Immediately I felt a wave of responsibility. How can the grain of sand inform the beach? How could I be my own father’s teacher? And what was it to be a teacher?
I recalled my years of open classroom schooling when our teachers guided and supported our engagements with the surrounding world. Those irreplaceable experiences allowed a critical reflection of my later educational experiences. The next stop was a military academy, followed by the university. For nearly a decade at the academy, with rare and thus wonderful exceptions, the shepherds herded cadets into rooms devoid of life’s beauties and distractions. I experienced how classrooms are designed to facilitate the memorization of facts, obedience of rules, and repetition of dead-end experiments. Creativity was confined to the art studio. By high school graduation cadets were, among other things, eminent scholars on passive learning, and the methodology of strangling curiosity and poisoning hope.
Throughout my life, my mother’s artistic spirit and my father’s critical perspectives have provided a sanctuary for reflection on my schooling. For the first time I began to consider and then reconsider my relationship to institutions of learning, an institution’s relationship to the community, and the community’s relationship to Earth. Over those years continually pondering my father’s conviction evoked my imagination, stirred my curiosity, and empowered my intellect. If I, the young, naïve son, were to be regarded as a teacher by his father, the wise, aging professor, than the world around us was truly standing on its head. A decade later, Eduardo Galleano affirmed my conviction when he published Upside Down, a radical program of study for the “looking glass world”. But at 11 years old questions come in pairs. What was it to be a student? Education is a complex phenomenon.
The internal questioning persisted. Eventually, I settled into an idea that comforted me at 12 years old as it does today at 22. I wrapped myself in the essential ingredients of education. If teaching could be a sharing of experience, then learning could be considered an experience of sharing. The simplicity equated the lessons of our English teacher, to the experience of hearing bird songs. Inanimate objects were teachers alongside the eminent scholars on particle physics. While English class helped students express ideas with words, bird songs opened the mind to the majestic complexity of non-human language, and boulders demonstrated the concept of permanence and determination. My young idealism was lucid. I felt emboldened by this all-encompassing conception of education. Holding to those reigns stirred my ambitions to imagine a place were education was a communal activity, an activity of individual empowerment, community service and ecological thinking. Thus began my re-envisioning of education.
Education was freed from the confines of schools. Teachers became guides in an experiential journey. Children learned everywhere, and from everything. Communities were filled with young engaged learners learning with teachers, not from them. Students learned from and served community needs simultaneously. Observing birds by the streams feeding a local lake, conversations with the homeless man on the corner, calculating the height of the trees at Otis Ridge, appreciating the grandiose modern architecture of the Empire State Plaza, studying the bright stars above Camel’s Hump, arranging pottery fragments unearthed in a back yard, eco-system rehabilitation at an abandoned port, turning an unused lot into a community garden, were all experiences that eagerly volunteered an educational bounty.
Although adults always reminded the youth to “stay in school”, as a teenager I was not aware of the global context of “schooling” How an acute global situation was intertwined with local institutions and experiences of education was beyond my years. I was not ready to understand that the obstacles of progressive modes of education were both within us and around us. In time I would learn.
Undergraduate work at New York University in a College of Interdisciplinary Studies led to a BA in cultural ecology and 6 Masters credits in environmental education. Over those years I accumulated a variety of working experiences that informed my thinking on education. From leading wilderness trips with youth through Vermont, to assisting research into the potentials of inquiry-based science in New York’s failing public schools, to teaching hands on ecology and botany to school children at the New York Botanical Gardens, to leading service-learning projects with urban middle school volunteers, my awareness grew of the deep seeded problems in modern American education.
Admittedly I developed an outsider’s perspective. From working in unique and experimental educational environments, the limitations of formal educational environments boldly stood out. Teachers I encountered often acted as colonizers, noble trumpeters of rational thinking and social conformity, while their students re-enacted the role of curious primitives lacking in the ways of civilization. The flow of knowledge was assumed to be unilateral. Eliciting questions ensured the accuracy of the information absorbed by the students. Particularly disturbing was the detachment of most lessons from the human and non-human community in which all life is located. At times education occurred like the handling of a corpse. The subject matter was dead, and your imagination was needed to reconnect this corpse with the living world. Even within the university education was alive in the streets, and carried dead through the halls.
In response to the decaying educational world, my intention was to create community-learning experiences for the NYU/NYC community. Throughout college I was co-chair of a progressive school organization with ideals of educating local individuals about the necessity of active community participation. Our primary responsibility was to the ideal of a flourishing democracy “by and for the people”. Democracy was nothing without participation. Participation meant identifying community priorities and bringing them to the forefront of local debate. Empowering ourselves and others to share ideas, discuss current issues, and debate opinions was accomplished through movie screenings, lectures, conferences, benefit concerts, seminars, both national and campus-wide awareness campaigns, and marches. We helped organize them all.
The goal was to raise community awareness about NYU’s role in both the local and global situation. The hope was for awareness to evoke participation, and from participation would flow democratic change. By the fall after I graduated the Princeton Review rated NYU as one of the most politically active campuses in the country. Students were brilliant teachers, the campus community was becoming more aware of itself, and professors often remarked at how much they were learning.
Initiating, organizing and facilitating community-learning experiences brought on a profound recognition of the internal and external obstacles to changing how we learn. In my junior year I worked with a Mexican activist to found a 501C-3 organization “Seeds for Self Reliance”. Healing the North-South Wound 1999, an interdisciplinary conference at NYU, would be the first initiative of Seeds. Our ambition was to create a hemispheric network and resource for community initiatives in political, economic, social, cultural, or spiritual self-reliance and self-determination. Healing was envisioned as a process that demanded a new kind of learning, one that exposed and engaged the connection between personal, communal, international, and ecological awareness and health. The conference focused on the psychological-ecological-historical “wounds” which persist within and around us, obscuring the underlying interdependence of the human and non-human global community. We advertised ambitiously to the entire diversity of our community, artists, students, academics, activists, therapists, business people, and families. Participants heard panels of international specialists from various disciplines speak about critical issues between the US and Mexico. While these panels were interactive we offered a more profound learning experience by facilitating small group workshops in painting, theatre, and movement. The workshops were designed to maximize the reflective process by engaging participants through multiple intelligences. Learning would become a new mirror, to reflect the qualities in ourselves which are often hidden, aide us in becoming more fully human, and to attain our personal potential.
For me the conference highlighted the importance of understanding the context of education with an examination of the cultural paradigms assumed by modern modes of life. While the Global South is the birthplace of the humanity’s oldest and most sustainable cultures, the dominant paradigm devalues tradition, favouring the progress and economic development of Northern cultures. Why, for example, does the industrialized North attempt to unilaterally feed, house, protect, and educate the developing South? A Martian scientist studying Earth who saw the tons of food shipped worldwide would dangerously assume that no one starved in America or that Africa had no arable land.
In an alternative scenario, reciprocal North/South partnerships could inform a shared global community helping balance interdependence, self-reliance, and global ecology. Yet regrettably in North-South relationships unilateral imposition of policy is commonplace while reciprocal integration of successful practices is unheard of. Trade partnerships are commonly masks for economic exploitation. There is a viable argument among progressive thinkers that equates the globalization of neo-liberalism with a new colonialism.
While North-South distinctions are not concrete they open the door to examine a dominant paradigm that legitimizes a global minority of powerful leaders, and inequitable access to technology, information, and wealth. How then does a high school education in a small American suburb fit into this macroscopic picture? Communities enact a similar cultural paradigm when they build the walls of the classrooms, station a teacher in the front of 50 children, enforce strict behavioural norms, and demand test scores. Accounting for the change in scale, the basic paradigm of the modern teacher-student relationship appears to parallel the north-south relationship. Without a critical examination of our cultural paradigms, educational institutions perpetuate the personal internalization and local manifestation of the inequities that cover our planet.
Fortunately, for future generations, there are other paradigms. Paradigms exist which recognize the material and immaterial interconnection of living systems, human communities, and individual health. There are ancient paradigms, for example of the Australian Aborigines, which accentuate partnership, equitable access to resources, and sustainable living. For some time prominent leaders from an array of academic fields, national governments, and spiritual traditions (for example CA Bowers, David Brower, Mahatma Ghandi, The Dalai Lama, and Vandana Shiva) have articulated specific arguments pushing for the serious consideration and application of environmental, empowering, and communally engaged modes of education.
In addition regional and global networks of community groups, NGOs, non-profits, foundations, and institutes have developed to support promising research and implementation of innovative educational modes. While in state-wide campaigns changes to educational policies are sought, growing community initiatives create alternatives locally. Communities from diverse cultures are recognizing; the intellectual potential when students and teachers can learn together, the social benefit of equitable access to education and, how the sustainability of human communities in interconnected with a healthy eco-system.
The development of creative community engagement, regionally practical ecological literacy, and a holistic, interdisciplinary world-view within youth and adults alike are arguably prerequisite steps toward the flourishing of sustainable communities worldwide.
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