I'm not as satisfied as I'd like to be with the quality of writing in this piece.
However, I've toyed with it to the point that the only other way to improve it
would be to totally rewrite it.  
Hopefully the ideas contained within will make following the thread worthwhile.  

In the tapes from the Coyote Teaching class at the Tracker School I came across a very interesting reference to something John Young calls "Adolescent Self Absorbed Behaviour". It is first referred to in terms of young birds, where the bird is crying out for food and is totally self absorbed. -meaning that it is concerned with its own immediate needs but without any awareness of external factors. This ego centrism makes them very vulnerable. If they don’t have a sense or awareness of when to be quiet, they attract attention, miss signs of danger and become easy prey.

Such animals are taught or develop awareness through either a close call, or through experience. Danger from and fear of predators foster awareness and a graduation from what may be an intrinsic "adolescent self-absorbed behaviour". They either learn or die.

If you apply this idea to human development, you have to take into consideration the fact that our society is mostly without predators and has been made safe from most hazards. Predators, for their part, are not usually in danger and yet are the most obviously aware species around. In their case, it is not the need for protection which spawns awareness, but rather hunger and the need to stalk. If a fox or cat is not aware, if they do not learn to read and control concentric rings, they go hungry. This other aspect of need, the kind associated with predation, is not usually required by human adolescents either, although often used.

Predators have a greater need to control concentric rings, while prey have a greater need to read them. However both are interested in and find awareness necessary.

Human adolescents (and children) also have this self absorption. It is ego centrism in children, but becomes something that needs to be transcended in adolescence. This would be a transcendence from self absorption to a degree of awareness which is generally functional in our society. It may not be necessary for food or protection, but it is generally useful in maintaining a certain quality of life. It may not even be so much that awareness is useful (although it defiantly is) but rather that self absorption is hindering.

The lack of any conditions that would correct a self absorbed state of mind leads to a number of things in our society. The awareness to notice what is going on in society and the general environment is underdeveloped in young adults. This extends from noticing what is going on in their lives to what’s happening in the bigger scenes of politics or global environment. The brain patterns needed to notice things outside of a narrow, self indulgent sphere, are never developed.

While the tools and experiences needed to make this leap to awareness are missing, there is still an intrinsic urge to do so, much like an intrinsic urge to exercise underused muscles. I think that the self absorption is intrinsic, but I think the drive and longing to escape it is intrinsic as well, leading to three possible consequences.

In the first consequence, the individual is totally unable to make the leap to awareness, and quiets the urge by diving into behaviours which reinforce the self absorption. This might include video games, drug and alcohol use, and grand materialism. Compounding this is the fact that many of these activities, in fact, subject such people to predatory actions from other members of society, but the individual has developed no protection from this predation. It is often the case that survivors of this predation do develop keen awareness and become very strong and wise members of our society. Such people receive their lessons in large doses. If they survive, they have managed to develop formidable awareness skills. The cost is often great, and the success rate should not encourage people to pursue this route. Most don’t get that far and just "veg" in harmless, mind numbing self absorbed activities like video games or spectator sports.

Then there’s the second possibility where individuals seek out dangerous activities to try to reach the obscure goal of awareness. Deprived of life’s lessons, they seek out dangers, subconsciously making up for missed opportunities and trying to fulfill that need for awareness. We are a society that likes to add danger to our lives in the form of extreme sports, fast driving ...or whatever. Unfocussed, these activities often don’t yield the desired result and such people just drift in this alternative haze of danger and fear. They become adrenaline junkies, or workaholics or addicted to dangerous sexual practices. These are more dangerous than the "mind numbing" alternative. -But it is a clue to the solution to the problem.

Kids that have been in gangs or have survived on the street level may not have academic intelligence, but often have a life savvy that we call being street-wise. It’s a form of awareness, and it is worthy of a degree of respect. Unfortunately this type of awareness is usually acquired in a predatory environment and hence has antisocial aims.

There is an irony in the fact that many activities which reinforce self absorption, such as drug use, also present an image of danger or adventure. It is unclear whether this paradox is deliberate on the part of the predators.

It remains to discuss how this knowledge can assist in the education of young people. What is its pedagogical relevance and how does it impact on (Coyote) teaching methods?

The first deduction is that we must provide appropriate, non-predatory forms of adventure and risk. However our society is (in the name of litigation) moving towards not just more safety, but also a more insulated experience for younger people, devoid of consequences and any need to learn awareness. Playgrounds deemed not up to the latest safety standards are ripped out of the ground. Children who once ran through forests and climbed trees, now play on climbing apparatuses which eliminate all danger and also any need for the child to think about danger. Students whose parents used to walk a mile uphill to school (both ways) now are bussed, even if their home is only 300m from the school, -for reasons of safety, or are picked up at the end of their driveway when they could walk to a street corner t be picked up in a group. No need to experience weather, either! Increasingly we have children declaring anything 5 degrees higher or lower than room temperature unbearably hot or cold. Leaving a warm home into a warmed up car or bus and kept inside during unpleasant weather, it is no wonder that children dress as if they are unaware that it is winter outside.

But what constitutes acceptable risk? For starters, back off from the antiseptic, safety obsessed stance we now have towards children. It began in the school yard with the throwing of snowballs being branded a crime. Does anyone out there know of even one reliable report of eye injury resulting from throwing a snowball? Does anyone out there actually apply the no snow balling rule outside of the school yard? If you were with a group of friends and a snowball fight erupted, would you chastise the throwers? I love a good snowball fight.

And then it has proceeded to the no hands rules in games. No rough and tumble; no contact sports. It has resulted in first softballs being obligatory in school yard baseball, - and now sponge balls. Soon we may be using foam bats! Overprotection and fear of litigation has led to countless pieces of playground equipment and climbing apparatus being torn from the ground as unsafe. Where are all the cripples from the jungle gyms of the past? We’ve done all this and wonder why our young people stand around bored. (This, of course, is not even mentioning banning of baseball card games and marble games because they are considered gambling.) And also, we wonder why physical fitness is on the decline.

The psychological developmental penalty we are paying for this goes largely unobserved. It is the creation of sanitized, unaware, non-resilient and intolerant adults, -who have no battle scars and who have never won the wisdom which comes from hard knocks.

I believe that this is why my outdoor program can attract young people so reliably. The adventure, the daring, the uncertainty, the roughness all are attractive features to young people seeking to flex those mental muscles and develop awareness. We are not afraid to get dirty or be uncomfortable, -in fact both are guaranteed! We are not afraid to be authentic in what we do, such as real pipe ceremonies and the real trials of the solo experience. We are not afraid to use meaningful rites of passage, -not ones stripped of all meaningful experience and reduced to a mere boring husk of symbolism.

In recent years, in my class, I have been disturbed by an increased failing of any sense of consequence in my students. Many don’t care about their marks. Many don’t care about parent reaction. Many don’t care about their future. Why should they? They live in a world with very few consequences. Most of the natural negative physical consequences have been purged. As for psychological consequences we no longer consider it fashionable to fail students, punish them, or now even provide them with consequential feedback in the form of failing grades, because it may potentially damage their self esteem. What we’re left with are students who don’t care about anything because they don’t believe any adverse consequences will ever befall them. Then we send them to high school, where they are victimized by the predators.

We need to back off the fear of psychological consequences as much as we have to temper our fear of physical consequences. The consequence of failure, which comes from making a poor mental decision is like the pain which may come from making a poor physical decision. This experience leads to growth and a progression from self absorption to awareness. The culmination of these hard experiences play an important role in forming the reality consensus by which the individual will view and interpret the world. Unprepared for both physical and psychological consequences, such people are at the mercy of the predators in society. They are easy pickings because they don’t see the consequences of their decisions and actions. Pregnancy as a result of sex is only an abstraction, as is dependence with smoking and legal difficulties with violence. In the individual’s reality the causal connection is not real. It may be known, but not understood.

I am not being a monster. I am not saying that caution and safety should be thrown to the wind. A child should not be permitted to make a decision in a situation which is beyond their developmental comprehension. Physical safety should be a consideration in games, equipment and outdoor programs. Experiences and challenges in my outdoor programs are managed to have safety, and more importantly, to teach safety. It is the obsession with complete and utter safety (fuelled by litigation) that goes beyond what should be the natural experience of the child. Similarly, with mental or psychological consideration, a child should not be traumatized by consequences. But we must remember that a child’s level of moral development still relies heavily on reward and punishment as meaningful consequence. (See Kholberg’s developmental morality theories, -the recognized psychological model of moral development.) To deny this is to deny the child access to that playing field in which he or she will develop moral values and attitudes. These are the things which form the foundation for motivation. Most action and motivation is dependent on one of three things. Reward and punishment. Desire to please others. Intrinsic sense of value.

Allowing a child the right to make mistakes an suffer the consequences must be reintroduced into our way of thinking. If one of my outdoor group members goes out on a solo unprepared, he may be cold all through a sleepless night, but that is an acceptable and valuable consequence. I check on them and give them a whistle, and thus maximize safety.  But the experience of being cold is more valuable than avoiding discomfort. 

These things are called growing pains, and we have to find more acceptable ways to reintroduce them to our children.

By Peter Wiinholt,  Jan. 2001

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