Monday, December 10, 2007

What have we created?


I recently had a friend of mine, who is taking her masters of Ed Physchology at the University of Regina, email me this picture and asked what my response to this would be. Well this is what conclusions I came to:
At first I looked at it and was thinking it was about young students just starting their school experience and how our bureaucratic, policy ridden education system has stripped them of their sense of wonder and ability to imagine.
Then I went back and read the saying at the top again and noticed the the word "She" was capitalized throughout the passage. This got me to think that maybe the "She" is really mother earth, or mother nature. Which paints a whole different picture. If we look at it from that perspective then this whole picture speaks to me on a more human sense.
To me this is describing how human beings see themselves as above or outside nature and all its elements. We tend to think we can "control" or predict nature and thus contain it or curb it to do what we want it to do when we want it to. It also speaks to our loss of inner-self and our inability to recognize our connectedness with everyone and everything in the universe. We strip away the feeling, intuition and instinct because we can't describe it, predict it or trust it. Thus, we label and categorize everyone and everything because to us it makes sense and reduces the unknown. Also, the serenity and calm that the figure in the tree is surprisingly glaring which emphasizes societies hectic pace and tiring sprint to the "finish line". With deadlines and the need to "succeed" we have no time in our life to just sit and exist. We are groomed to think we should be productive all the time. We should feel guilty because we should be doing something instead of "wasting time". The last line, "now She goes to school and She can only read words" is interesting. For me, I look at life as a learning/discovery experience and thus the world or our lifetime is in essence spent at school. But all we are learning is the words (ideas) that others or human kind deems worthy of passing on. There is no more self discovery, it is all taken on trust that those before us are correct. We have lost the ability to question and seek out our own answers or find new ones.
What do you think?

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