One Mountain

I belong to quite a few online chat groups, many of which discuss homeschooling. There is one I particularly enjoy, which is run by a woman who writes nature-based curriculum for young children. I find her ideas to be inspiring, and I have incorporated many of them into my own life.

Recently, she posted that she and her daughters had gone out and collected thousands of acorns from their yards, and offered to mail some of them to people who did not have any acorns around their homes. While this is a seemingly innocent, even generous, offer, the more I thought about it the more it started to bother me.

First of all, if acorns are not something that is native to your area, why would you ever want someone to mail you some? What were people going to do with them? What would be wrong with going outside with children and looking at the things that are native to their area, whether that be cactus and Joshua trees or lichen and towering pines?

Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods, quotes an old Native American saying that goes something like this: "It is better to know one mountain well than to visit many mountains." (I've loaned out my copy so I can't look up the exact wording, but you get the idea.) If we are trying to build reverence for nature among our chilren, in the hopes that this will make them physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually healthier - in addition to making them more compassionate and responsible residents of our planet - it is probably more effective, and certainly more efficient, to help them fall in love with their immediate surroundings.

In trying to teach them about some Hallmark card-esque version of "Autumn", for example, instead of going outside and exploring what autumn really looks like in our own neighborhoods, whether we live in the deserts of Arizona, the tundra of Alaska, or foliage-dense New Hampshire, we turn what could be a reverence-building activity into an intellectual exercise. Instead of teaching our children to tune into the beauty that surrounds them wherever they are, we teach them about an abstraction that is some other place, a place they cannot touch or experience, at least in the moment.

But more than that, I think that this activity shows a very subtle lack of respect for nature. It implies that the acorns belong to us and are ours for the taking, instead of recognizing the reality that they have a purpose, right where they are. Recently we were in Florida on vacation, and the acorns there look very different from the acorns we see in New Jersey. Jersey acorns are short, fat and brown, while Florida acorns are long, thin and green. My daughter was intrigued by the difference, and wanted to collect dozens of them to bring home to compare to our native species. While I did allow her to take a handful of them home (which amounted to about five), I then explained to her that they rest of them needed to stay where they were. The squirrels needed them for food, and the ones they did not eat they would bury and either dig up to eat later, or they would grow into new trees.

It is vital that we be very aware of the underlying messages that are inherent in what we do, if we are trying to raise our children to be humane. Many of the problems that we face in our world are borne of the attitude that humans, whites, men, Protestants, heteresexuals, able-bodied people, or ________________ (fill in the dominant group of your choice) are entitled to take what they wish from other people, other species, or the environment, and everyone else would have to get by on whatever is left. Therefore, it is so important that those of us who are trying to raise compassionate children give serious thought to everything we do, examining our actions to be sure they do not perpetuate this mind-set. If we wish for our children to be critical thinkers, then we need to model this for them by critically evaluating our own choices and decoding the messages that we send.