Foxfire Books

 

Cool! I remember these books from my youth, my parents having had them in their library. These are a couple of the once well-known Foxfire books, a series of 12 anthologies published in the 1970s, from articles published in the Foxfire magazine. I borrowed these from my Mom.

Wikipedia describes the series;

The Foxfire magazine began in 1966, written and published as a quarterly American magazine by students at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private secondary education school located in the U.S. state of Georgia. An example of experiential education, the magazine had articles based on the students' interviews with local people about aspects and practices in Appalachian culture. They captured oral history, craft traditions, and other material about the culture. When the articles were collected and published in book form in 1972, it became a surprising best-seller nationally and gained attention for the Foxfire project.

I remember being fascinated with the articles and the Foxfire project itself. It's an entirely different educational paradigm from what we see in most institutional schools (public or private) that is based on learning traditions, history and culture first-hand (or as close as possible) from previous generations.

The Foxfire books are still as helpful as ever for learning how to, for instance, build a log cabin or butcher a hog (though one could recently have learned a good deal about hog butchering just from reading Gilbert magazine!). They would no longer be the best resource for this kind of knowledge, however, since we have the internet, now, and through it a whole universe of useful, esoteric information. I've gone to the internet recently to get instruction on everything from knife-sharpening to fixing our washing machine. Video makes these things that much easier to learn, too. But the books are still neat and fun to browse. The article format makes them great for bedtime reading, and the whole outlook of the books makes them inspirational. Seems like they would be a great supplement for home-schoolers or scouts.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. - G.K. Chersterton, The Observer, 1924

(NOTE: Foxfire is not to be confused either Firefox, the popular internet browser, or Firefox Starfox, the awesome video game, wherein I beat the evil Andross and saved the entire Lylat system. You're welcome...).

Comments

[jim janknegt]

I have a bunch of these I got from my fatherinlaw. I need to spend more time with them. It would be good to know how to butcher a hog.

[Shakespeare's Cobbler]

You played (and beat) Starfox? And forgot (or mistyped) its name? Should I even ask if you know if it was it the old Super Nintendo original or the Nintendo 64 remake that everybody now remembers as the start of the series? (If you recall actual voice acting, it was the latter. The former had really amusing gibberish... "Dabbidadab-d'dab-dab!")

Digression aside, as a young man looking toward marriage and raising children, I've been thinking a lot about how to pass down real knowledge from one generation to another. Part of this is because I feel like I could have been brought up to speed on the stuff I know and do now sooner somehow; part of it is simply that I know a lot of stuff that isn't taught in school (stuff about self-mastery and purpose, but also stuff that I expect not to be taught till PhD level anymore by the time my kids are in college, considering that in my generation college has downgraded to a repeat of high school) and want to pass it on to the next generation if I can. Rumour has it that the little wars between each generation and the next that have plagued the past century or so of American life are not a universal phenomenon; and then, niether is the notion that kids should sit around in school for twenty years of their lives trying over and over to learn the basic methods of science and practical skills that they could learn the first or second time they actually, you know, try to apply them in real life instead of getting bored of sitting in a classroom. (Yes, I oversimplify the problem of the modern educational system; but my point is, even grossly oversimplified, it's easy to see why most men don't mature till they're thirty anymore.)

[Tim J.]

Thanks, Shakes, for dropping by and humiliating me on the whole Starfox/Firefox debacle. While you're at it, why don't you just give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it? ;-)

That's what I get for blogging on the fly. But then, if I stopped typing long enough to consider whether my thoughts were really worthwhile, I would likely never have STARTED blogging... AND, as Shakespeare so famously never said; " 'tis better to have blogged messily than never to have posted at all".

Or words to that effect.

[Shakespeare's Cobbler]

Sounds right to me, but I'm the bit player from the opening scene who leads the rabble around for kicks -- or business, or celebrating Caesar, take your pick -- it's an opportunity for wordplay, that's what counts.

At least I'm not the brute squad. The brute squad would've checked back sooner.

I'm still dying to know whether you got the voice acting or the babble. Just not, you know, dying so much that I remembered to find time to drop by in between all the real life I seem to be mired in (ah, woe). Yeah, I am a bad leagueist.

[Tim J.]

It was the voice acting version, which I know pegs me as a bourgeois mass-market maven, and not one of the True Brotherhood. I liked the way Falco was always talking smack.

[Shakespeare's Cobbler]

Hey, I think it's cool that you've played any of them. Falco's pretty fun. In one of the sequels Slippy actually got an amusing and believable teenage voice instead of the girly pre-pubescent voice he had in 64. Of course, they also added this purple psychic fox later and I'm like... "What??" (Seriously, it bewilders me enough to make me talk like a teenager.) I guess it's probably a throwback to classic pulp science fiction or something, but it threw me a bit.

Falco had an attitude in the original, too, it just sounded funnier. 8^)

[mark fuglestad]

I spent 3 years in Elizabethton, TN, for my flight training. I enjoyed the appalachian lifestyle there of the local people. We had lots of cornbread and soup beans and ice tea. What good memories those days give me.

Thanks for allowing me to view this article and I hope that I can help in knife sharpeners. Please visit me at http://www.sharpenablade.com. Thank you :)