I considered setting up a poll for this question, but there doesn't seem to be the facility, so will have to judge the results from replies instead.
There are a lot of bushcraft schools around, it seems. To support this many schools, there must be plenty of takers (and plenty wealthy ones, too, judging by some of the prices!). Yet in the beginning - which means pretty much any time prior to the popularisation of bushcraft by TV personalities like Ray Mears and Les Hiddins - it seems that you learnt it from books (like Brian Hildreth's 'How to Survive' discussed elsewhere) and/or acquired it as you went along from hard experience and the sage advice of "elders".
It seems a general rule in the modern, retail-oriented age that all popular pursuits become gradually more formalised and standardised, and have legislation and other forms of rigour applied to them, with the result that the body of knowledge expands from just a few hundred or few thousand dedicated practitioners, to hundreds of thousands of casual students. That cadre of dedicated practitioners seeds the new generation of qualified instructors (whose qualifications comply with legislation and who are trained to deliver bushcraft according to a syllabus) who then teach the rest of us.
There is, however, a down-side to this standardisation. Any time that you develop a curriculum and lay down regulations and criteria, you will inevitably and unavoidably exclude certain pieces of knowledge from the finished product.
For example, I study Kung Fu. For most of its history, Kung Fu skills have been passed down through families or tribes and the secrets jealously guarded. This resulted in a complex, fascinating, over-lapping mess of different styles. A style is just a different approach to solving the same problem; how to do unto the other guy first!
But if you tried to rationalise all of it down into one linear curriculum through which you could take a student from novice to expert, you would have to ignore or disregard huge quantities of otherwise interesting and potentially valuable material, simply because a lot of it would contradict itself. This is because to train in all these different solutions to the same problem would be confusing and sometimes counter-productive, not to mention time-consuming!
We can be pretty certain of this because someone once tried to do just that! The Chinese Communist party. The result was what is known as Modern Wushu, which can perhaps best be described as aggressive gymnastics and bears little more resemblance to functional, combat-oriented Kung Fu than Frank Sinatra's tap dancing does to Muhammed Ali's boxing.
So, as the various arts and crafts that comprise bushcraft become absorbed into a cohesive whole and this new lexicon is fed to the thousands of new students that attend bushcraft schools every year, is the craft itself in danger of losing something in the re-telling?
This raises the following question: given the choice, would you take the solitary, dedicated route of self-discovery, leaving yourself open to serendipity (the discovery, or re-discovery, of solutions to old problems) or would you go down the increasingly commercialised, standardised route?
When you were starting out, learning your first basic skills in bushcraft (or survival, as it may have been known at the time), did you ever part with money to learn and improve your skills under the tutelage of a more experienced or qualified practitioner and did this bias the result?
How far did you get on your own before you paid someone else to show you how to go farther?
Did you ever pay?
There are a lot of bushcraft schools around, it seems. To support this many schools, there must be plenty of takers (and plenty wealthy ones, too, judging by some of the prices!). Yet in the beginning - which means pretty much any time prior to the popularisation of bushcraft by TV personalities like Ray Mears and Les Hiddins - it seems that you learnt it from books (like Brian Hildreth's 'How to Survive' discussed elsewhere) and/or acquired it as you went along from hard experience and the sage advice of "elders".
It seems a general rule in the modern, retail-oriented age that all popular pursuits become gradually more formalised and standardised, and have legislation and other forms of rigour applied to them, with the result that the body of knowledge expands from just a few hundred or few thousand dedicated practitioners, to hundreds of thousands of casual students. That cadre of dedicated practitioners seeds the new generation of qualified instructors (whose qualifications comply with legislation and who are trained to deliver bushcraft according to a syllabus) who then teach the rest of us.
There is, however, a down-side to this standardisation. Any time that you develop a curriculum and lay down regulations and criteria, you will inevitably and unavoidably exclude certain pieces of knowledge from the finished product.
For example, I study Kung Fu. For most of its history, Kung Fu skills have been passed down through families or tribes and the secrets jealously guarded. This resulted in a complex, fascinating, over-lapping mess of different styles. A style is just a different approach to solving the same problem; how to do unto the other guy first!
But if you tried to rationalise all of it down into one linear curriculum through which you could take a student from novice to expert, you would have to ignore or disregard huge quantities of otherwise interesting and potentially valuable material, simply because a lot of it would contradict itself. This is because to train in all these different solutions to the same problem would be confusing and sometimes counter-productive, not to mention time-consuming!
We can be pretty certain of this because someone once tried to do just that! The Chinese Communist party. The result was what is known as Modern Wushu, which can perhaps best be described as aggressive gymnastics and bears little more resemblance to functional, combat-oriented Kung Fu than Frank Sinatra's tap dancing does to Muhammed Ali's boxing.
So, as the various arts and crafts that comprise bushcraft become absorbed into a cohesive whole and this new lexicon is fed to the thousands of new students that attend bushcraft schools every year, is the craft itself in danger of losing something in the re-telling?
This raises the following question: given the choice, would you take the solitary, dedicated route of self-discovery, leaving yourself open to serendipity (the discovery, or re-discovery, of solutions to old problems) or would you go down the increasingly commercialised, standardised route?
When you were starting out, learning your first basic skills in bushcraft (or survival, as it may have been known at the time), did you ever part with money to learn and improve your skills under the tutelage of a more experienced or qualified practitioner and did this bias the result?
How far did you get on your own before you paid someone else to show you how to go farther?
Did you ever pay?
