Original Instructions

President Obama has made education reform one of the three top priorities of his first 100 days, along with health care reform and the economy (or is it the war on terror?). Our education system is certainly broken. In America’s 19th and 20th century scramble to get and preserve our imperial advantage, education has been strictly about programming children and youth to compete for more power and more stuff. The ideal of democracy (which was long ago superseded by the ideal of an ever-expanding consumer market), included the proposition that every citizen, in order to be an equal participant in a democratic republic, was entitled to a publically guaranteed education. Genuine democracy cannot work when the citizenry is trained to think of ourselves as consumers. The Obama administration appears to be using the internet to recover some semblance of an active, educated national citizenry. I applaud the effort.

On the other hand, I wonder if schools – private or public – can prepare people for living as citizens of the cosmos, or the Earth, or the land.

A favorite book of mine is entitled Return to Creation, written in 1991 by Manitonquat (Medicine Story). “Story”, as he is respectfully addressed by friends, is an elder, and the spiritual leader of the Assonet band of the Wampanoag nation, whose ancestral lands were once what is now the area of Newport, Rhode Island. I spent a weekend with him and his wife at Rowe Conference Center in 2004.

As Story tells it, the land of the Wampanoag was shaped by Maushop, the principle Hero-deity of the people. Maushop slept in the curve of Cape Cod, and gouged out the sound with a shovel made of an iceberg. Then, Maushop made the people – four races of people from the four colors of clay. “He mixed them in shades of brown, some with more red or white, more black or yellow.” Once the gift of the body had been given, Maushop gave people the gift of mind, the gift of heart and then asked Creation itself to give people the gift of Kishtannit, part of Creation’s own Spirit. “Then Maushop taught the human beings what they needed to know in order to survive and add their music to the great Song of Creation.”

“Those teachings are the Original Instructions. Most people who have an ancient oral tradition speak of such instructions, or the instructions are implicit in the tales and legends of the people. These instructions are very similar throughout North America.
“It is this concept of Original Instructions that most profoundly distinguishes native spiritual belief from all the man-made religions of the world. The Original Instructions are not ideas. They are reality. They are actually Natural Law, The Way Things Are – the operational manual for a working Creation.”

Indian people believe the Original Instructions are written on the soul of every creature, including human creatures. The role of teachers is not to edit those instructions, let alone re-write them. Rather, a teacher’s job is to awaken the student to what is already known within her. Thus, as the “original people” believe, those Original Instructions continue from generation to generation to guide and sustain tribal life.

Pink Floyd had it. “Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!” Let’s recover a sense of why it is we educate our young people. Are we pressing them from the bleachers to compete harder and score more points than the other kids? Or are we willing to allow them to discover the Original Instructions? Seems to me we need more than education reform in America. We need to relearn the Original Instructions.