I interrupt our series on overconsumption, to bring you this special message in honor of World Environment Day! (Spread the word~ we can’t reverse climate change today, but we can at least use today to spread education about how to change our unsustainable ways one habit, one day at a time!) I want to talk today about a system, a system I believe needs to be updated to be relevant to the pressing issues we live with today. That system is, yes, you guessed it… education. I believe there are many things that researchers have discovered about the way kids learn and what type of content really matters, that show we might have our priorities a bit skewed in this realm as well. I’m not about to begin a discussion of all the things that should have been long-ago reformed, but I will suggest for you several subjects I believe to be missing in our standard educational curricula. Perhaps, education administrators and school boards once thought these subjects to be things kids should be learning at home… Perhaps, kids should be learning these things at home… But, the point is, they’re largely not. In light of climate change, endless wars, social inequality, world hunger, and the myriad of other issues our earth is plagued with (largely our fault), I would imagine Mother Earth would appreciate us adding the following subjects to our schools:
1. Environmental Studies
"Environmental Studies 101" Photography by Author
Well, if we, adults, aren’t even aware of half the things we do that are destroying our earth, how can we expect our kids to know any better? And how can we ever change our ways, if the information is not accessible, and if we don’t spend time studying the information that is available? How can we expect green technology to come up with innovative solutions when our great minds are working on nuclear power plants? We can’t improve our habits, if we don’t learn why change is important and how we can change. The earth mother simply can’t sustain our living habits for much longer. And we certainly aren’t going to evolve fast enough to become “Climate Kid” in time:
2. Cultural Appreciation
"Cultural Studies" Photograph by Author
Next, I think cultural studies should be high on the list. And for all these subjects, I mean that they should be in the first grade agenda, not just in high school or college, when we have already set patterns for our behavior. I feel, considering how embedded into our cultural habitus (the internalization of our cultural habits) things like racism, religious intolerance, and environmental irresponsibility still unfortunately are (at least in America), we should be taught about how cultures develop, how they influence our actions, how we shape our cultures, and how we can maintain diversity despite globalization. In this age of global interdependence, a subject with such an interdisciplinary potential to teach us a holistic kind of critical thinking~ seeking the meaning behind our beliefs, our actions, our economics, our politics, our habits, our religious traditions, our social structures, all under the umbrella of culture~ is absolutely vital to our self-awareness, to realizing the importance of community, to understanding the significance of contextualizing our social issues, and to appreciating diversity instead of waiting for socialization to teach us xenophobia, intolerance to difference, and social irresponsibility.
3. Social Skills, Rhetoric, Communication…
"Communication Studies" Photograph by Author
Yes, I believe that we should be teaching our kids a thing or two about communicating while they’re growing up. Have you ever tried to change a bad habit? A struggle, isn’t it? Then, you know exactly why these skills should be learned early. It’s easier to teach my kitten to paw at the bell hanging from the door when it wants to go outside, than to teach my nana’s older rescued cat to stop scratching the door when it needs some fresh air. Communication is necessary to run a good business, to interact with others at our jobs, to work with our communities on projects, and to have good relationships. Along with this, of course, cultural studies should dip in and teach us about other modes of communication in other cultures, so that we don’t go being rude when we visit other countries and we learn what is important to other cultures and why.
4. Conflict Resolution
"Conflict Resolution" Photograph by Author
After our kids learn how to communicate, next on their schedules should be a class on conflict resolution, how sharing is important, and the recognition that what we want isn’t always what’s best for our community and our Mother Earth. The older we get, the less important sharing seems to be on our priority list. Come to think of it, if we learned to share in all areas of life, not just our colored pencils and cheerios, it might lead us to better economic policies and more community collaboration. As my academic area of expertise (if I can be so bold as to say I have one) happens to be violence, I have thought about quite a few ideas for my future “Manifesto of Peace and Holistic Justice.” But each one of those ideas happens to rest on our learning how to think about the whole community (local and global) and not just our individual selves and our nuclear families… In order for us to confront social and environmental justice issues, we have to learn to put our wants in context with other people’s wants and the needs of other living things. Like our spending habits, we also need to learn to put needs ahead of our wants. A simple concept, but somehow in its translation to political policies, the principle gets murky and lost in political mumbo-jumbo that supports the interests of those who can pay for their voices to be heard. Maybe, if we spent 12 years of our lives learning about negotiation, sharing, and peaceful interaction, we might start changing our minds about how to run our governments and when to wage wars.
5. Media Literacy & Applied Ethics
"Media Literacy" Photograph by Author
Finally, because what we learn doesn’t always translate into how we act and because the media has a tendency of reporting only what’s convenient to the editors’ or advertisers’ agendas, our kids should be learning how to read and watch the news, deciphering truth from slant and seeking various different sources to get a wider, more complete picture of the event in question. But not only should kids be taught to critically assess bias and manipulative persuasion techniques, they should also be taught to look at ways to transform media so that it upholds a higher standard of ethics instead of political/financial biases. Ethics should be a stronger part of the school curriculum, in general, and applied projects should be incorporated more, so that what we learn in textbooks becomes more easily viewed as relevant and we begin to practice the principles we are taught. As my beloved piano teacher used to remind me every week, “Practice makes perfect.”
We should have all been taught these subjects in school, but while we try to improve our own ways, we can also, at least, usher in a new generation that has a much broader understanding of our social and environmental issues and hopefully acts accordingly. We need to encourage divergent thinking as an essential part of creativity, which is the only way we can come up with new and better solutions to all our problems. Sadly, mostly, we just conform ourselves with learning textbook definitions and thinking within the boundaries others give us. In an RSA animate lecture, Sir Ken Robinson reports that in a longitudinal study of creative thinking (citing Beth Jarman and George Land in their book Break Point and Beyond) , 98% of 1500 kindergarteners tested at genius level. When they were retested 5 years later, only 32% of the same students scored at genius level. Another 5 years later, only 10% scored at genius level. Our creativity, unfortunately, seems to get curtailed the longer we stay in school. 😦 How are we ever supposed to come up with solutions to climate change and the recession if our creativity is not nurtured? Perhaps, as Robinson suggests, we should stop teaching that there’s only one answer (at the back of the textbook), and allow that we may not have all the answers and that there may be other better ways to solving social ills. I do not have a Ph.D. in Education, so I do not profess to have all the answers either, but I can imagine that if Mother Earth ran the school systems, she’d probably start with including these subjects. For those interested, below is Robinson’s speech on changing educational paradigms, with other ideas about educational reform.
Happy World Environment Day, all! Remember to do something in honor of our earth mother and remind others to do the same. And we will start off the new week with Tips on Buying Organic.
~Zulema Ibarra
A Cup of Change 