Busywork...leading us down the road to ruin

A paean to dreaming, free play and "doing nothing."

Recently I had occasion to talk with a high school student, a high achiever in his senior year, who was taking an AP Literature class. Learning that he was reading “Hamlet” and Frankenstein, two texts I have taught often, I asked how he was enjoying them.

“Well, we had to fill out a worksheet answering 120 questions about “Hamlet,” and 90 questions about Frankenstein,” he said with a grimace. His father, sitting next to him, muttered, “What a way to kill someone’s interest in literature.”

Exactly. If that’s the way literature is being taught in the high school AP classes, no wonder so few students are interested in literature classes when they get to college!

But what really strikes me, as I mull this over, is that the young man’s father saw what was happening but clearly had no intention of intervening in any way. This student had already been accepted, “early decision,” to a fine university. He did not need to take an AP literature class in the spring of his senior year. Why not drop it and do something more productive with his time?

That’s the way my mind goes, contemplating this scenario. But others, apparently, just accept it as normal and inevitable that a bright young person should spend hours of their precious time answering rote questions about “great books.”

This is part of a larger cultural pattern of keeping kids busy at school, and getting them accustomed to being busy—driven by constant to-do lists, schedules and deadlines—throughout their lives.

As a young person, I obediently bent my head and accepted the yoke of busyness. Now, at the other end of my life, I can feel how much this has warped my experience. I hardly know how to relax and do nothing. Even in my leisure time, I am doing something: exercising, taking classes, keeping up with friends and family, doing hobbies.

I can dimly remember the time, in my childhood, when I would get up, get dressed and go outdoors immediately to greet the sunrise. This was on weekends, when we were in the country, where I could go out into the birdsong of the new morning and feel my spirit rise to meet the sun coming up over the mountain.

Later in the day, I would climb my favorite maple tree and lie on a branch, delighting in the feeling of the wind swaying the limb beneath me. Or I would go to the little clearing in the woods I called “my spot,” a natural circle of large stones with soft woodland grass in the center, where I would sit and listen and let my mind wander.

I wasn’t doing anything. I was just being.

What did I give up when I began to focus on doing? What happened to my being?

Little children are born with open channels to the world. They easily lose themselves in their imaginative play. Communion with the world comes naturally to them.

When we push children into busywork, getting them used to worksheets and crowded schedules, we curtail their potential to communicate with the more-than-human world. The loss, for humanity and for the world, is huge.

More than 30 years ago, in his essay “The New Story,” Thomas Berry pointed to the “tragedy” that children experience in school: “Children who begin their earth studies or life studies do not experience any numinous aspect of these subjects. The excitement of existence is diminished. If this fascination, this entrancement with life is not evoked, the children will not have the psychic energies needed to sustain the sorrows inherent in the human condition. They might never discover their true place in the vast world of time and space.”

Children don’t need to be taught how to commune deeply with the world around them. This is part of what Berry called our “genetic coding”—it comes naturally to us. The problem is that our “cultural coding,” our formal and informal education, insists that we get with the program, that we clutter our minds with lists and worksheets and—in the present era—a constant stream of digital information, which destroys our capacity to tap into our deepest sources of knowing.

As a result, Berry says, “The human venture remains stuck in its impasse” because “our secular society does not see the numinous quality or the deeper psychic powers associated with its own story” and children are not given “a deeper understanding of the spiritual dynamics of the universe as revealed through our own empirical insight into the mysteries of its functioning.”

What happens when an entire culture loses its ability to commune with the world, with Gaia and the cosmos?

Look around.

Education must remember its earlier calling as initiation into “the story of the universe in its awesome and numinous aspects,” Thomas Berry says. We adults must remember our childhood ability to “commune with and absorb into our own being the deeper powers of the natural world.” We must stand back and get out of the way of children’s natural tendency to experiment with their potential to imagine, to play, to merge their consciousness with the world around them.

·      What if free play were as highly valued as “athletics” in school?

·      What if children and young people were encouraged to daydream?

·      What if the capacity to commune with the immanent Spirit in all Gaian manifestations was recognized as a human birthright and cultivated as a crucial skill necessary for successful adulthood?

“You may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one….”

What are we here for, after all, but to enter the vast living dream of the universe and the Earth? What could possibly be more important?

One thing for sure, it does not come with a worksheet.