Re-settle Your American Kids by
Giving the Gift of Hard Work
As a people, we have celebrated the mechanical and technological defeat of hard work.
Releasing ourselves and our children into lives of physical leisure, we have also released ourselves into boredom, obesity, laziness, and a deep sense of purposelessness.
“As a people, we must learn again to think of human energy, our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and to be enjoyed in use. We must understand that our strength is, first of all, strength of body, and that this strength cannot thrive except in useful, decent, satisfying, comely work. There is no such thing as a reservoir of bodily energy. By saving it—as our ideals of labor-saving and luxury bid us to do—we simply waste it, and waste much else along with it.”
Child labor, as defined by industrialism with long hours in filthy factories, has been rightly defeated, but child and human labor as defined by the hard work of cleaning, cooking, and tending the earth and its creatures is labor without which we and our children cannot be whole.
Recognizing the loss of activity in our modern world, many folks are rightly championing exercise and sport for children. However, these activities are separate from a child's normal life and do not afford the equally important gift of contributing to the world around them.
We must find ways, even in our high-tech, urban, homes and schools, to honor hard physical labor and create opportunity for children to receive it as a way of life.
There is simply too much human labor in our families and schools for the concrete, computerized places we live to provide work enough to meet. Here are three questions parents and educators can begin to answer to create greater opportunities for physical labor:
1. Who can we help?
All around us are people who do not have unused physical energies. The sick, the elderly, and those who are paid full time to use their bodies (like custodians and park laborers) are all folks who have yards and properties with work for us to do. Consider adopting this week a neighbor of your home or school and start putting kids and yourself to work.
2. What labor-saving devices and practices can we retire?
If labor is a gift, we must change our habits of trying so hard to save it. Ditch the snowblower for shovels, chainsaw for hand saws, roto-tiller for shovels, dishwasher for hand washing, clothes dryer for a line outside. In your classrooms, ask the custodians how much of their job you can do without getting them fired? Sweep and mop and wipe walls every day, even if they're clean. Go ahead and play with glitter just for the opportunity for a mess to clean up!
3. How can we access more plant and animal life to tend?
Tending the earth and its creatures is an essentially human activity most of us have relegated to professionals. Every home and school should have garden space sufficient to keep kids with daily labor watering, weeding, and watching the wonder of growing life. Most urban areas allow chickens, and all of them allow domesticated pets, which require care. In order to provide life to tend, some families might consider moving, and all of us should consider what yard and grounds space we might transform into a space for labor and learning with and for children.
The forgotten gift of physical labor is the way it settles us.
Hard work settles us into a place we have sweated and gotten dirty caring for.
It settles us with a people alongside whom we work and enjoy the fruits of our labors.
It settles us into our minds, providing space to ponder, notice, and be without mental input.
Finally, it settles us into our physicality, tuning us into the muscles, which move us and giving us a reason to eat and rest well.
For more from The Unsettling of America,
visit here and go to the "Work & Restraint" topic tab