Happy Samhain! (for the Children)
Tonight is the first night of the three days of Samhain, the ancient festival known even to the neolithic Ulster Cycle, the Celtic New Year coopted by Christian 
All Hallow's Eve and Dia De Los Mortes combined, and here in Sauble, it was the perfect night under clouds enough to make the waxing moon a little spooky to young spooks and goblins winding their way through streets of candy treats and smiles and neighbourhood hellos.
This is a night of pure magic. This is the community of young families reclaiming their birthright to the night, the night of children unafraid of the dark, our explicit acknowledgement of our frail lives through a celebration flying in the face of our mortality by portraying ourselves as the selves we are unafraid to be.
So do tell me, what is so terrible awful blasphemous evil about all of this that our School Masters should see fit to remove all references of this festival from our classrooms?
Samhain is a time when the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead become thinner, at times even fading away completely, allowing spirits and other supernatural entities to pass between the worlds to socialize with humans. It is the time of the year when ancestors and other departed souls are especially honored.
[ via Samhain - Wikipedia ]
Yes indeedy, that do sound real nasty, don't it. Not nice and noble and polite and pluralistic like the religiously observed 'celebration' of swindling all their great-grandfathers whisked off to die of gangrene and mustard gas in a merchant war.
I plan to be at the next SCC meeting; I'm told that's the proper venue to first vent our issues with the public education we fund by our taxes. I've never been to one before, but I plan to be there, armed with Joseph Conrad's anthropological necessity of myth, armed with two centuries of systemic Ontarian denial of Irish heritage, armed with the simple fact that these calendar milestones are more than marketing opportunities, they are vitally important human events, not just important to us, but important also to the children. Important not just socially and culturally but important neuro-cognitively to the proper healthy development of the human beings these children must become.
'Embracing' does not mean 'Removing'
And I'm going to request some answers as to why their own pet myths are acceptable while those of my history (and theirs) are not (eg atoms and ethnic heritage in place of, say, relativity and quantum chromodynamics and the essential DNA-certified unity of the one singular family of humanity) Why should the lies of their generation's science be preached as fact, but the since-discovered meticulous and globally verified hard science of my generation be ignored, or treated as irrelevent, or even heresy. Modern neuroscience tells us our dreaming never ceases, the groundstate is only masked by consciousness as the stars by the rising sun, and that means the mind remains fundamentally in a magical state that needs myth to see and survive. Myth and ceremony are not fodder for Discovery Channel spectaculars, they are hard-won evolutionary adaptations to ensure ecological viability of our species. Clarify our understanding, certainly, but expunge them at our peril.
I'm curious to hear their answer.
Rumours tell me their official answer is political correctness in the name of Religious Tolerance but this does not hold holy water; the only people here being required to comply are our children being required to deny Samhain, and as we have seen in Britain, the spin of a spiral on an icecream or the desktop image of Piglet will be "offensive" to somebody and therefore forbidden by law; the bowing down to such imagined ghosts will betray us not as champions of sane and reasoned science, but as minions to raw, blatent and dogmatic superstition.
Learning our Lessons
Erosion of the relevence of the educational system; leading our children to practice their culture covert on the quiet (like Moors in Isobel's Spain); sanctioned and systematic denegrating the children's collective self image; breeding of societal division and denial of their cultural precidents; teaching how democracy means bend over and insert pressure group .. the number of reasons against abandoning the cycles of our culture to pander to burocratic paranoia is staggering -- it will be interesting to know the reasons they will offer on the pro. Do they mean to say that we festival-sanitized Ontarians are somehow 'culturally superior' to, say, the Indian villagers who pool their whole community spirit to prepare for a single elephant parade? Superior to the Caribbeans who pool whole villages together to celebrate the sin of Mardi Gras?
Is this denial of the reality of the myth because we are to be "too enlightened for such heathen poppycock"? Is that the message? And if not this, then what exactly is their intended message of progressive 'weeding' our educational institutions of all festivities, hunting down and extinguishing all acknowledgement of the certain myths of our existance, replacing them with empty inventions in their own buro-sanctitized image? Spirit Day indeed. Perchance, could it be to tell the future drop-outs that the school is run by pompous asses who would be as at-home in a Victorian residential as they are expousing such supremist drivel in 'modern' schools today? Sorry. Pardon me. That was rude. My apologies. It's just that my mind simply reels at the astounding idiocy of this ignorance.
That it is being handed to my children as exemplary of the behaviour of sane and educated professional adults only makes it worse. The Mound of the Hostages in Tara (in Ireland, built in 3000BC!) is meticulously aligned to their rising sun of Imbolc and Samhain, yet this is too "childish" even for our children? These celestial festivals speak to us of our place in the cosmos and serve to define our uniquely-human extended sense of time, and the festive preparations and pagentry are time-tested community catalysts. Ironic isn't it that this purging should happen in a Town world famous and envied for it's Imbolc celebration of Brede (Groundhog Day) and star-light dances in the streets on the midsummer night of Lunasa (Sandfest) -- the only remaining unmarked celtic festival being the Easter-like May-Day resurrection fourth-point of Beltaine, and Easter/May-Day, as we beachers will all attest, sees the undeniable annual re-awakening of our village, a good reason to celebrate if ever there was one, and we do, we call it Deck Day. All four are officially denied by our schools, covertly snuck into the classroom consciousness only by the very most sensitive teachers.
First they came for Imbolc and Samhain, and we said nothing because we were neither children nor Irish. Then they came for Christmas and Easter, and we said nothing because we were neither merchants nor Christians. Then they came for Birthdays and we said nothing because we've not yet found a cure for the common birthday. Then they came for Reason and Justice and we still said nothing because all along we had been demonstrating ourselves no better than them anyway.
If anyone cares to join me at that SCC, I'll post the date, and I'd be very thankful for the backup ;)
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Amabel-Sauble SCC: Nov 20
Monday night, November 20th. 7pm, at the school. "Everyone is welcome" it says.
and its the kids that suffer..
There is always a small core of people everywhere, that would take any bit of fun and what being a kid is all about, away.It was ok for them as children to have a happy halloween, but -oh no- its not ok now.
So sad, and such a hit on the Irish and Scots pioneers who worked this land in the Bruce, and brought those very traditions with them, to be quashed by people that equate having fun and being a child by dressing up at Halloween...to that of evil...so sad, and so ignorant of facts.
Gary you highlighted the following quote:
"It is the time of the year when ancestors and other departed souls are especially honored."
that sounds down right eveil..yesirree bob..oh wait..isnt that what we do when we light candles in the churches? Hmm......
Ill try and make the meeting
You can say THAT again!
Sorry..I just couldnt help myself, Hockey ;)
More than just 'fun' is lost
Certainly yes, it is fun, and fun has been so thoroughly now purged from the school curriculum as to disenfranchise an alarming number of dropout-bound youngsters, leaving most everyone the schools touch with such life-long distain for learning, the average ex-student may never again pick up a non-fiction book.
But it is much more than fun at stake here.
First off, there is the pageantry. Pageants require copperative preparation, planning and administration. Pageants need creative input, organizational input, strategic input. Pageants are community catalysts that unite the participants in a common vision of themselves, and Mythological pageants universally strive to provide us with a vision of ourselves as better and greater than we know we are, inspiring us to be that extra bit in the future. Pirates and Princesses, the statistics tell me, are the clear front-runner hallowe'en costumes to the gradeschool crowd, and those are heroic ideals, noble and desireable self-image archetypes.
When I worked in geriatric care in the 70's, it was hip among the 'enlightened' sociologists to "ground the patients in reality" and to deny their dementia. Now dig this: the gentlemen on the 4th floor lived in an institution, plain dyspeptic mint-green hallways, they ate slop, sat in highchairs and needed a nurse to wipe their mouths, wipe their bottoms. What sort of sick bastard would insist these gentlemen 'face their reality'? Many of these men were decorated war heroes, many were leaders of their community, master craftsmen, patriarchs and accomplished pioneer farmers. If they chose to live in a 'reality' that said the hallways yeilded crops, really, who are we to question that reality as the false one?
Needless to say, we, the staff, all laughed at the directives from The Sociologist, and I don't even think she followed her own memos.
Modern Cognitive Science tells us that we can never consciously experience our perceptions, we can only consciously experience the sensory aftereffects, and while that sounds confusing, it does explain why people blind in half their vision can still catch a ball thrown to their blind-spot; they can 'see' without any personal conscious sense of that seeing, their bodies clearly at odds with "They Themselves". Further, we find that our expectations seriously taint even the most mundane apparent perceptions such as the colour of a banana (try adding more blue until the banana is 'grey'!) and this is the trick behind Dale Carnegie or Morita's famous line "It is amazing how different the world looks when we have changed" -- the cognitive reality is an imagined world, only often synchronous with the Objectivist's quantum foam world, we literally 'live' in a world that we create by our culture, by our myth, by our ideas about that foam. It follows, therefore, that all of us are gone walkabout in a dreaming, experiencing a myth-tainted sensation of a perceived reality we can only touch through abstractions, abstractions like math, like poetry, like music, like myth.
To deny all that in the name of 'education' isn't just sad. It is wrong. We rob the children of the pageantry and the community that goes with it, rob them of the mythic vision of themselves and leave them stranded in a dull green-walled world where everyone is in classic Freudian Denial of the rich poetry of their common human reality. How could that be healthy?
How many times do the teachers say, "Stop that daydreaming!" completely ignorant of the empirical scientific fact that even if the student could comply, the child would drop dead on the spot, lifeless meat on the floor, at best a Protozoa.
Some neighbours have voiced their support, but they also don't hold much hope for my quixotic charge. They'll say they don't have time, it's not in the curriculum, not their call, not their job and I expect that may be exactly the response I get. But if no one ever voices these concerns, then we have abandoned the field to the burocrats and nothing will ever change. Change starts by taking action, and myth and science both tell how sweeping change can be ignited by even something as small and simple as the sweep of a butterfly's wing.
The lost Candy apple
I guess it all falls into trying to weed out traditions, and make us all one bland wonder loaf with bleached flour and secret ingredients that make it last thousands of years when buried in a landfill.
Do you remember the candy apple? When I was a kid in the 60's we hunted down houses that handed them out.In fact word would spread throughout the street and we'd all rush to the house with the candy apples.Usually they were all gone, and we had to settle for those dreaded caramel halloween candies.There was a friendly woman from Hong Kong that made homemade shrimp chips that we would engulf her house to get at them...
Then came the urban myths about razors and needles and such , then ANY homemade treats were tossed out by our parents.All the work done by those friendly neighbour ladies for naught.Yes the same people who would sit on the front porch and enjoy us playing, and encourage us to play hide and seek on their lawns, and backyards, and treat us to cookies.Try having a child play on someones lawn now..see what happens.Gary will remember the old Red Sovine Song "It'll come back" not the best of songs, but the point is there.
I guess we are all bound to be wonder bread, and not a nice crusty bastogne.
scc night
so just as our children are not allowed to celebrate XMas..now we cant have fun on Halloween..leading up to all that is ancient and meaningful..who runs this world....we are all in this world to enjoy and have experiences..some of my best were Halloween..so now it is bad..we need to do a reality check..what are we teaching..all things fun and ancient are wrong/// I dont think so..
The Long Road to Education
Back from the Sauble-Community committee meeting, and first off, for all of you who were not there ;) I'm going to set your hearts at ease:, there was nothing culturally bullying or politically corrective or anything at all really sinister about the loss of Samhain parades of young demons about the school. No, no, nothing of the sort, nothing could be farther from the truth because the truth of the matter, I'm told, was simply this: "The older kids just didn't."
That was the gist of it. The really small children, the kindergarten and Grade 1/2, they say, they all wanted the costume parade and all, but the older kids, the sober gr'uppies, they just didn't really want to participate. They just weren't into it, that's all, and that is where I'm going to lay the fault and the blame and the sad disappointing loss of opportunity of it all right squarely back on the laps of the educators.
Eat your Beets
Kids don't like vegetables, as a rule. They don't like algebra, homework, piano practice, personal hygiene or writing thank you notes to Grandma, as a rule. They don't like weeding gardens, oiling driveways, raking leaves or paying taxes either, as a rule, at least when they are a bit older. Point being, of course, that the value of all these good things are best seen in the 20-20 of hindsight, and that's where the schooling has taught the sanity right out of the children. I was told that our school outperforms all provincial standards for the literacy and numeracy, and our present school system is the best yet, graduating some 20% more students than it did even just 20 years ago, which all runs counter to my observation but I won't wax anecdotal in the face of hard stats -- my point is that our education system is failing to teach children the essence of our culture, the curriculum may be great at readin' and 'rithmatics, but omits the meaning and point of pageantry and community co-operation, of 'harambe' working together in harmony for an innocent, just and positive goal. Kids only see myth in action in their movies, in their video games, in their TV ... all those places, if I'm not mistake, which are cited as having a bigger mindshare of the young than anything said in class.
The kids didn't want to participate.
Egad, man, let the children choose the lunch menu, you'll be feasting on fries and Twinkies! As educators we should be the ones to lead them into the pageantry of life. We need to show them how to work together in peace and goodwill on these festive goals and only then will they see the value of the ritual, they will see the why of it and know.
I don't know what I said, actually, but I do remember bits, and while no one rose to stop me (and I was on a roll!) I did notice our Principal Wainwright jotting down many notes that he wasn't slating for any rebut upon my finish. He seemed to be jotting down ideas drawn from what I'd said, and while maybe that was shopping list ideas, quite very possibly there's a possibility that perhaps it wasn't: just before I'd set in to fill up the Other Items agenda section Todd had given his own Principal's Report where the topic had grown out from his recent powwows with the Queen's Park edu-elite, the Minister and Deputy Minister and the Premier's own promise that this time around our enlightened innovations in education were going to be great, and now the new theme of all was going to be something called "Character Development" education.
Here's the promise we get from Avis Glaze and the call for "nurturing the best of the human AND universal" at the 2006 education symposium:
Aye, and there's more things, dear Avis, in this heaven and earth, than perchance do chance upon the dreams of your philosophies. Aye, the cognitive affective behavioural, the very best of the local human and the very best of the Cosmic Universal ...
Because I like to hear what I want to hear, I would want take that above blurb to mean, "Whole Human Education" at least in intent, and that means more than dry fact-myth and data, it means exactly what I'd said there about Literacy meaning not scanning characters on a page but understanding the stories that make us human and if Avis is sincere, which surely must be so, if that's the direction we as a people are going to take, if that's the mouth we are putting our tax-dollars in the place of, then zowie that's exactly where I was going with my pitch: Pageantry builds character.
And the SCC, it is said, is there to make teachers and parents work together as a team and there again, spot on and without doubt: The serious and determined execution of pageantry builds community. Sure they have 'Spirit Day' (by which they mean Bon Temps not Passing Ghosts) and they have a readied parade of various enlightening speakers they can summon, but, I asked, why re-invent what has been handed down time-proven from five-thousand years of positive clinical field trials? We cannot improve on these ancient community building principles, to even pretend we can is sheer pompous lunacy, and these calendrical events are all there, perfectly spaced, themed, honed and refined, sitting right there in the open public domain, free for the taking, waiting for us to wake up and come to our senses and simply use them.
An Action Plan?
Well, no, we didn't get one, but I did get the impression that there was at least an agreement in principle that perhaps the whole character might be somehow tied to the culture of a community and a community culture. Whether they still feel they must invent a wal-mart imitation version or not was not discussed, that remains to be seen, maybe won't happen. What I did get a solid sense of, though, was that here in the SCC there is some small potential, some latent energy that could reach the switch and flip into an action plan for precisely this sort of a change. They have the means, they have the desire, they have the motive and opportunity, and it's now a bee in the bonnet that they don't need to buy anything to make it happen, it only requires a bit of will and a bit of leadership. They may boast the best education system the world has ever seen, but that doesn't mean it couldn't stand some improvement and who knows, maybe a bit of Festival Fever could be the exact right catalyst.
The Urban Ideal of 'Cocooning' is your Greatest Enemy
Words to that effect. We have to re-make our 'Community School' into a community vortex, a connections place, and the best person to take the ship's wheel to bring us there is our school principal. Because he alone can command some degree of compliance to ask his teachers to ask of their students to eat those mythic vegetables, wash behind their pageantry and pay their social taxes.
Sure the older kids won't do it on their own, especially not when all their envied elders think it is 'silly' ... but dig, there is no crime in having a bit of fun! Have the courage to be that bit silly if it means you'll save the soul of your community! Steady the hand there kids, lean to on the scenery, man the float lines, pull up the magic mainsails and be painting the face of your co-student like your very life depended on it.
Because it does.