Three decades ago, the pioneering environmental thinker David Orr asked the question, “What is education for?” It was a genius question, meant to spur higher education to reflect on its role in the unfolding environmental crisis. Despite the increase in the number of college-educated people, planetary health was in decline.
“More of the same kind of education,” he wrote, “will only compound our problems. . .It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.”
Thirty years later, despite Orr’s prophetic urging, the efforts of many faculty and staff, and the increasing desire of students, the answer is that higher education is primarily “for” economic advancement. Despite the continued decline of the planet’s ecological systems, the primary reason for post-secondary education given by universities, liberal arts colleges, and (most vigorously) community colleges is economic success and the individual self-sufficiency that accompanies it.
It is time to ask Orr’s question again, but to an audience that includes all of us, regardless of our level of education, who struggle to address the challenges of ecological and social breakdown. What is education for and what kind of education do we need? Our answer: We need education-for-community, in-community, and about-community. We need “communiversities”— non-hierarchical, inclusive, public centers of education for the enrichment and advancement of community life. We need wider education as much as, if not more than, we need higher education.
Communiversities are the missing “third place” of public education. They are the educational counterpart to the cafes, bars, and community hang-out spots described by Ray Oldenburg as anchors for civil society. Communiversities are where adults of all ages can participate in sustained reflection on challenging contemporary issues—and in the process create community. Unlike casual gatherings like book groups or occasional public events, communiversities offer programs that are intentional, structured, and geared toward acting locally. Most importantly, unlike the dominant forms of “lifelong learning” that focus either on career advancement or personal enrichment, communiversities make the community their orienting principle. Instead of an abstract concept or the backdrop for personal achievement, the community is a vital presence, and that vitality is central to the goal of communiversity education.
A form of education that makes community the substance and goal of education, the communiversity entails a shift in mindset, ethos, and purpose. Its primary assumption is that we are “persons-in-community.” At the Center for NuLeadership’s communiversity, situated in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood ravaged by mass incarceration, poverty, institutional racism, and gang violence, the aim is a culture change from “rugged individualism to community cooperation.” If our communities are not functioning well, neither are our lives. To think of education simply as “for” personal advancement or satisfaction is to undo the tie between ourselves and our relations. And that, as we have come to learn late in our modern world, is an undoing with extreme social and ecological consequences.
Because the word “communiversity” is so evocative, it has been embraced by projects that overlook and even run counter to the deep-seated relationality that informs it. It has been used both to describe workforce development partnerships between higher education institutions and industry and as an appealing way to talk about university-community relations, especially conventional forms of lifelong learning and student internships. But these projects don’t do justice to either the innovative educational idea of communiversity or its historical predecessors.
Though the term “communiversity” is new, the idea goes back at least to the founding of the Danish folk high school movement in the early part of the 19th century. Responding to the elitism of formal education, the Danish thinker N.F.S. Grundtvig imagined a “School for Life” that would educate and empower the common person, strengthen community, and celebrate Danish culture.
The most influential folk school in the US, by far, was the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center) established in 1932 in Tennessee and inspired by the Danish folk high school movement. Highlander provided education that encouraged rural leadership, supported local culture, and improved the lives of people in the region. Established during the Great Depression, it first focused on labor organizing. In the 1950’s and 60’s, it became an educational training ground for civil rights work, sponsoring leadership training and literacy programs. All and all, this tiny school in Tennessee, always on the verge of insolvency, probably did more to promote civil rights and the common good than all the Ivy League and public universities combined. More recently, it has made environmental justice the focus of its grassroots organizing and movement building.
As the founders of Flagstaff College/Communiversity, we’ve learned firsthand that people are starved for serious, directed conversation, hungry for connection, and eager to know what they can do that will contribute to positive change in the world. We are located in a university town but like universities everywhere, our local university’s primary mission is research and preparing the next generation for employment. Though we benefit from its presence in our community, its focus is inward. In contrast, our practice of educational localism began with what we called the “3.5% project,” drawing on political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research on the power of 3.5% of an actively committed public to effect social change. Over the last three years, hundreds of people in Flagstaff have participated in “reading-action” groups and grappled with the questions, “What are we called to do as a community? How can we create the kind of community we all want to live in?” Recently, we have focused on the need to create a blueprint for community food security, giving our attention to treating food as a public utility rather than a private good. In alliance with local food-focused non-profits, we are facilitating a conversation on possibilities not previously considered, such as municipal food production and expanded public education in agroecology. Providing a structured forum for entertaining community-generated possibilities outside of the status quo makes it possible for such ideas to take hold in community. This practice of seeking answers that make sense in our community is also a practice of engagement with global issues, but instead of being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the enormity of the challenges we face, we learn to find and use our power where we live.
The shape of a communiversity is unique to each community. The Sweetwater communiversity in Chicago offers courses on the practice of Regenerative Neighborhood Development. The communiversity at the NuLeadership Institute focuses on the intersection of race and economics and strategies for capacity building. But in all cases, the curriculum is, as the NuLedership Institute describes, “community-led, community-created, and community-curated to meet our wants and needs.” The commitment to creating vibrant community life—and doing so by addressing the fundamental requirements of social justice and ecological health—defines each communiversity.
In the final section of his seminal essay, Orr points to the impact of deindustrialization on communities across the U.S. Rust Belt, including Youngstown, Ohio, near to where he grew up.
“What was taught in the business schools and economics departments,” he writes, “did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.”
Directed toward individual advancement in an economy that is neither sustainable nor just, higher education does little to make us better people or to protect civic life. Communiversities have a different educational agenda. Centered on education as a practice of relationality, they recognize the importance of compassion, cooperation, and community, qualities that, overall, are in short supply in our modern civilization. Encouraging wider education does not, of course, ensure that wisdom will result, but it provides a context within which it might. It is what education must be for.
For more on Flagstaff College/Communiversity see: www.flagstaffcollege.education.
