Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Faced with existential crises in the environment, human migration, creeping authoritarianism, and the specter of artificial intelligence, a world without a broadly disseminated capacity for thinking is severely exposed.
Henry David Thoreau said: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” And for that we need books, newspapers and other print media that esteem the truth and with it, create new generations of readers, writers and listeners.
Education over the last two centuries has had the unprecedented and noble goal of reaching everyone, of every race, gender, and economic class. That’s a good thing and shouldn’t be lost; but we have to ask ourselves: Is the universal public . . . experience . . . we foist on our children actually education, and is it any good?
Though a varied and complex story, the widespread separation of humans from nature in Western culture can be traced to a few key historical developments, starting with the rise of Judeo-Christian values 2000 years ago.
As the school year beckons, I would like to invite teachers to join me in co-creating an on-line knowledge action network – Transition U – as a space to share our thoughts, materials, best practices, syllabi, and any other resources we have for engaging our students both inside and outside the classroom in learning about the climate crisis, climate justice, and building resilient communities wherever we are.
We need a form of civilization that co-exists with the nine million other species of life on this planet. We need a form of civilization that is socially just and does not equate human happiness and well-being with the endless consumption of material goods. The modern university, as it is currently configured, stands in the way of creating this form of civilization. Rethinking civilization requires rethinking higher education.
If we are moving away from this old form of political education – filling empty containers with the ‘right’ knowledge or ideology and policing those ‘right answers’ – what then are we actually trying to do?
Rather than the neoliberal image of the school as business and ‘exam factory’, the image of the common public school is as a public space and public resource, a place of encounter for citizens of all ages where they participate together in projects of environmental, social, cultural, political and economic significance.
At the very least, critical pedagogy proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world and that it is capable of creating the possibilities for social transformation.
Given US capitalism’s control of the American economy, the economic system’s educational needs are best served by ensuring that the nation’s school achievement does not get out of hand; that is, schools cannot become too successful in producing well-educated graduates for the purportedly vast (but actually small) number of STEM jobs.
With over a decade-and-a-half of American schooling under my belt, I feel that I can assert with absolute certainty that there are some fundamental flaws in how we have chosen to structure education.
If we are to understand how social-ecological resource systems can be better governed, we need to come out of our narrow academic cubicles and interact with other scholars who may themselves be confined in equally narrow academic cubicles.
