This is an excerpt for the upcoming book One Life by Econation founder, Michael Lockhart.
When you think of self-sufficiency you might be thinking of solar panels, a vegetable garden, homemade jam and DIY renovations, for example. Whilst that might be part of it, first and foremost, self-sufficiency is an attitude.
Self-sufficient people are independent active agents. They have the desire to live life on their own terms, to determine their own course, to make their own decisions, and not have their life choices made by others. This includes choosing what to believe.
Self-sufficient people are not interested in trying to impress other people, and so it’s possible for them to be more authentic. Self-sufficient people are less likely to need expensive possessions to feel good about themselves or to seek fame or power to make themselves look good. If you have inner order, you are less likely to seek the compensations of material goods and status. Your inner sense of well-being means that you are more resilient and confident in the face of the vicissitudes of life on a psychological level. Lifestyles of self-sufficiency provide practical resilience.
The problems is that whilst I believe people are born innately self-sufficient to a large extent, this is knocked out of people by our culture, and in particular by our education system.
Learning self-sufficiency
There is the saying: “If you give a person a fish you feed them for a day, if you teach a person how to fish you feed them for a lifetime.” This is obviously about teaching self-sufficiency, but it is also about sustainability.
The ‘give a person a fish’ approach is that of our current political-economic system, which is typified by the top-down control of production and people. This system relies on people being dependent on goods and services supplied to them by others. In other words, it is when supply drives demand. This is what effectively keeps people motivated to produce and to conform to the system. It is a system that tends to create the needy and helpless people that it requires for making a profit and for economic growth.
Whereas the ‘teach a person how to fish’ way is the way of sustainabilism.
By-and-large our education system follows the top-down approach. It teaches people what to think and not how to think. It also teaches us the wrong things and not the right things. It is increasingly focussed on subjects that have a vocational bent and increasingly less on subjects that have positive intrinsic value such as history, geography, literature and art.
The bottom-up approach of self-sufficiency in education is about self-directed learning – learning self-sufficiency is really about learning how to learn.
Being told what to know is shallow learning, it has become the most common form of learning because it’s a much easier and more efficient way to teach. It allows for standardisation of curriculum and therefore standardisation of achievement.
Deep learning is harder, it encourages naturally open and curious minds, and it requires a vision of what good lives would be like. Unlike shallow learning, deep learning is self-directed, and is therefore learning that matters to the learner. We must accept that people, even youngsters, know what is best for themselves. They certainly know what interests them, they know what they enjoy doing and what they like to engage with.
As the social commentator, Ivan Illich said in Deschooling Society, “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.”
The industrial-technical paradigm in both production and education creates ‘products’ which are standardised ‘replicas’ that are designed, literally, to conform with the system.
Of course there are many great schools, teachers and courses that do not ‘fit the mould’ or blindly conform. It would be good to encourage these worthy alternatives for the goal of naturally sustainable human well-being.