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I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half
by awhitty 3y ago
I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half a day every week in permaculture class. We spent that class doing things like gardening, constructing adobe stuff like ovens and a gathering space shaped like a turtle (the head formed a pizza oven too - it was really cool), collecting eggs from a chicken coop, recycling fibers and scrap paper into (very brittle) paper, and making tea out of the herbs we grew - mint, chamomile, lavender, etc.
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!
- colordrops 3y agoDid they say thanks to the chickens as well?
- cjohnson318 3y agoWhy wouldn't you? Anyway, I don't think schools with farms in the US regularly harvest poultry or livestock for their students.
- colordrops 3y agoThey mention directly that they collected eggs from the coup.
- msla 3y ago> They mention directly that they collected eggs from the coup. And if they thanked their chickens more often, the chickens wouldn't have staged a coup.
- awhitty 3y agoHaha, I have to assume so, but honestly I didn't spend much time in the chicken coop because I thought it smelled bad. I'm not sure where the eggs went, also. And yea, on reflection, it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school? I remember a friend getting pecked by a chicken once. This was a pretty agg-y area in New Mexico and most everyone I grew up with had at least some animals on their land, so it wasn't unusual.
- markdown 3y ago> it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school. These days there are American children as young as 13 washing down slaughterhouses on school nights and sleepwalking to school. In a nation where child labor of this kind is completely legal, I think it’s fair to say that a few chickens at school is just fine. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-find-100-children-cleaning-slaughterhouses-pssi-rcna71171 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/feds-find-100-children-...
- jaggederest 3y ago> And yea, on reflection, it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school? How will children learn to care for and appreciate animals if they don't interact with them? I think, rather than "not above-board", it's vital.
- rcoveson 3y agoBut what about the allergens? The risk of salmonella? Have you seen the damage an angy chicken can do with those claws? I've heard that Avian Influenza is on the rise again. Can't they just learn about chickens on their EduTablets? ...is what I imagine I'd hear at the Parent/Teacher conferences leading up to the average public school's field trip to a local farm.
- hosh 3y agoThat kind of fear is not what I want to impart my children. Life becomes so small and dark when living life like that. But I get that I’m not the average parent. We already have chickens in the backyard. Hen pecking don’t really hurt. They are more likely to run away from you. If you don’t pet them on their head, they won’t take it as establishing pecking order. Their claws only come out when they are raising chicks — as any mother caring for her young will do. It’s the roosters you have to watch for, and you don’t need them in a flock. Dealing with roosters is trainable — using a mop is unreasonably effective with communicating with roosters because they think it is a giant rooster. Disease is something you take care of by keeping the coop clean, and letting the chickens forage — pasture raising them. But for my children, I think it is very important for them to know where food really comes from, and it’s not the grocery store.
- akira2501 3y agoEvery time I feed them. Chickens are generally inscrutable.. but the noises they make when the food comes out definitely sound like unrestrained joy.
- eschneider 3y agoIndividual chickens definitely have personalities which you'll get to know if you spend enough time with them.
- hosh 3y agoYeah, their chicken egg songs are something else.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 3y agobirth of the kfcism religion
- hosh 3y agoI don’t see why that is unreasonable to do. Whether it is ranching or hunting, why wouldn’t you?
- tpmx 3y ago[flagged]
- willismichael 3y agoPlease elaborate.
- geph2021 3y agomessed up for a school to get children to verbally apologize to plants interesting that you conflate thanking with apologizing.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoWhy not be grateful regardless of whether things have feelings? The practice of gratitude is a good one, internally and externally, for the living and the inert. We don’t have to imagine the plants have souls; it’s the simple act of acknowledgment and appreciation that instills a sense of value and importance upon the things that keep us alive.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoIt's really fascinating that you appear to register 'thanking' as 'apologizing'. And I thank you for that, as I think it just helped me better understand a broad group of the general population I could never quite figure out.
- EatingWithForks 3y agoCould you share your understanding please? I can't quite wrap my head around registering thanking as apologizing.
- wccrawford 3y agoThe original post only talked about thanking the plants. The reply only talks about apologizing to the plants. Clearly the reply thinks that's the same thing here.
- 3y ago
- throw8383833jj 3y agothat sounds like a fantastic way to grow up. I wish I could raise my kid in this kind of community. permaculture has so much to offer people.
- hosh 3y agoI thought about working with 4-H to create a permaculture track. I live in the city. I have been applying permaculture design principles to my back and front yard. I am exposing my kids to all of this, and it is not too late for you if that is what you want to do. You have to do things a bit differently in the city, but you absolutely can apply the 12 design principles and 3 ethical principles.
- ecnahc515 3y agoThis reminds me of the lessons from the book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. One of the main characters is teaching another lessons throughout the book using a Montessori approach. One of the big lessons is to only take what you need, and to appreciate these things we take for granted. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
- m463 3y agofascinating -- I wonder if saying "thank you" to the plants might unconsciously prevent over-harvesting.
- hosh 3y agoI was just talking to a friend about the fatal flaw in Marxian analysis of capitalism Both the analysis and the proposed solution focused on owning the means of production, but none of it says anything about the well-being of the humans, the community, and the eco-system involved. In contrast, look at say, how the Hopi views things. There is a faction among the Hopi that never signed anything with the US government. Their view is that ownership is granted to those that take care of it. It isn’t about the means of production, but rather, your ability to participate in the land’s wel-being. A further implication is that, within this world view, you cannot accumulate capital beyond your personal ability to take care of it. Instead of gaining property rights, and having social expectations for taking care of it, you don’t get those rights until you demonstrate ongoing care. It goes even further. Can you own a person because you “take care” of that person? If you reject that idea, what about any living being? Do you really own the trees, the birds, the bees? Instead, you view this as being in relation within a community that take care of the land. You obtain an yield (one of the permaculture design principles), but you don’t exclusively do so. Other living beings within the land can also obtain a yield, whether it is also the food, water or habitat.
- RGamma 3y agoRandom fun fact that I learned yesterday: Only 0.6% of Germany's land area is covered in wilderness. Let that sink in... https://wilderness-society.org/how-much-wilderness-is-possible-in-germany/ https://wilderness-society.org/how-much-wilderness-is-possib...
- codr7 3y agoI lived there for five years; and let me tell you, it's not fun at all. Just finding enough trees in one place to take a 20min forest walk in northern Germany is a major challenge. But I was born in Sweden, so I have pretty high expectations when it comes to forests :)