Unplug

Perhaps one of my favorite pieces I've done. It was intentionally propagandist, and I think benefited from it. Its also something I really believe, even if not to the extent I pushed it here. And no, this does not make me a hypocrite. There are plenty of other things that do, though.



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"Go play."

Simple words. I heard them a thousand times in my childhood, usually from a mother exasperated with my running in circles, invading her space in the kitchen. "Go find something to do outside! And take your brother!" We would scamper off, plunging into the warmth of the sunlight, at least for a short while. We were young; play was everything to us and encompassed everything. Mother would look out the windows to see my brother and me simply spinning in circles, or trying to play hotbox with just two people. I can imagine the smile that would come to her face when she would notice Dad (whom we had convinced to stop working just long enough to help us) dropping our basketball hoop from the proper ten feet to something closer to six, so my younger brother Andrew and I had some chance at scoring.

Those days of innocence and youth have a degree of enthusiasm that is lost as you age. The natural, boundless energy and unrestricted mind become checked. Occasionally something will get you started, but it isn't everything all the time anymore. Why not? Why don't our society, our schools, our lives breed that passion that we had as children? No one has ever thought to say, "Go learn! And take your brother with you!" "Of course not!" experts yell. "You can't learn anything advanced by random discovery!" Visual, Audio, and Action. Those are the ways to learn, aren't they? Strange that when you say let's go see something, or hear something, or do something...you never think of school.

Andrew and I would play tennis outside. We didn't have a net, so we used the house. Winding up with a huge baseball swing, we would whale into a tennis ball in a way it wasn't intended to be hit. The rackets would emit a delightful TWANG! and send the ball arcing over our two-story house. I would hear screaming, a moment of silence, then a fainter twang, and inevitably miss the ball on the return flight. We never got more than three volleys out of this game, yet we tried all the time.

Tried to get better, tried to learn. Why has our system missed this? Even today, the idea is that a school is a box, one with teachers inside. Add students for four years, shake vigorously, and out will come educated individuals. Yet these people may have never seen, heard, or done what they have learned. Schools praise computers as the next great thing...they bring into the classroom what teachers can't. Computers in schools are killing our youth. Computers in general are killing our youth. TV, Nintendo, computers, schools, they all educate and entertain in a virtual world. Children used to sit in school and stare out the window...dreaming of what they were going to do outside when they got out -- run in the grass, climb a tree. They wanted out of the box and into the real world. Now children gaze at computers in school, and ache to get home where they can jump on their own computers, giving them a bigger realm to work in, simply a larger virtual world, one that is slowly eliminating the desire in a child to experience the real world. We need to unplug our society. Go outside; learn from the real world. Schools are not boxes; they are collections of inquiring minds. Thoreau was right when he founded a school, one that met in a field and traipsed across the landscape to experience nature, life, and other human contact. We live in a non-virtual world, yet before we understand it, we are trying to replicate it. As soon as we understand our world, we will have a virtual copy of it. Why? Why exist and work in a virtual copy of what we really have? Why educate our children on a soundstage constructed to mimic real life? Remove schools from their walls; return students to the actual world they are learning about. Let them cut and paste, build with cardboard boxes, eat the glue. Let them be open-minded and active. Don't restrict a mind within a smaller, simpler, copy of the world they are so curious about. Release them into the real world with guidance, answer their questions, teach them as you stand before the lesson, give them mentors, make them apprentices.

Teach them reality. Teach them life.

Unplug America. Unplug Yourself. Unplug our Youth.