Trackers PDX Blog

Choice

14th

July

Put a child in a room with an Xbox on a big screen TV and they'll end up playing Halo all day. Give them time in the woods with a carving knife and you'll create an outdoors enthusiast who builds traps, makes bows, searches through ponds for frogs and eats mud pies.

While the ability to choose your own destiny lays the foundation for a competent and confident individual, the "art of limited means" is an invaluable compliment to such freedom. The secret to a well played childhood is not necessarily the enforcement of regulations imposed by the overt artifice of adult-dom. Instead it is far more simple and far more complex. Children who grow up with iPods and iPhones may become savvy to Apple chic while children who grow up with lots of books and adults reading to them often develop into avid readers.

I'm an advocate of well designed context. It helps for Alice to believe she fell down the rabbit hole by happenstance and of her own accord. Fortunately, nature provides an already rich Wonderland where children can deftly cultivate their own mental and emotional temper.

This isn't the philosophy of a luddite; it's about goals matching reality. If we want kids to be on Facebook all the time, teach them with a computer. If we want kids to have the awareness of a deer, the strength of a bear, the humility of a field mouse and the patience of a fox, simply let them live free in the Wilds of Nature.

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