Eco-Mentoring: Using Nature as a Guide to Destiny

Abstract The decline of traditional mentoring and its replacement by institutional teaching, with the consequent separation of the young from intimate contact with nature, has been a mixed blessing. In particular, the use of nature as a guide for the young to find their life path has been abandoned, with perhaps predictable negative consequences. This article shows how educators can elicit the power of nature to guide the young toward their destiny, and so counteract the psychosocial pathologies associated with bureaucratic instruction. I love to watch things grow. They grow, and bloom, and fade, and die, and change into something else. Ah, life! . . . What flower would you like to be? Maude to Harold, in the film Harold and Maude (Paramount, 1971). Modern education has spawned large numbers of alienated youth exhibiting psychosocial pathologies. School absences, high dropout rates, vandalism, bullying, gangbanging, self-mutilation, drug abuse, eating disorders, depression, suicide, mass shootings, and so on reflect the deep dissatisfaction of bureaucratically instructed youth. A number of trends might account for these developments. First, modern educators, fearing any accusation of 'brainwashing' their charges, have increasingly steered away from offering the young any sense of meaning. Instead of treating education as a hero's quest for psychosocial significance, they have encouraged a professional's career for economic advancement. Many have taught the young to see learning as a means of self-promotion instead of social service. As a result, in the eyes of some, young people have degenerated into a meaningless narcissism. Second, modern education-rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding-is not youth-centered but bureaucrat-centered. 'Student-centered instruction' is in reality a paternalistic fraud. The young are clearly aware of their powerlessness in the system. Their voices are rarely consulted in any democratic way about curriculum, scheduling, and other basics. The demands of industrial corporations for long periods of intellectual instruction, rather than the deep strivings of the young, have priority. As a result, the artificial social construct of 'adolescence'-delayed adulthood-has been established, a practice found at no other time or place in history. The deepest natural needs of children, such as running free in the grass, are trumped by the sterile mandates of clerks. This raises the question: Is attention-deficit a disorder or a healthy sign? Third, to an historically unprecedented degree, modern education has gradually separated the young from direct and intimate contact with nature. Most importantly, nature has increasingly been treated as a passive object, not an active agent. Many scientists have assiduously tried to devitalize nature and reduce it to cold data-but not without stiff resistance even within the halls of science itself. In particular, the use of nature as a guide for the young to find their path in the world is a discussion topic completely off the table. As a result, in the eyes of some, education has more and more become a cold intellectual enterprise abstracted from close connection with the natural world (Louv, 2005). Earth mentoring To aboriginal peoples, in contrast, it is the earth that directs the young, with the help of mentors, toward their heroic path of destiny to serve the people. So, when the young are torn out of earthschool and put in institutional ones, when mentors are replaced by bureaucrats, when the intellect is privileged over passion, when destiny is replaced by career, and when personal fulfillment is confused with academic achievement, then the young are lost, floundering in search of meaning. Teachers face bored students, not because they are poor teachers, but because they are teachers period. Youthful alienation, then, should not be a surprise but an expectation. If you wonder why the young reply, disgustedly, 'What-ever' then you just don't get it. …