Following another insufficient COP there is a growing vacuum between our day to day lives and what is required to mitigate the worst effects of climate breakdown. Although COP26 was tepid, the awareness and concern for this climate emergency we all face is growing. I believe students and teachers are hungry for a school system that addresses head on the challenges of the present, indeed the reality of what we are faced with renders much of what we do in the business as usual manner meaningless. After all, as the Friday’s for Future placards read, ‘What am I studying for?’ because there is ‘No future on a dead planet’. A wellbeing curriculum that puts people and planet at the focus is the only meaningful route education can take. I am not close to an expert in education, or in anything really. A true expert is recognised by their intimate knowledge of a subject, the way they pirouette with their experience, intuition and insights aligned with the facts as they emerge. I am not that person. Though I could not resist sitting down to write this piece. Education at its best invites everyone to the table and engages with lived experience. Ideas alongside hard won pieces of information, have to be distilled through a prism of values that asks what do we collectively want as people? What is the good that we want to corporately praise?
Education
as if people and the planet matter, has been a preoccupation of mine since my
degree in Outdoor Studies and Experiential Education. From then on in I told
people my work was to do with transformation and real learning. The reality is
I have spent a decade sifting through the sand at the edges of an education
fortress whose foundations have eroded. At sea, me and the system I speak of. I
wanted to graft myself to something that was going to address the challenges of
our age. So much so that I still have not trained to be a teacher and am
currently working as a Learning Support Assistant in a mainstream secondary
school whilst I look for signs of land. What challenges am I referring to?
Those now familiar phrases that spell very real trouble such as ‘climate
emergency’ and ‘ecological collapse’ along with growing societal division, the presence
of racial inequality and a desire for social justice that currently outstrips
us. Anyone in the pub will tell you that you go to school so you can get a job.
The same person might also tell you that school was a drag but they liked the
social aspect (or found it excruciating). I believe education is far more than
an induction process into the world of work. It is a participatory journey
towards greater wholeness. Where we can slowly specialise and work out how to
be a blessing to others, first by being introduced to the ways we are blessed.
The
story goes that our education system has a history of seeing the young people
in its charge as resources, units in a capitalist project of immense hubris, on
an endless mission towards perpetual unrestrained growth. As the factories
closed and job market changed, schools have been engaged in a project to pacify
and hypnotise the majority whilst syphoning off an elite to captain the ship as
it sails diligently for the iceberg (The greedy minority wager by the time the
iceberg melts they will be sipping cocktails on another planet). I am not
cynical enough to buy that story whole-sale, but only because I know that
inside our school’s individuals are making daily choices to champion curiosity,
creativity, rigour, questioning and collaboration. Our education system is not
one thing but an unwieldly network of competing values staffed by overworked, well
qualified, mostly passionate people who want the best for people and planet.
That is my intuition; schools are not a conglomerate of evil and brainwashing,
they want to change in response to our times, but they are under resourced,
scared and not given a mandate to make bold changes. These people that make up
the institutions are in the cross fire as politicians, corporations and
activists posture over what education is for. It is a tug of war fight that
pulls the young people from apathy through a desert devoid of inspiration into anxiety
and disillusionment.
I
want to explore how we can own the best in education, for from a flawed system
good ideas have been birthed and are still gasping for air amongst the detritus
of confused values, antiquated methods and data worship. Ideas that find their
footing in primary school don’t get a fair run out into secondary. For example,
cross curricular approaches to learning work well, they prize research skills,
nuanced thinking, discussion, collaboration and recording work innovatively.
But perhaps this is just tinkering around the edges. Do we need to be thinking
more fundamentally about how we organise our schools in relation to age, class
size and timings of the school day, to hold that children will not all follow a
linear path? Do we need to create a society that affords families more time
over work, time that might be used to team up in different configurations at
different points in their child’s life, patterns that allow for more
exploration and serendipity? Ultimately to make journeys, physical and
internal, to find an awareness, love and respect for themselves, others and the
environment. That last point was influenced by the views of Colin Mortlock in
his book Adventure Alternative (Colin founded the degree course I took and
mentioned above). Schools do have an important role in offering teenagers that
rubric of boundaries to react to, to stretch against, but this is an art form
not a blueprint and the blunt instrument of conformity does a disservice to the
life force inside the young people. Instead schools can become sites where
elders, true experts and mentors are put in the path of the next generation,
where those groups sharpen one another for a future that needs both vitality and
wisdom, along with a sound scientific understanding of the world we live in.
At
its most benign the function of a school has been to equip the future workforce
with the necessary skills to lend their backs to the wheels of progress. As the
circumstances change so too will the jobs, that much is obvious. Only my
feeling is that those defining the word progress have not had the spiritual
maturity to understand what it might mean or possess a true vision for what it
could look like. Purely equating progress with economic growth does not follow
in the context of a finite planet of natural resources approaching a tipping
point in its life support systems. True progress asks the nuanced questions around
how we create wellbeing for the planet, for the people and life on it. That some
people are asking these question gives me cause to hope. In my opinion to
explore the ‘how’ of wellbeing for planet and people has the makings of an
excellent lengthy school project, it should be the focus. Indeed, a ‘Wellbeing
Curriculum’ could become mainstream, not one off sessions on diet and
mindfulness but something deeper that equips students to critique the outdated
economic status quo and learn about innovative solutions to subjects such as
organising and politics to trade and food systems. Of course this would include
mental and physical wellbeing on the individual level but it should strive to
place that into a political, environmental, economic and social context too. This
kind of education values the substance of a person, their character, social and
emotional wherewithal or what are sometimes called ‘soft skills’ over that
which can be simplified to a number on a spreadsheet.
Each
day at work I enter the four walls of a classroom, it is a lethargic bubble
burst only by my own cognitive dissonance. Outside the world is coming to the
boil, scarcity and chaos loom, inside we wade through the curriculum. The
children are kept in incubators where they are not given the sustenance they
will need to confront the challenges they will face together. They know it too.
Broadly speaking we lose the ‘cleverest’ to the status quo that is self-serving
and the ones whose needs are not met, we do not manage to induct them into
their life spark and gifting. If they were resources, we couldn’t afford to
waste them. Yet they are so much more, they are the continual emergence of life
making sense of itself and they are woven into a united whole.
