Full Circle on a cold winter night

Sometimes nature is the greatest teacher. For the first nine years of my education I attended a school where the average grade size was between five or six. We played outside for an hour or more every day, and instead of standard math and science and English classes we had a set of “goals” we needed to complete over the course of the term. Most learning was done in a self-motivated fashion, with an emphasis on independence and individual development. Technology, aside from word processing, was virtually nonexistent in my early education. Because of my background as an outdoor, individual learner, I firmly believe that technology is neither necessary nor beneficial to childhood development.

The best memories that I have of my time at my elementary school, appropriately named Full Circle, are of creating a tiny village in between the roots of a tall pine tree with my friends. We spent many an afternoon crawling on our knees through the pine needles, building tiny houses or excavating them from the hillside. What strikes me now that didn’t seem all that significant then is the complexity and creativity of this activity. While we were of course pretending to be hobbits straight out of one of Tolkien’s books, what we were doing was not copying something that had already been done, but using an idea to create our own world. We built our own system of economy and trade. There were rules to be followed, laws to be voted on, and all disputes were settled by the community (bear in mind that by “community,” I mean probably five people). For money we used tiny pieces of lichen, which could not be removed from the nearby trees (this was a fineable offense), but rather had to be foraged from among the pine needles and grass and sticks. I can’t begin to estimate the hours I spent building my house in the crook of that tree’s roots. I hauled buckets of mud up from the “pond” by the school, created an internal structure out of sticks, then used the mud to create a wall. For a roof I used pieces of bark that could be easily removed to access the house’s interior. It was a remarkably strong piece of architecture, one that lasted for several years without any upkeep.

This experience mirrors my childhood as a whole. I would spend days building castles out of legos, turning my living room into an entire city. There were hundreds of stories to tell in those cities, dozens of characters, dozens of conflicts to be resolved (or not – sometimes the bad guys won). Creation – whether physical or imaginative – was the primary activity of my childhood.

Part 2 will hopefully come next week. This is a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, so you’ll have to indulge me as I recount the childhood that brought me to where I am today.

-epn