of the Age of Information, for his
coyote method came close to being a
flat-out refusal to divulge information. In
response to questions he would say things
such as Go ask the mice, or Feed the
birds. The student would immediately be
off on a new adventure of days' or weeks'
duration.
To teach fire-making with a bow drill,
Stalking Wolf gave Tom a piece of oak from
which it would have been impossible to
coax a live coal. Only much later (and after
long struggle) did Tom discover that, using
cedar wood, he could start a fire almost
instantly, thanks to the techniques he had
honed so well upon the recalcitrant oak. So
now, not only did he know how to make a
fire, but, much more importantly, his skills
grew out of an understanding of the world in
which he was embedded.
Tom went on to develop survival and
tracking abilities that seem all but
supernatural to many observers. He has
located lost persons and helped to track
down criminals for law enforcement
agencies. During recent years, he has
devoted his life to teaching others.
Interestingly, though, he quickly gave up the
coyote method of teaching. It simply doesn't
work for most people today. They just get
lost and discouraged because, unlike Tom
with the crawdads, they have no time and
they're not connected to anything. Or,
rather, their connections are
one-dimensional, abstract, arbitrary, and of
uncertain reality. The creek is one thing, but
how do you make a child's world out of a
concrete building with exotic
screensavers?
We can begin to attack the problem, but it
always involves grounding the child in a
world to which he can relate on as many
different levels as possible. The daughter of
one of our neighbors grew up to be a marine
biologist, and I'm sure aquariums figured in
her upbringing. But when she was a little
girl, and throughout her youth, her parents
took her to the seashore at every
opportunity. They waded through tide
pools, explored, and had adventures.
Learning the Language of Horses
The Man Who Listens to Horses is the
remarkable story of how Monty Roberts, by
observing horses by listening to their
language of movement and gesture
learned to relate to them as a friend and
collaborator rather than as a tyrant. In
hundreds of demonstrations Roberts has
persuaded wild or untrained horses to
submit to bridle, saddle, and rider without
any use of constraining force. Employing
his own body to speak the horse's language,
Roberts plays out a subtle drama of horse
behavior in which he must read and respond
to the horse's utterances, right down to the
fear or intelligence or curiosity shining
through its eyes. Finally he turns his back
on the horse and walks away whereupon
this often high-strung flight animal slowly
comes up to him from behind to await
further collaboration. It often takes less than
thirty minutes to saddle and mount a horse
that has never been ridden before.
Roberts has achieved similar join-up with
deer, and he remarks that it is always a
stirring moment for him when a flight
animal agrees to be touched by the human
hand.
But what is going on here? How can it be
that Roberts is such an isolated case, and
such an eccentric within his profession? If
we can put a man on the moon, how can we
be so blind in our understanding of the
animals we have employed for millennia?
Well, as I have suggested, we may have become blind in part because we have sent a man to moon that is, because we have
been interested only in the exploration and
conquering of objects, and you cannot hold
a conversation with an object.
Roberts is the son of a more traditional
horse trainer who used ropes, pain, and
subjugation to break horses a process
typically lasting six weeks and not
infrequently resulting in injury to the horse.
Roberts' father may have been more violent
than most, but his bitter resistance to his
son's crazy notions has been shared to one
degree or another by many conventional
trainers.
I found the story a powerful testimonial to
our culture's instinctive conviction that
every problem can be solved by bringing the
right combination of materials and forces to
bear upon it. We are not taught to look for
the nuances of meaning and gesture through
which we can hold a delicate, yet powerful
conversation with the problem. (Ask
yourself, incidentally, whether it's easier or
harder to find these nuances in
computer-mediated communication.)
There are a few things I would like to say in
relating Roberts' story to education.
The
first is that we've not lacked the opportunity
to learn what Roberts learned. Many of the
things he learned have in fact been learned
before. Roberts' half-Indian uncle told him
how the Cherokees used to capture wild
horses: at the end of an extended
conversation through movement, they would
walk into a corral with the horses willingly
following them. A book by John Solomon
Rarey in the mid-1800s created a huge stir
throughout Europe by detailing the dramatic
potentials of collaboration between man and
horse. In 1858 a writer in the Illustrated
London News predicted that Rarey's name
will rank among the great social reformers
of the nineteenth century. But instead the
book along with its insights was
forgotten.
Something in our culture works powerfully
against a sensitive, participative
understanding of the world, often
obliterating that understanding wherever it
does arise. I believe that a primary task of
education today is to counter this
one-sidedness.
Second, the delicate conversation I
mentioned a moment ago is not a casual
exchange of information. Roberts'
understanding arose from close observation
of the finest details, repeated again and
again while he was wholly immersed in the
horse's environment. He tried to experience
that environment as the horse experienced it.
This is not at all the sort of knowledge, or
information, that can be passed
automatically from one mind or database to
another.
In our drive to achieve frontal, effective
power over the world, we have generally not
had the patience to cultivate the very
different, but no less effective powers of
intimacy and sympathy. But if we want to
redress the imbalance of our culture, surely
this is where we must apply ourselves.
Third, Roberts loved horses. He could not
bear to see them suffer, and his desire to
understand them was a passion that drove
him through great danger. You do not hear
much about love in the contemporary
arguments for wired schools.
Fourth, if there is any one place where this
intimacy and sympathy, this immersion in
the concrete environment of the other, this
delicate reading of nuance and meaning, is
most required, it is in human relations. Here
the task must surely be even more complex
and challenging than it is with horses. Yet
one can fairly say that the future hangs upon
our capacity to read the other person in his
own world certainly much more than it
hangs on our ability to pass information
around. Where you find social breakdown,
you will also find people who don't even
know how to begin the process of mutual
understanding that brought Monty Roberts
and wild horses into fruitful engagement.
Once we recognize this, we can hardly avoid
the uncomfortable sense that our society has
gone quite out of its mind in making the
computer the tool of choice for connecting
people and in particular for connecting
young students to sources of
information. The computer undeniably
inserts a distance between people that must
be overcome. As a result it is much easier
for us to objectify others to treat them in
terms of our own needs. It disconnects
words from the speaker, ignores much of
our non-verbal communication, and
occludes the larger environment that is
always speaking and being spoken through
us.
I am not saying that the limitations of the
computer, any more than the limitations of
the telescope, are insuperable. We can and
must learn to overcome them. But they are
hardly instruments for countering the
prevailing imbalance of society. And if it is
true that the 21st century will be the age of
unimaginably sophisticated and pervasive
technologies, then counterbalance is what
we will need most.
A Chickadee Lesson
I would like to conclude with a much more
humble, personal story. For some time I've
been interested in birds, although I haven't
been able to do much more than begin to
observe and listen as best I can in my own
neighborhood. But a couple of months ago,
I decided to see whether I could coax a few
birds into feeding from my hand.
I spent four days about an hour and a half per day sitting on the steps of my house, beside a bench, which happens to be just a few feet from a mix of trees, weeds, and
brush. I spread seed around so as to
encourage the birds to come closer and
closer as I sat motionless.
On the fourth day the first black-capped
chickadee, with a lightning-quick peck, stole
a sunflower seed from my hand and fled for
his life. Soon, however, he and some of his
kin were jumping right into my hand, and
eventually an occasional one would go
about his precision business of punching
open the seed while holding it against my
thumb.
Chickadees, of course, don't really count,
since they're half human already. But other
birds even including the storm troopers,
which most people call bluejays have
gotten progressively curious. So far, juncos,
titmice, and nuthatches have braved the
human hand. And at times, amid a flurry of
wings and sudden little air blasts against the
face, I find my head, arms, legs and feet all
used as temporary perches.
Now, rest assured: I am no man who listens
to birds. I have no special sympathies or
skills and in fact am probably deprived in
this regard. I simply went rather
mechanically through the steps required to
accustom the birds to a human feeding
station. After I had done this, my grown son
took my place and had birds feeding from
his hand on the first try. A child could do
the same.
I am coming to appreciate the chickadee in
ways I never would have thought possible.
But the prolonged stillness and quiet of my
vigils are themselves valuable. I see things
I would never see while moving about
normally. Once a hawk, attended by a
highly upset bluejay, landed on a low branch
about ten yards in front of my face,
scattering all the smaller birds. A pileated
woodpecker, I discovered to my surprise,
sometimes visits our little grove. And I've
watched a hare drowsing for an hour or so in
the filtered sunlight just inside the brush
line.
All this has been an epiphany for me. It's
been all I can do to restrain myself from
collaring everyone I meet and exclaiming, I
had a bird eating out of my hand today!
But this, I suggest, is a sad state of affairs.
Here I am, a 51-year-old man, and I am
discovering for the first time what it can be
like to join up with a little bit of nature.
Others, of course, are not as slow and
backward as I. But it seems to me there is a
question that might occur to anyone who has
had such an experience. What would it cost
us to wire, say, every third-grade class to a
few birds? Just chickadee feed.
And the same question, with the same
answer, applies to countless other aspects of
nature.
Yet we are spending billions of dollars to
give our children computer-mediated,
distance-increasing experiences of the
world.
Where are our priorities? Children are not
at risk of missing out on the fact that we're
becoming a wired society. We don't need
help making sure that future generations
embrace technology. Technophobia just
doesn't happen to be the dominant trait of
our society. What we need is balance and
connection.
We are right to think that technology has
huge implications for education. But no
more with the computer than with the
television will the decisive problem be one
of familiarization and adaptation. The
adaptation occurs all too well on its own.
Children must learn, rather, how to hold
these technologies in a human balance. And
I suggest that a bird in the hand and a
pine cone, and a rock, and a crawdad, and a
snowflake are the counterbalances we
need if our alienation from nature is not to
become more than the world can bear.
These bits of nature may not seem like much
to us but that is the problem. For the
child they hold magic exactly the magic
that, in a matured form, may be required to
ground the adult in a twenty-first century of
encompassing virtuality.
Steve Talbott is editor of Netfuture. This article
appeared in Issue No.70 and is reproduced with
permission.
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