OK, so, I see this class being mostly about getting deep into food and shelter as fundamentally human concerns, so secondarily a critique of the commodification of this stuff, and a big, wide, underused doorway to talking about the Good Life and about capitalism. Uh.
So, anyway, it's of course a philosophy class: I aim to bring some good, rigorous thinking to the good life.
In the broadest outline, it goes about like this:
1. Human nature makes us deeply concerned with food and shelter security and quality.
2. Money is the tool we've invented that allows us to delegate food and shelter responsibilities to others while we specialize.
3. Our food and shelter choices change as our consciousness increases, but specialization for money tends to suppress consciousness and the sense of integrated wholeness and meaning in general.
4. Each of us makes food/shelter choices along a continuum [suburban/fast food <---> intentional shelter/food]
In practice, I see the class being quite hands-on and experimental/conversational. I'd love to have an actual garden to work in. Good buildings to visit. Guest people, like a chef, an architect, a farmer, etc who can show a kind of tacit knowledge that exists right below what we commonly notice. OI want the kids to step into a new way of looking at stuff so that they can see interlocking patterns, overlapping systems, integrity and wholeness where we usually see dualistically, etc.
Very very roughly, classes might progress like this, sessions 1-40:
1. What is a person? What makes us human? As humans, what do we care about? What makes us happy? What scares us? Why? What is it about the human condition that makes our food and shelter concerns different from those of a cow, for example?
2. Where do we live? In what? Why? How? What mechanism and systems have we set up in our culture for getting shelter? Who thrives in this system? Who flails? Why? Who profits? What does the typical American do over the course of his life to maintain access to shelter?
3. How do you spend your time? What do you do for work? Why? What do you get? What does your employer get? Talk about specialization, cash, credit. How is your time valued? What skills does the culture reward, and which does it disdain? What does your pay mean? Who decides what your time is worth?
4. What do you eat? How do you get it? Where does it come from? How did it get to your plate? Who grows it? How much does it cost? Who gets that money?
5. What grows here? What is grown here? Why is this grown here, but not that? Why is some land used for growing food, and other land is not? Where does food growing go when a city gets bigger?
6. Exotic food- what? Where? Why? Who's involved? What are the costs?What are the benefits?
7. Gardens/subsistence farms/commercial farms/monocultures... what are the market forces on food production, and how do they conflict with the OTHER forces on food production, such as flavor, freshness, health, worker safety, etc. How does profit and convenience bow to ethical and aesthetic concerns that are hard to measure? What might our food economy look like if we had different priorities? Talk about phenomenon of the farmer's market, home gardening, etc. Why?
8. Efficiency and embodied energy and subsidies. How is the market manipulated? Why? Who benefits? What are the consequences? How are scarcity and abundance manipulated? Commodities markets, centralized planning, false economies. Let's bring some suspicion, anxiety, curiosity to our food choices. How to research, etc.
9. Region vs. profits, one-size-fits-all practices, centralized planning, biotech solutions to the problems of region, the traditional banes of farmers and how to eradicate them, cartesian thinking, management and engineering . GMO vs seed-saving.
10. Food and buidlings. Is it just association, or is there a deep harmony between McDonald's and the American model of suburban development?
11. Land use: what do we do where? What land is sacred, and what is profane? Who lives on which? What is blight? Who suffers it? Mobility and its consequences for the rich and poor. Some effects of spatial segregation. The control of land. Land as reward and punishment. Freedom from the land. Freedom to the land. The shadow economies and the people who choose them. "Marginal".
etc. Meanwhile, we are hopefully growing some food, tasting it next to supermarket food, going on field trips to look at food available in different parts of the city, talking a big donor into flying Van Jones out from Oakland ,
cooking some great meals, talking at great length about quality of life, complicating the idea of buying and earning, etc. Occupy!!!
Whatcha think?
Love the questions, how they progress from first principles and how they explore connections between happiness, livelihood, eating and sheltering. I'd love to talk about that those connections in part bc the way you describe it, one could start from any of those places -- eating, sheltering, working, etc.-- and critique others of them, the using similar principles. don't know if that's clear, but I like.
ReplyDeleteWhat would you have the kids read so that they would have greater ownership of the discussions? i.e. if you could have them read some pretty engaging stuff that they could have access to studies in these questions, what would it be?
Love the field trips and guest speakers ideas. what exactly do they do in the garden and how is it connected to the reading and talking part?
What might they make as a sort of culminating statement of there own views on this stuff? What would the products look like for each of them?
I feel like my remarks aren't clear but. mUst get to bed so that I have the whatever to make it through a visit w my folks.
Fricken heart ya, bra.
I think some good'ol Wendell Berry essays, some Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, lots of maps, maybe Peter singer, e.f.schumacher?, like, go back to the '60s? What can prep school kids handle? I thought maybe each student gets a neighborhood to re-draw, converting it from a bedroom-community for specialists into a self-sustaining village of sorts, where people work and grow their own food etc. or maybe look at the Christian Socialists and their plans for ideal towns and teams of students draw a town plan where neurosurgeons, jet mechanics, securities traders, and marriage counselors could survive the apocolypse under the benign direction of a hippie farmer.
ReplyDeleteI see the garden as a hands-on lesson about complexity and ever-encroaching wildness and skill and holism. It should lead inevitably to a craving for solutions... Lots of weeds to pull on a hot day leads almost certainly to thoughts of RoundUp. Choosing the difficulty of an integrative practice over the ease of an engineered "solution" is to acknowledge that sustainable practices take effort and skill and a great deal of knowledge about overlapping systems. Dualism is tempting, but contra naturam
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