A couple years ago when we were still homeschooling, I decided the children and I would spend a day cleaning the deteriorating stain from off our back deck in readiness for Olivier to put down another fresh layer. My plan was to hand out brooms and buckets of water and to scrub together like one happy family. The children weren’t the most enthusiastic about the project but with a little coaxing and vision they took a leap of faith and ploughed with me. Which unfortunately didn’t last very long.
The more work one child did than another, the more that child complained about another child doing less. Then came the “but you’re older so you SHOULD be doing more work!” comments from the younger children, which then turned into a ping pong tournament of words thrown back and forth between three players. If my children were old enough to reason like this they were sure as heck old enough to scrub that deck too. But the bickering continued and my attempts to stop it grew louder so that by the end of the day zilch got accomplished.
That evening I deliberated whether I should just go ahead and clean the deck myself. I could had easily done the work but what would the children have learned by me doing their work for them? Lucky the weather turned and for the next couple days it rained. Which meant that we spent a lot of time indoors doing fun stuff, like reading. At that time we were learning about American History and I was reading to them The Story of Liberty by Charles Coffin (and reading on my own about the history of the constitution). During this incident I was reading excerpts from William Bradford’s original manuscript, written in 1647. It was his personal account of the history of the Pilgrims before and after their arrival to the New World. While reading what happened at Plymouth Plantation, I thought I could see my error for the way in which I executed cleaning our deck. Hear me out a bit.
After the Pilgrims arrived to the New World they were still indebted to the Virginia Company for their journey, which they honoured despite the maltreatment they experienced while on board the ship. Then there were changes in the agreement. Part of those changes being that they were to work seven years and that all profit was to be divided evenly for the common good of all. But hardly time went by when “they found some discontents & murmurings arise amongst some, and mutinous speeches & carriags in others…” Business wasn’t going as well as they had hoped. This form of governing would show that “taking away of propertie and bringing in comunitie into a comone wealth… was found to breed much confusion & discontent, and retard much imployment that would have been to their benefite and comforte. For yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour & service did repine that they should spend their time & streingth to worke for other mens wives and children, with out any recompence… and for mens wives to be commanded to doe service for other men, as dresing their meate, washing their cloaths, &c., they deemd it a kind of slaverie…”
Bradford called it the Injustice of Collectivism. Which is another form of communism. They finally hit upon the solution and relying on Providence came upon the idea of Initiative of Individual Farming. They assigned each family with their own plot of land rather than work in one communal lot together, which in the end proved successful because more corn was planted than would otherwise have been. Even “the women now wente willngly into ye feild, and tooke their litle-ons with them to set corne, which before would aledg weaknes, and inabilitie; whom to have compelled would have bene thought great tiranie and oppression.”
So there I was reading this with a solution I thought would help us with our work problem. What I next set out to do once the weather cleared was to experiment with the idea of Initiative of Individual Farming, giving each child a plot of deck in which to clean. And would you know it, it worked. The work wasn’t perfect but the point is the children worked quickly and did it without murmuring, which is hardly what happened when we first tackled the job. They were able to see their work and the progress they made on their plot; and when they saw another’s work, made them want to work harder.
Of course our initial deck cleaning stunt isn’t exactly what one would call practicing communism, but the Pilgrim’s solution helped me see that if we changed the way we looked at our problem, the job could be tackled in a much more efficient if not positive way. This of course hasn’t changed how work is always done in our home but I am often reminded of ways and methods in which we can better use rather than always resort to the squabbling that we are prone to do.
