This picture is an excerpt from a children's book that I wrote and illustrated. The central character is Muffy, based on a real live silver tabby that I had as a child. I loved her dearly! In this story, she negotiates with her family for her freedom to be an indoor/outdoor cat during the summer. She is seen here having a delicious dinner with the local tough guy, Mookie. Notice the Cat Nip wine and crabs -- yum!
Muffy was a cool cat because she had skills. Before she was adopted (by us) her mother had sufficient time to teach her the basics. She knew how to clean herself in the classic cat way: cleaning her face and neck with her paw and reaching with her sand paper tongue wherever she needed. She knew how to keep her teeth clean and her breath fresh by chewing on house plants especially ferns. She knew how to be charming. And most importantly, she knew how to hunt. Everyday when we opened the back door, we would find a big pile of half dead grasshoppers and crickets. She hunted for each and every one of those critters. Spying them in the grass, she would become still as a statue and slowly but surely . . . wiggle her back and then pounce. She brought each one of these insects over to the back steps as a gift to us! She was generous and clearly, a hard worker. What a cat!
I have been thinking about the importance of skills. I would like to teach my children everything I know and in the process, I'm discovering how incomplete my own education is. Because I have four children who are girls, it would be difficult to send them out for lessons on every little thing. So I really do need to teach them myself but do I know ballet, gymnastics, how to sew? Not really!
As they get older, they do go to school to become educated as I'm finding with my 5 year old but you really can't expect the school to teach them everything. They are assessed and grouped according to their previously acquired skills and their ability to listen and carry out tasks. So for children to have success in school, they need to be taught at home as much as possible. And success in school is not necessarily related to success in life. Each time a person does something new like go to school or get some sort of job, that person needs to learn how to navigate that system and bring life to it.
I imagine that scouting might be a worthwhile activity but even there, the kids have to be taught by real people: how to build a fire, construct a tent, how to identify edible plants in the forest, how to tell what time it is by noting the placement of the sun in the sky, how to tie various knots etc. I bet fewer and fewer people know how to do these basic things. I think that the lack of skills can be somewhat attributed to watching too much television. We got rid of our TV a year ago. I hope having no TV will make a difference in our abilities to take action in our lives. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have a little fun but zoning out watching show after show is a waste of time. Isn't it? What do you think?
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