In many tribal cultures, children help parents, learn basic survival skills from a very young age, and are integrated into the community in numerous ways. They get oriented from a young age into how things work in their society, and are constantly learning about the natural world around them. Our children often don't learn these things until they leave home for a job or college.
Most tribal cultures teach kids how to hunt or grow food from a young age.
In Sweden, children don’t start school until they are seven years old. Yet, their college test scores are competitive with countries that start children in school earlier. By staying at home, they are able to learn more about day to day life in their family and in the community and become more a part of it. This orients them to real life, with different age groups, and day to day tasks of survival and group dynamics, which becomes a context for their school experience.
In our culture, children are often taken to daycare at an early age. Busy working parents don’t have time to spend with their child, allowing them to help to prepare food, clean and other household duties - which most young children really love to do even if they’re not very good at it.
A daycare with a permaculture viewpoint could help children learn basic skills and do different things to integrate them into the community. Most do not have this viewpoint however.
Children are separated from families and communities via schools. This artificial environment with little real world context continues to dominate their lives until they’re adults. They are disconnected from the natural world and from real life and in school, study it out of context, and from afar. Many children thus have trouble adjusting to “real life” once they leave school.
Some public and private schools have made an effort to connect children to the community with school gardens being run by community volunteers, job shadow days, mentoring programs, and other community activities. These activities have all kinds of benefits from raised test scores to lowered crime to healthier and happier children.
Some communities are still intact, and community members mentor and help children in the community.
One example, in a story told by award winning educator turned homeschooler John Gatto, is a child who was a “troublemaker” but loved cars and engines. Through the community grapevine, the local car repair expert heard about this, and called out to the child once when he was walking by, “Can you help me out for a minute? I need an extra hand.”
This turned into a longer term mentoring project that helped give the child a purpose focus and skill set doing something he loved, working with cars. There are various fears and barriers to doing that kind of thing today. How can we knit our communities back together again? Children thrive when integrated into real life.