Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [73]
The challenge of the twenty-first century—and it applies to problems of war, the environment, and cultural survival—is: how do we educate a Neolithic body to live successfully in an electronic world? The genetic basis of the body has changed little since we first domesticated fire and painted on cave walls, but during that time we have altered the environment we live in to an almost unrecognizable degree.
Every generation thinks that its own crises are greater than those faced by their forebears. In the clouds looming over inhabitants of this century, however, there really are telling differences. With the fully global nature of humanity’s interactions these days, there is no frontier left, no room for dumping the results and moving on to the next green pasture. You cannot throw something away—there is no “away.” We have shown little propensity for tackling our problems with courage, energy, imagination, and initiative. Bucky’s “spaceship earth” hurtles on through space, most of its inhabitants still unaware that they are part of the crew. The consumptive attitude that permeates the West and its economies is clearly unsustainable yet shows little sign of abating. The alienation from the body and the “natural” is reaching epidemic proportions. There is cause for pessimism.
Yet we tend to believe that technical solutions exist for all the problems confronting us—energy, pollution, quality of life, read Amory Lovins—and the young are full of boundless enthusiasm and conviction that all such challenges will fall before our ability to organize solutions. There is cause for optimism.
Physical Education in the Twenty-First Century
On a practical level, a new comprehensive physical education is key to the challenges that face us. As a somatic therapist and teacher, I believe that over the medium term each of these puzzling locks (energy, politics, the environment, and personal plasticity) can be picked by an increased and focused awareness on the physical self and its complex relations with the world, others, and its own essence—the kind of deep inner experience suggested by my opening story about the frog. How can we cultivate the deep self-sensing that leads to authenticity in ourselves and in the young?
Although some of our kids are challenging themselves on the planet as never before—on sea, snow, and air—the general running down of physical capacity is frightening. Everywhere in schools, physical education is being dropped, cut, ignored, and abandoned. What educational programs remain are firmly based in an industrial approach to physical culture, centered on repetition and competition.
Repetition is fine for habit-setting purposes, and competition is fine for building performance and good sportsmanship, but are these the basis for a twenty-first-century physical education? Repetitive moves in a competitive atmosphere are tailored to prepare a generation for jobs in an industrial world, often interacting with a machine in the service of production. In fact, each generation fashions its physical education to the world it finds (see the brilliant film Dance and Human History at www.css.washington.edu/emc/title/719). For example, cricket was perfectly suited to the running of a vast, slow empire in the last century, baseball to the entrepreneurial culture of the 50s, football to corporate culture of the 80s, and soccer to the cheerful anarchy of European socialism.
In the twenty-first century, however, anything repetitive—from jumping jacks to writing romance novels—can be done better by machine. So we need to teach our children to