Demonstrating

[altivo]

So, as mentioned yesterday, I spent a full 8 hour day demonstrating handspinning at a historical site over in McHenry. The place is a pioneer farm that dates to the late 1830s, and still has the original house and barn intact. This was the first year for their big event, and I give credit to the organizers (who were apparently most of them in their 70s) for getting out excellent publicity and getting in a good crew of demonstrators. It was of course a "family" event with lots of parents towing kids around to see the demonstrations of everything from milking cows to sewing quilts. There were turkeys, chickens, alpacas, sheep, and cows to look at. I don't think there were any horses (pity.) There were tractors, both old and new. There were food concessions (of course) and presentations on 19th century life, with lots of people in historic costumes. They had an excellent turnout, with a gate count of 800 by noon and 1500 by the time they closed down at 4 pm.

I spun continuously, first wool on a drop spindle, and then cotton on a wheel, with only a half hour break for lunch (which was provided by the organizers as prepared box lunches distributed to the volunteer demonstrators.) I explained what I was doing again and again (not my strong point) until I was losing my voice.

I'm very impressed with the organizers and volunteers, and pleased to say that the weather behaved except for one quick shower and a burst of wind. However, once again I came away utterly unimpressed with Americans' attitudes and awareness. As I've been saying for years, people are so isolated now from the sources of their food and clothing that they are absolutely clueless about how this stuff comes to exist, or that people have to do things to make it happen. The actual process befuddles them. The sequence of steps from raw cotton or wool to finished clothing are a total mystery to them. They simply have no idea, and in most cases seem never to have thought of it at all. Most children have the attention spans of monkeys, and can stare at you without even seeing you while their mental wheels seem to be only processing on when the ice cream is coming or how soon they get to ride the tractor. Adults, though, are just scary.

They will ask what you're doing. You explain that you are making yarn that can be knitted into clothing or woven into cloth (and there are weavers working under the next canopy over, so they can see that happening. You see this look of disbelief cross their faces. Then they either humor you, or ask the obvious (to them) question: "Why would you do that when you can just buy yarn, or better yet, clothing?" The notion that throughout 99% of humankind's existence, there was no Wal-Mart store seems to be beyond their grasp. They gape at the spinning wheel (a modern manufactured one) and then ask how old it is and where you got it. You explain that it's only eight years old and was made in New Zealand (or Canada) and they shake their heads. "I had no idea anyone made such things any more." They ask where the wool or cotton came from, and don't seem to be able to understand the answer. "But didn't you have to kill the sheep?" The wool is gray and they can't believe there are gray sheep. "I thought they were all white or else black."

Cotton is the most puzzling to them, despite the fact that it is such a significant element in U.S. history. They have no idea how it grows, or that it had to be picked by hand and "seeded" before it could be prepared for spinning. Or else you tell them it's cotton you're spinning and they persist in thinking you bought it from the bandage department at the pharmacy.

Older people (generally those over about 50 years of age) are better. They have some idea of the process by which finished goods arrive in their hands, even if they have never performed the steps personally. The under 30 set, though, are absolutely ignorant. They have no idea about anything, though I'm sure most of them could tell me all the shows they will watch on television this evening. The idea that spinning is one step in a longer process from raw fiber to finished clothing seems incomprehensible to them. The fact that the spinning wheel doesn't do it automatically, and the spinner must exercise acquired skills, is hard for them to grasp too. They say "It looks so easy" or "It looks so tedious" (it is neither, but there's no point in arguing) and I point out that I've been doing it for 20 years now, so I have a fairly practiced hand. This, of course, produces more astonishment. How could anyone make the effort to learn something that takes that long?

I'm truly afraid that our educational system has completely failed, and that our society is within a tiny pinprick of collapse. If the oil dries up, or becomes too expensive, huge numbers of people are going to be totally helpless and will die because they don't know how to get raw food and prepare it, or how to make or even repair clothing for themselves.

Comments

[loriana.livejournal.com]

You are so right... on so many levels...
...sad...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The scary part is that my complaints apply to our leaders and politicians just as much as to the drones. It's fortunately not universal. (Obviously, you don't suffer from this kind of ignorance for example.) But remember when George H. Bush revealed that he was so out of touch with reality that he had never seen a supermarket scanner?

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Just ask Atomicat about the american education system. There's a book (I think the author's name is John Gatto or somesuch) where they go into detail, and the education system is basically a generator of willing slaves. As the saying goes, "Someone has to pump your gas!"

Actually, I wouldn't mind self-serve gas, if it meant everyone had university degrees.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Self serve gas is all you can get down here anyway. Unless you eat at McDonald's, in which case you get all kinds of gas everywhere.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

Considering how much knowledge comes from just plain old osmosis I guess from this we can deduce that the only movies these kids watch contain nothing but guns and cars.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

John Taylor Gatto's writings are both revealing and scary. Not only is there that history of making human robots, so how most real education is in spite of rather than because of schooling, but how school bureaucracy is ever-expanding. I recall one example where he'd take willing students to unused rooms and do real teaching, but he found that becoming impossible as every spare space was being filled by assistant deputy directors to the undersecretary of the vice president of blargh and whatnot - people doing nothing for actual education, just soaking up resources.

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

1) shear the sheep
2) card the wool
3) spin the rolags of wool into yarn
4) dye the yarn (optional)
5) use the yarn.

really, it's not all the complicated, just time consuming :p just don't ask me to try to do it, i'd likely injure myself trying! :p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No risk of injury except at the shearing stage. I've still got a sore muscle in my arm from wrestling sheep for shearing three weeks ago.

I'm not surprised that you have some grasp of the process. But then, I know you read books too, which makes you exceptional these days.

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Whinnyhi, Rider.

The weirdest thing is. As I get older and having some heart health problems lately (have to go to the VA hospital in Ann Arbor next according to the doctors there is something wrong with my heart stress test they will not tell me yet) I think about death.

So here I am a very smart, worldly and well-educated person who is gonna die and be gone forever one of these days. I do not fear death nor do I worry much about it but it kinda bugs me that when I go, along with goes all the knowledge I possess. INCLUDING a LOT about how things are made and history and stuff like that. So further the human race gets away from the basics. I think about that, how and when older people who actually know how to use a lathe properly, or how to spin wool into yarn and weave into cloth, how as we depart the world, we also take with us that knowledge.

Glad there are others out there who are kinda like me in that regard.

Love ya.

Imperator

[silver-kiden.livejournal.com]

hey, you'll only be about fourty minutes northeast of me. cool. hope everything turns out alright!

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

I feel exactly the same way. I'd love to be a teacher in the old and proper way that the world used to use... get a bunch of curious kids together with a know-it-all (who's hopefully got his ego under control! :D) and just explore.

One of the most depressing things I run across constantly is the inability to just try things! In the fursuit community there's a constant stream of questions that could be answered with five minutes of trying! Experiment! Check it out! Everyone needs a guide, everyone needs to be told or shown the proper way to do things.

Add in the fear of failure that the grading system leaves us. I had this exchange last summer (MSN)...

"I just made an absolutely wicked t-shirt! Great iron-on, check it out... "Space Rats in Leather" Cool eh?"
"Cool! I wish I could do that."
"Well just do it! Print out a pic on iron-on transfer paper and have at it."
"I'd be afraid to fuck it up."
"Um.... well so what... so did I the first few times..."
"No.... I could never do that..."

Never could talk him into just TRYING it. *sigh*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We know that you and I have some significant things in common, that's for sure.

Now you've got me worried. I trust you will go for that consultation and find out what it's about.

Love,
Rider

[dogteam.livejournal.com]

That's very sad. I guess I'm not surprised. I've written about the "disconnect" before, and I guess it's gotten worse. Most people eat food that they didn't kill, live in houses they didn't build...myself included, for the most part, though I can and do hunt for food, and could probably build a house in a pinch. Spin wool? Mm...unlikely, but I could learn.
So many skills are falling by the wayside. Most alarming to me here is the disappearance of the family farm. Even those that are still trying find it hard to get help...a vet friend told me yesterday that no one wants to work on large animals anymore. She got a call the other day from someone in Hay River to look at a down cow. That's a couple of thousand kilometers from here; it would have cost more for the vet call than the cow was worth.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I was in pre-vet (dare I say it?) 40 years ago. Even then, at a major agricultural university, there was little interest in large animal practice. I believe they were already having difficulty getting instructors for those courses. Though I was'nt from a farm background myself, I had plans to go into large animals. It didn't work out that way, but it wasn't for lack of interest or academics.

"Disconnect" is the best word I can come up with to describe this phenomenon. While I remember my grandparents complaining about a lot of things they saw wrong with the younger generations, at least that wasn't one of them. I can just imagine what my grandmother would have to say about this. She was an extremely capable and independent woman who had been a farmer, a butcher, a restaurant cook, and many other things in her life, as well as a homemaker who raised three children of her own and helped raise and educate other people's children. I don't know that she could actually spin herself, but I do know she was aware of the process and its place in the overall scheme. She sewed and knitted clothing, and had raised sheep at one time.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

I guess nobody watches the History Channel. I believe Modern Marvels has done several episodes on cotton, wool, and spinning/weaving.

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

Ahh ha! But remember, the History Channel is TV. And we all know how factual anything shown on TV these days is...

(/sarcasm)

[luperion.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered, if people were genuinely educated (not the tripe they try to pass for education today) and could choose any job they wanted, what would happen to the Wal-Marts and the McDonalds of the world?

Indeed, who would pump our gas, if it were not automated? (Actually here in Australia there is no longer any such thing as service - it's self serve, you pump your own gas and then go in and pay for it).

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about this a lot myself as I can understand actually why the industrialists set up the education system to actually dumb people down. This is also happens in a different way in an old classic I'm re-reading right now, "Brain Wave" by Gordon Dickson. To skip the explanation, insert device to boost the intelligence of everything on earth (animals too, way cool!), insert major chaos of course.

HOWEVER... When the story on E8 symmetry broke I was browsing some of the physics forums and I noticed that a lot of these people who were casually tossing around mad level physics and math had extremely mindless and repetitive jobs, forklift operators, mail-sorters, assembly-line workers. They loved these jobs because not only did they get paid fairly well for work most people rightfully (or so? we'll see!) considered too monotonous and boring but these jobs were so monotonous and boring that (and you can see where this is going) they could spend all of their time just thinking about math/physics problems. E8 symmetry was cracked by a surfer-dude/snow-board instructor of course. (It's all like, waves man! :D)

So it's true, only stupid people are bored. I used to love spending hours building frames for the bee-hives when I was a kid.

"Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definitions."
—Mentat Text One (decto)

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."
—Jean Piaget

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Oh, heavens, that sounds quite bad, yes - how can anyone not be aware of things like the fact that no, you don't have to kill sheep to shear their wool? I suppose I should give people credit for at least trying to learn, but goodness...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's very bad here in the US, I'd say. The majority of people are not even trying to learn, and have no interest at all in the processes that make their lives possible. They don't look into the future or the past at all, and just expect everything to always stay the same.

[vimsig.livejournal.com]

harsh, but fair my man - yes, harsh but very fair!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Not harsh enough, I'm afraid. You are of course one of those who is aware of and interested in the processes by which we obtain the necessities of life, so you can see what I'm talking about here.

[plushlover.livejournal.com]

I'm truly afraid that our educational system has completely failed, and that our society is within a tiny pinprick of collapse. If the oil dries up, or becomes too expensive, huge numbers of people are going to be totally helpless and will die because they don't know how to get raw food and prepare it, or how to make or even repair clothing for themselves.

You are quite correct in this assessment. People take all this comfort and convenience entirely for granted, and they have no knowledge whatsoever about where it all comes from. In the face of such pandemic ignorance, it's difficult to have hope for the future, isn't it?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not a natural pessimist, but you're right. It's a daunting situation that bodes no good.

H.G. Wells foresaw it in The Time Machine with his Morelocks and Eloi. That horrific vision is upon us, more than even in his time, and people are utterly unaware of how tenuous the threads are that hold society and economy together.

Samuel R. Delany describes in Dhalgren one way in which society and culture could collapse as a result of this. Steven R. Boyett gave a similar account in his novel Ariel. Both are quite believable.

Laughs :P

[bladehorse.livejournal.com]

Yes it is sad, but at this point we, at work just think them all as defective, and it seems rather amusing.
With questions like "how do I get a job like this?". or "Is the steam for effect?" on a steam locomotive.

There are allot of darwin canidates lined up for the armageddon :P

Re: Laughs :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The conclusion makes me shudder, but I'm afraid you're right.

I sometimes wonder how many of these mothers towing kids around and "sanitizing" everything out of existence with disinfectants and detergents realize that eggs come out of the asshole of a chicken... (And what they'd do if they thought about it.)

"Adults"

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Adults, though, are just scary.

So-called "Adults" operate under society's conditioning thought system that tries to fit everything into a certain mindset... I find that scary to. Who wouldn't want to change that?

Re: "Adults"

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

What's really bad is, say that we're speaking of "adults" in their 30s or 40s... that means their conditioning started 30 to 40 years ago. Assuming nothing has changed till now (and it hasn't, if anything it's just gotten worse), people coming along since our group of adults in their 30s and 40s are another huge group of people who are just as conditioned. Even if the whole system magically improved today, at best we're in the middle of an age of, frankly, stupidity. At worst, it has only just begun, relatively speaking.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

It's OK (well, kind of OK) to not know things. People have to start somewhere; would be nice if they were taught things earlier, but starting late is better than not at all. What makes the lack of knowledge worse is the mind-set or attitude many people start with. The questions they ask you, Altivo, are not really the ones that imply they're trying to learn. They're the sorts of statements one makes when the person has some sort of resistance — the very telling "Why do this when you can go to Wal-Mart?" sort of question is a fine example. Or they betray a lack of what I thought was "natural" curiosity. As you and others have said, it's not that they have to care about all the details and execute them well, but just that they might be interested to know that it takes a, b, c to make a shirt. But they don't seem to be, not about shirts and so many other things.

The thought occurred to me that, when everything collapses and the few survivors are left to pick up the pieces, they'll probably be back to wearing animal hides because so many other skills will be lost. Every other skill will have to be re-invented. I hope that's just hyperbole, but it's easy to envision.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Of course, there are a few who really *are* trying to learn something. It's easy enough to tell the difference by the tone of the questioning and the direction they go with followup questions. They are in the minority though, and I still find it appalling that they should have gotten so far advanced in life without any understanding at all of these basics.

Then there are the really worrisome ones, like the little boy, probably 8 or 9 I'd guess, who got upset and started crying because we cut the sheep's "fur" off and it would be cold. His mother tried to explain, and I tried to explain, that we do that in the summer when it's hot and that the wool grows back before the weather gets cold, but he was having none of it.

I wonder if he knows that they *killed* a cow to make the McDonald's he had for lunch... I suspect not, that has been kept from him because it would upset him too much. When eventually he learns the truth it will be even more traumatic.

[herefox.livejournal.com]

When I was learning to knit one of the things I joked about, but was sort of half serious, was that if the world came screeching to a halt me and my friends might not be doing too hot with the hunting bit but we'd be able to at least manage the growing part of things and we'd damn well be the best dressed group of people sliding backwards into barbarism!

It's sad though...I often wonder how people who don't have hobbies spend their time. I guess it's all watching crap tv. It really amazes me people don't want to know how to do/make things.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You got it. They spend their spare waking hours watching television, and usually the junkiest stuff too, not PBS or Discovery or History Channel or any of that "boring" stuff. They never blow anything up on those channels.

How's your spinning coming along?

[damnbear.livejournal.com]

A belated smart assed reply that I could have offered, "To explain myself better, I work with computers with my day job and I prefer not to go around like a neanderthal in animal skins when the resources that provide clothing run out."

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, we have to allow for the fact that these people live in McHenry County, which implies some things about them. For instance, they can afford to buy stuff and never have to make anything themselves (it might get their hands dirty, or, god forbid, they might break a nail.)

They vote solid republican, don't believe there is such a thing as global warming or evolution, and home school their kids so that they won't encounter horrid dirty stories like fairy tales where princes sneak into princesses' bedrooms, kiss them while they're asleep, and lord knows what other nefarious goings on. Never mind that those fairy tales often feature spinning wheels and spinning in them. It only proves that the whole thing was the figment of some dirty old German's imagination. The nerve of them telling such stories to little children and deflecting their attention from proper commerce in which cash money is exchanged for goods...

[songcoyote.livejournal.com]

I am very fortunate in that the school I attended from K-12 was founded on a farm. Even when they moved to a new location in an urban area they set aside a quarter acre or so just for farm animals... and everyone above a certain age was required to take a Farm period every so often. So I grew up learning about the cycles of life and death, the fact that chicken doesn't spawn in plastic packages in the store, and that wool is carefully cut from sheep.

Small wonder I turned out to be Pagan clergy :)

Light and laughter,
SongCoyote

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Fortunate indeed, even for someone who is closer to my own age group than not. :)

My grandparents were farmers on both sides, but had retired from the farm long before I was around to see it. Of course they told stories all the time, enough so that when the opportunity arose to go to a county fair I wanted to spend all my time watching the animals and the judging, rather than eating junk food and riding the midway stuff until I puked my guts out. And I certainly had no interest in dumb stuff like the "demolition derby." It was too noisy and wasteful. I did rather enjoy when they had circus acts though. All those handsome athletic acrobats wearing so little clothing, doncha know. ;p

[jairus-greywolf.livejournal.com]

The mere fact that we live in a technologically advanced "throw away" society where mechanization and industry supply all of our basic needs naturally causes people to become complacent and lazy. Add to that a downward spiral of ethics and moral values and a society that values leisure and entertainment so highly and the result is what we have today.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

All that and more. I think the real issue is that our society has become so anti-intellectual and opposed to learning for its own sake or out of curiosity, that things we learned in school when I was a kid are no longer even mentioned. The only things being taught in school are those directly related to getting and holding the most basic of jobs. Sometimes not even that. I note that today's younger employees serving as cashiers often cannot make change correctly, for instance. I'm sure they can't do their own tax return either, even though it's probably only the short form.

People are forgetting how to prepare food, how to repair their clothing or even how to wash it, or how to care for their health. I'm utterly appalled at the lack of understanding of basic nutrition, even among mothers. I keep thinking of H.G. Wells' Eloi race, the ones who were completely dependent upon the services provided for them by the more practical but unethical Morelocks. Many of these younger people are no better and no more capable of caring for themselves than my sheep are. ;p