DESIGN FICTION: Ju’wasi School
DESIGN FICTION: JU'WASI SCHOOL
The following is the transcription of a personalised persuad archived from the metastream of a wealthy, bohemian mother based in Berkeley, California in October 2032.
The persuad promoted one of several schools offering year-long immersion with hunter-gatherer tribes as a means of assimilating indigenous Palaeolithic knowledge. Technical Ecological Knowledge and ways-of-being in the global population was increasingly viewed as invaluable in the education of a humane elite. The intention was to send children, sometimes with a parent, to live amongst a tribe so that they may maximise rate and depth of experiential learning.
The immersion programmes were the precursor to the Rewild Sapiens movement that later would see permanent residence of neo-hunter-gatherer families in American national parks.
The persuad's metadata notes the following stamp from the American Guardian of Generative Advertising. This was the third variation that the mother had viewed in the campaign. The emotive, and romantic language used was within the limits of 'acceptable performance promise'. The wording and imagery was generated from a model that was 65% based on previously consumed content and so deemed within 'acceptable limits of personalised persuad generation'.
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[Cuts to first-person chase of an Eland across broken scrub]
You sit on the shoulders of millions of years of evolution.
Our modern lives are alien, cramped, caged. As humans we were meant for the wilds. We were meant to walk, to hunt. We grew to search forest and savannah for sustenance. We were meant to talk by firelight. We were meant to know our environment intimately.
Most of us know this to some extent.
We feel it when we sit for endless hours on front of our terminals, walk half-blinded by our VisionPros and Augcasts, slave away at repetitive and pointless busywork in the pursuit of abstract CØIN. Our ancestors did not know these irritants. They lived in worlds dripping with meaning - hostile and abundant in equal measure. Unforgiving worlds that challenged them to survive. And survive they did. Their lived experience was fundamentally different than ours. Fundamentally richer.
[Cuts to fire-talk, night roars of lion pride]
This is a world we have forgotten. This is a world we are slowly beginning to remember. As we quietly piece together the dream, recall what it was like to live in Nature, as Nature.
In ten years of psychological research we have discovered that individuals who immerse themselves with hunter-gatherer peoples go on to lead more satisfying, richer lives. Their experience, skills and connection to their deep past stays with them.
Most strikingly still, the younger the participant in our hunter-gatherer immersions the more positive are the lasting effects.
[Cuts to day-scene. Tool-building, group-talk]
Children's' worldviews and sense-making is heightened and most sensitive between the ages of 6 and 8. By placing children in hunter gatherer communities, they accelerate their acquisition of Technical Ecological Knowledge. Incredibly, they begin to learn and adapt new ways of survival, art-making and meaning-making in those worlds.
Hunter-gatherer societies are innately conservative. Innovation is a dangerous thing when survival is on the line. They rely on methods and tools that have survived the test of time; time in this case being tens of thousands of years.
Our modern children living in indigenous tribes, combine the best of traditional ways of being and modern day creativity, curiosity and idea-forging.
Alumni of TEK Path state that they come away with heightened understanding of the natural and modern worlds, a sense of change-making possibility, and agency. They score substantially higher for resourcefulness, resilience, grit and flow-finding than their peers.
These alumni are meaning-seeking, happy individuals who, without exception, have had major positive impact on their subsequent Pathways in adulthood.
Give your child the gift of deep human knowledge. Equip them with the survival skills and ways-of-being that held our ancestors together for hundreds of thousands of years.
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Overview
Your child will live for 12 months amongst a hunter-gatherer group living The Old Way, entirely off the land and in connection with nature.
As a student of TEK Path your child will be assigned a family. They will be cared for and treated as a member of the tribe. Your child will grow and be nurtured by their new families, and taught the Old Way in theory and in practice. Detailed immersive diaries of day-to-day life can be found on our metaspace and in the Immersive Documentary: Teaching New Ones Old Tricks.
Learn, practice, and rely on primitive and traditional living skills.
Travel as a hunter gatherer band, living off the land.
Learn competence and confidence in their ability to live in the wilderness with nothing more than simple tools they have made themselves.
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Philosophy
Every man, woman and child should know deeply the feeling of complete dependence on the bounties of nature. Every man, woman and child should know hunger and hardship and how to survive them. Every man, woman and child should know the meaning of total self-dependence. They should have the confidence that self-dependence gifts them, and feel that throughout their being.
Every man, woman and child should have the opportunity to understand their ancestors at an experiential level, to connect with them via the acts that define our species.
Few of us ever depend upon our own skills and resources for our needs. We depend, instead, upon the manufactured items of our civilisation and live in fear of losing them. Most of us are less creative than we could be. Most of us are less resilient than we could be. Most of us are less connected to the living world than we could be.
A person who has lived off the land without the help of a single pre-manufactured item has gained a security-of-being unmatched by contemporary living.
Pre-requisites
TEK Path strongly suggests that students bring a high level of comfort in the wilderness and degree of competency with primitive survival skills. These skills can be obtained on the longer Field courses at TEK Path, or elsewhere.
TEK Path requires that all Hunter-Gatherer course applicants undergo a complete physical examination and receive their physician’s approval in writing prior to final acceptance on the course.
Students must be 5 years of age or older.
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Testimonials
“My daughter attended TEK Path when she was 7. It was the single most impactful act of her education and has made her into the kind, wise, young leader she is today. I wish I myself had taken the course when I was a child."
“The freedom I found walking back into our past - and later bringing that freedom back into society is indescribable. I look back at the year I spent with the Ju'wasi as the year that made me who I am, all that I could be."
“Not a day has gone by that I haven’t applied the skills learned at TEK Path. I am who am because of my time at TEK Path. I returned as an adult for another 18 months and have just enrolled our 6 year old son in his immersion for this coming September."