Indigenous education, eldership and rites of passage
Adults are supposed to keep growing up, becoming wiser, more mature in responses, not so reactive and reflexive. There is no — I have arrived at some endpoint of my development. There is only the journey.
There are many schools of thought around adult development theory. I teach one, Integral Theory, as part of the Syntropic Foundations program.
In order to have a healthy platform for development, we need, as children, to be surrounded by healthy elders who have progressed through the stages of adult development. Role models.
We also need clear threshold crossings, rites of passage, through the key markers of child to adult life. Rites of passage that require effort, commitment, and a deep awareness of our role as both agents and community.
I suspect that many Indigenous communities enabled their children access to true eldership and the rites of passage that, by their nature, insisted that children put aside their childhood ways and begin to take responsibility for others.
Our Western education and family systems do not have any of these critical ingredients. Wise elder role models are hard to find.
And rites of passage, if they exist, have been reduced to getting drunk when you reach the legal drinking age.
It is no wonder we have such a scarcity of true leadership taking positions of power. The essential ingredients to wisdom are missing.
Yet wise leaders are not missing, they are everywhere. They are simply not in public positions of power and access. Our operating system deliberately seeks to keep them down.
If we want a world with a future for Earth and all her children, we might look beyond the status quo for the kind of leadership our future needs.
Photo Taken October 24th 2023, Article written October 27th 2024
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