Tom Royce

American Schools Hate Hunters!

// February 6th, 2010 // Uncategorized

Have you ever had the lightbulb go off and you recognized that there are 100 mistakes you have made that you can now correct?

A rainy Saturday was such a day for me.

My eldest son has always struggled with school. Always. A teacher even recommended we drug him, for his own good you know. I still despise her.

He is a terribly bright and creative young man. Who does a mediocre job when it comes to schooling.

We always thought the problem was him, now we know the problem is that schools are designed exactly in opposition to who he is.

The recognition started with this post by Seth Godin. Hunters and Farmers.

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

That is my son. Shiny Objects. Squirrels.

And it is also me.

We are hunters in a farmers world. We can focus intently when it is needed but otherwise we are observing, looking, thinking.

But farming is a brutal exercises for hunters and farming is all schools know.

Here is a chart by Thom Hartmann who has been talking about the phenomenon of Hunters and Farmers since the early 1990s.

Why American Schools Do Not Fit America:

There is a phrase that America produces mediocre teenagers and exceptional 30 year olds. And it is making sense now.

America is a country where the hunters went. It was founded on rugged individuality and taking on challenges.

Yet our educational system tries to beat that out of our children. It takes a percentage of our children and tells them they are bad when they want to be true to themselves. It screws them up. It takes our Hunters years to unlearn the lessons of the classroom and understand they are powerful.

We need an alternative.

Now.