RE: Fw: [Futurework] The world of work

[Karen Watters Cole]

Do you think it might be productive for us to play around with ideas about how to incorporate this feeling into the socialization process and the educational process in general?  Selma   Do you mean on Futurework or society at large?  If on Futurework, I sometimes imagine a food fight with jello, preferably all natural flavors, maybe the frozen vodka recipe.  Most of the time, however, I imagine a long evening dinner in comfortable chairs, a fireplace, rambling conversation and a few good stories.  If I were a wealthy, I would create a weekend retreat center somewhere near the trees and water just for that purpose, my own kind of interactive B&B.  Alternatively, an urban retreat designed like a Japanese inn, but we’d have to have afternoon conversations before dinner and the hot ofuro.    Okay, enough playful imagining.    In schools I think there is some but not enough activity such as younger students working on a school garden, learning math and business skills, and becoming little farmers in the process, donating the produce to food banks.  I was very encouraged here in Oregon to learn that high schools seniors are strongly urged to incorporate volunteer work before graduation, as college application enhancements, certainly, but the benefits are much deeper than that.  My youngest daughter trained as a domestic abuse counselor and served shifts at a local halfway house.  This work softened the hard edges of her ambitions and may or may not have contributed to where she is today, a rookie Teach for America classroom teacher of children with autism in NE Washington  DC., beginning a MA in education.   Parents are of course responsible to their own children for their emotional maturity that includes an appetite for the larger world and traditions that are meaningful, but all adults should be mindful of the example they give to children as they come across them everyday.  We elders have great opportunity that should not be squandered.  I have never had any patience for adults who raised their children to be just like them and or forbade independent thought.  Of course, I did such a good job on that issue with my own daughters that they hardly ever listen to me now.  Smile.  I’m waiting for the rewards of that to kick in, and see positive signs already.   Incidentally, after living overseas for 22 years and away from their grown children, when my parents relocated to the Pacific Northwest three of their four children migrated together here for different reasons. The seven grandchildren benefited from this close family unit (perhaps more so that the grown siblings on occasion) as did the grandparents – reestablishing a multi generation experience my siblings and I did not have ourselves growing up overseas, I might add.  We have two step-grandchildren and two great-grandchildren now, so family dinners are not simple.  By the way, my other daughter is training to be a nurse, and she keeps an eye on her grandparents’ health with me now.   As someone else pointed out elsewhere, I think, parents don’t know all the answers and these days the kids can show them the ropes on their computers, so that this is a good chance for mutually open learning, when grandparents do not feel the same pressures as parents do. Elders are an important source of continuity and learning to value longevity.  Why should retirees vegetate in cloistered communities?  Rest, yes,  but for goodness sake, we are talking a vast resource of wisdom and experience  in senior citizens, not just the academic and inquisitive kind we enjoy here on FW.  As an example, I read several years ago that the Peace Corps is thrilled that almost half of their recruits have come from middle aged and older people with career and life experiences that balance and enhance the youthfulness and energy of their traditional volunteer.   I am a firm believer in travel not only to enlarge the horizon of young people but to make them appreciate their own native environment.  My daughters did not get the opportunity I had for that and it shows in their vision, their horizons, in spite of everything.  They are still young, however.  Overseas travel should be mandatory for college graduation, if not high school, at least a summer tour somewhere.  We should encourage balance, as in yin and yang, recognizing that the two are always present in life, though we may not always recognize them together. There has been too much emphasis on growth and “progress” at all costs, for its own sake.    Notice the popularity of poetry among young people.  Witness the enduring sustainability of religious and secular communities/communes for families and singles.  I live in a region where recycling and daily environmentalism are facts of life, even with the inherent conflicts.  As much as Oregon’s schools have been disparaged lately, one enduring quality that all support is Outdoor School, when six graders from across the state are placed in cabins in the woods or marshes along the coastline, with sixth graders from a deliberately different school system, given science classes in streams and under trees by counselors they only know as Sky Hawk or Fern.  It has certainly contributed to several generations here living and understanding the connection of man with nature.  We are not hopelessly lost. Yet.   Karen