We may at some stage have come across a remarkable lady by the name of Juliane Margaret Beate Koepcke, a German-Peruvian mammalogist who will be best known for being the sole survivor at the age of 17 of a flight from Lima to Pucallpa, which crashed in the Amazon jungle after being struck by lightning. Incredibly she fell 3 000m (10 000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffered numerous injuries including a concussion, broken collarbone, and a torn knee ligament. She then survived eleven days alone in the jungle by following a creek which led to a river before coming across a local lumberjack camp, all the while combatting severe insect bites and an infestation of botfly larvae in her injured arm.
Many scholars and researchers have sought to understand how she survived such an ordeal while fourteen other passengers were later discovered to have survived the initial crash but died while waiting to be rescued. For her part, Juliane did not just survive but went on to gain a doctorate in biology from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich before returning to Peru, and ultimately back to Germany. Her time as a student in the jungle clearly helped her in later studies.
Another story of survival in the jungle might be found in Walt Disney’s classic film Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling’s classic story of the same name, where the ‘man cub’ Mowgli is found orphaned in the jungle and reared by various intriguing animals, including the ever-cheerful, ever-positive Baloo the Bear, with his uplifting advice to look for the bare necessities of life. Baloo is confounded and confused by the ever-serious Bagheera who believes it right to return Mowgli to the man village, despite Baloo’s protestations: “The man village? They’ll ruin him!” Mowgli does survive the jungle experience and wants to stay there, while the apes, led by King Louis, want, in reference to Mowgli the man cub, to “walk like you, talk like you, be you”! Mowgli wants to thrive in the jungle; the apes want to strive outside the jungle.
In a different vein, there is a British reality television show called I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here where famous people are placed together in a jungle setting for several weeks and are tested with various challenges and trials to earn treats and extra food while all the time living with snakes, spiders and other creepy crawlies. Gradually the contestants are voted out by viewers who watch all the events of the jungle camp, even if some voters are motivated by keeping in the unpopular celebrities just to see them suffer even more. The one who survives to the end with the greatest conviction is voted the King or Queen of the Jungle. Survive in the jungle – that is the task.
It would seem we have taken a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous in recounting these different stories bu they lead to another account shared by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike sportswear in his book Shoe Dog.
He recounts how he met the 86-year-old Vietnamese General Võ Nguyen Giáp, the man who singlehandedly defeated the Japanese, French, Americans and Chinese in the Vietnam War, and asked him how he had managed to not only survive but thrive and succeed. The reply was simple: “I was a professor of the jungle” which led Knight to conclude and advise that “We must all be Professors of the Jungle”.
Such a statement leads to various questions. We might question why we (and in turn, our pupils) should be professors of the jungle.
A jungle is generally wild, untamed, full of extreme danger, just like the world.
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Is our responsibility not a matter of being Escapers from the Jungle, rather than Professors in it? Should we not be returning our man cubs to the village which is their home, rather than helping them to stay in the wild? Should we not be teaching them to get out of there?
In another sense, we might wonder why we should all be professors of the jungle. That implies that there are no students, if all are professors; who do professors teach if there are no students? There are perhaps too many people teaching survival skills instead of making the world a less wild, dangerous place.
We live in a jungle, a wild mess. We need to help our children find their way more than learn ways to live in it. It is not just celebrities who need to get out of the jungle; it is children. It will not happen by public vote though but through private values. That is the bare necessity.
