Education's EcologyWhy Teaching, Textbooks, Testing & Technology are Not Enough.Introduction The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else. Barry Commoner
Much has been written about education since 1983 when “A Nation at Risk” flooded the consciousness of educators, politicians, economists and anyone with a patriotic passion for the United States of America. The frame of nationalism that pervades writing, research and delivery of education in the United States creates borders for thinking about education that locks in systems that were created to serve another time. The pervasive system of schools was built for the Industrial Age is and will continue to leave too many people, young and not-so-young, behind and still egregiously at risk. These are People at Risk. Concerns for education are no longer dealing with A Nation at Risk. Our global society must deal forcefully, immediately and effectively with A World at Risk. The world is at risk because our global human population is exploding; growing exponentially, and will, if it already hasn’t, exceed the carrying capacity of the earth’s ecosystems. The vast majority of this large and growing population has been excluded from a share of the world’s wealth. The growing inequality fosters significant migrations of people seeking a better life and avoiding the despotic actions of oligarchs on almost every continent.1 The human population has transportation, housing,and food production systems in place that are dependent, directly and indirectly, on fossil fuels while the uses of these fuels are increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and causing climate instability as a harbinger of global warming that will massively disrupt, first, coastal cities and eventually villages worldwide. The chemical industry is producing tons of cheap plastic that is overwhelming ecosystems, most notably our oceans, as plastic residues of discarded Styrofoam, polyethylene, vinyl chloride, polychlorobiphenols, and dioxins accumulate in the tissues of animals to disrupt coordination and reproduction. Risk is increased with political systems that are stagnating, unresponsive and increasingly undemocratic. Networks of people are increasingly disrupted through ambitious politicians and their affiliates who are more concerned with marketing and money than with democracy that broadly protects the worth and dignity of diverse segments of the global human population. We have, it seems, thoroughly confused individual libertarianism with democracy that is inherently social. Thank you Ayn Rand. The exclusion of a massive majority of people from a share of worldwide wealth has been systematic and egregious. There is a small minority that really believe that inequality is inevitable because of differences in personal qualities including but not limited to intelligence, moral character and evolution. This minority accumulates wealth and uses it for privilege and power while believing that the remaining majority is eager to serve their esteem needs for subordination and servitude (and even slavery in its many guises) as they relate to others. — We must focus not only on childhood education but also and emphatically on adult education because the school failures of the past have given us a social and political culture that cannot cope with the realities of a contemporary world and worldview that is sinking our life boat. Spaceship Earth is in danger of losing the support systems that our species and most other species need for survival. As our air is increasingly saturated with green house gases, our waters are polluted with industrial and agricultural wastes, our soils are depleted of essential plant nutrients, and our oceans are contaminated and inundated with tons of cheap plastic crap. We are a world at risk. We are increasingly at risk because we have created systems for learning that are artificial and block the natural learning that is built into our individual selves and has supported social stability. The open society envisioned by Karl Popper has emerged but only partially. Its conjectures and experiments began in America and have influenced social and cultural relationships in many places across the globe. But other forces and passions—particularly for privilege and power—have subverted and restrained a recognizable path to the open society. We will not, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, solve the problems of schools today with the same thinking that served yesterday’s industrial age schools. A new consciousness embracing the fundamental worth and dignity of all individuals must co-evolve while world population declines as new social systems for population control emerge. Entirely new systems supporting democracy, justice, civil society and, indeed, our survival as humans will enable us to live—even thrive—as humans while protecting the diversity of the life forms upon which our own survival depends. Education Ecology is fundamentally about human development and includes or embraces everything that contributes or detracts from developing knowledge and skills by individuals and institutions. Education Ecology is a powerful path to build useful new thinking about how social systems can be designed with and around education to foster change in the way we think about our human relationships and responsibilities for environment, economics and education. Survival is not assured by oligarchs acting as neo-gods and demagogues. We humans cannot thrive along with massive human poverty, gross political and economic inequality and the catastrophic losses of biodiversity. Our human future will emerge from a new vision. Unfortunately that new vision is many decades behind and very likely many more decades away, unless we begin to transform education along with all of society now. It is not either, or; it is both, and. — While it may be argued that the industrial age has passed in the United States and in many of the developed countries across the earth, there certainly is a case to be made that in the developing world, the skills and mindsets of the industrial age may still be needed. Yet the paradigms for the application of industrial age methods to economic development must be brought into compliance with the realities of contemporary earth science and global political imperatives. The industrial age schools provided many worthwhile attributes for the building of a workforce—punctuality, standardization, conformity, that supported a top-down hierarchy honoring ownership and management. However a new ecology of education may build upon these attributes, a new paradigm based on a planetary imperative must emerge. This imperative, encouraging and enabling parallel development of an industrial ecology that recognizes, and that is compatible with emerging concepts such as a Circular Economy, will be both imperative and inevitable for humanity's very survival. — Anyone who thinks education can be separated from social justice is living with their head where the sun does not shine. Anyone who thinks education is independent of economic and environmental values needs to wake up earlier, breathe deeply and watch the sun rise. The answer rises every morning. We exist on planet earth as guests of the green plants and we humans had better be sure we take care, really good care, of the soil, water and air that plants need to give us life. Natural systems have served life on planet earth for over three billion years. If we don’t soon develop a mindset to mimic these systems, life in many, but not all, of its forms will become extinct. A World at Risk emphatically includes humans. Our age, the anthropocene, opened recently on a geologic timescale, but it is at risk of closing quickly on even a human timescale. In the words of the late Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson; Economics is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. Our sun's warm daily glow, an open society, and respect for the worth and dignity of every living thing must become an inseparable value for education as well as economics and ecology. While education may be regarded as about knowledge and understanding it is deeply rooted by our values. We are too ready to treat education as an instrumental value intended to support the economy and the economic needs of capitalism within a framework that steers clear of biological foundations, most notably neurobiology, evolution, development and ecology. Action before inquiry and without reflection for human development has given us a system of education based on schools and schooling that no longer promises to meet future needs. Values are rooted in relationships and aside from instrumental or intrinsic values, the values of education are fundamentally relational. Our arrogant and high-handed thinking—or perhaps thoughtless—approach to education entails hubris that borders on belligerence. Education, even with lip-service to complexity, has been reduced to simple considerations in a world that is complex beyond the capacity of our contemporary consciousness to comprehend. Education Ecology is an attempt to refresh and reorganize our expectations for education. Building a new consciousness for and about human development is fundamental to our human future. What we casually and almost thoughtlessly call learning2 should be a natural process of human development and is a constant across a lifetime. Learning may begin at birth ( and some evidence suggests learning may begin in utero) but it is certain that development begins with conception. Development continues until death, which may be our final learning experience. We will experience that with death there is something of consciousness beyond death; or, that with death there is nothingness. It is, of course, highly doubtful that we can ever know. Our stories about afterlife are not based on evidence. Death is beyond teaching, testing, textbooks and technology. Education Ecology is all about relationships. One could, arguably, say that life is all about relationships. At the organizational level of ecosystems, life in the biosphere is a matrix of relationships that engage the atmosphere, soil and water to support plants, animals and microbes. The immunologist Sir F. Macfarlane Burnett famously said that all of ecology could be reduced to the simple fact of eat or be eaten; certainly an expression of a Darwinian view of competition within the broad scheme of natural selection. Yet a century after Darwin, Lynn Margulis stunned the world of biologists with new evidence that life at the cellular level in multicellular organisms is the result of cooperation among bacteria that created a whole new and more successful form of life. For more than three decades, Dr. Margulis studied and wrote about the role of symbiosis; cooperative living in biological evolution, building a path for new thinking and understanding how cooperation and competition merge in natural and sexual selection to support the evolution of life’s millions of forms populating our planet. Relationships in education build an ecology. These are relationships that, I will argue: 1.) emphasize pedagogy with teaching as guiding and development as discovery; 2.) support action inquiry that expands knowing; 3.) acknowledges and embeds physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions or domains of changing lives across lifetimes of individuals and institutions; 4.) are aspirational; 5.) integrate knowing across time; 6.) celebrate change; 7.) enable immersion and flow; 8 ) lead to self-esteem and self-actualization; 9.) expand consciousness. 10.) connect and construct personal and institutional skills, knowledge and positive attitudes to support benificial actions. — Society is in a quandary about aging and maturation of children. The option has been to base, seemingly, everything on age. School progress is measured by age in the grade-level system was adopted by virtually every schooling system. This despite near overwhelming evidence about differential rates of maturation among male and female youth not to even mention or consider differences in developmental readiness or capacity among a group, cohort or cluster of individuals that are of a similar age. Emergence is another consideration for Education Ecology. Emergence flows from relationships and is also a property of organization that these relationships foster. Emergent properties are the result of organizational relationships of the parts assembled at a place or space in time. Components of a system interface with other systems to form systems of systems. Relationships may be plotted in a diagram of a network and indeed the nodes and links of networks diagram relationships. Where nodes of one network connect with a need of another network; we see the emergence of a networks of networks. We begin to see that linear depictions of relationships are uselessly simplistic. Education based on linear progressions and measurements fits the definition of simplistic. With due respect to the KISS principle, there are definitely times when it is necessary and desirable to jump into the deep end of the pool. Society has opted for such a linear system to make the education of children manageable. That is, cheap and effective. It has been said that to do anything it can be done cheap, fast or with high quality. It is also well recognized that you can have any two but not all three. Somehow that doesn't sink in to those entrusted with a system of education based on schools. High quality should be a sine qua non—an essential condition—for education. Quality in the absence of immersion is ludicrous. The teaching of foreign language could serve as a case in point. We expect competent linguists in a system where we teach the language for part of one hour a day often for several years. Yet nearly everyone who has mastered a language will tell us that mastery came from immersion, often living in a foreign country for seeks or months. So our schools trade efficiency (and probably lower cost) for high quality. Efficiency comes from the clustering that is essential for a school to even be possible. Imagine a situation where a student could go and live in a foreign country for a year learning by doing and reflecting on what is being done. As levels of organization in living systems are studied, what becomes more evident is that at each level—cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms—new properties are revealed that cannot be a simple sum of the parts. Life at all levels including the supra-organismic levels of populations, communities and ecosystems, continuously and wonderfully reveals that life is more than the sum of its parts. Populations of organisms interacting or relating within a biological community display emerging characteristics at all levels even including the molecular and cellular levels. — Water quality serves and reserves the quality of life. And it does so in highly complex ways. The hubris that we know everything that can be known about a simple molecule of water, H20 is ludicrous. A single molecule of water is chemically simple but no water molecule exists that is isolated from other water molecules and from a border with other matter. Water molecules interact with themselves and as they do, new properties emerge. We have all be told from simple science in the elementary grades that water has three phases; solid (ice) liquid, and gas. Well! … it may not be that simple at all. Dr. Gerald Polack, working at the University of Washington in Seattle has provided very compelling evidence that water has a fourth phase—an exclusion zone—that changes everything we thought we knew about water in living systems. This is because, it turns out, water in life is not only essential as a solvent, it is part of the very capacity of DNA, RNA, Proteins to do what they must do to sustain life. Without water in its fourth phase, cells would not divide, muscles would not contract and nerves would not coordinate anything. What I hope this book will accomplish is to challenge and change the way we look at education impacts everything related to life. This will emphasize that our current paradigm of schooling for education is a relic of the industrial past and no longer fits the conditions that have emerged in the digital age. I will focus throughout on the central argument of the book; that the framework of schooling for education is out of date and out of touch with the contemporary realities of life on earth; human life to be sure but to a considerable extent all forms of life. An ecology of education is demanded now, not because of our awareness of ecological vulnerability, important though that is, but because education is embedded in a planetary system that is imperative for sustainability across every aspect of our human planetary existence. To say that the planet Earth is in a planetary crisis may seem an overstatement to many. But that is because ignorance of the condition of the Earth’s systems that sustain life and are essential for sustaining life are interdependent systems, never, ever independent systems. Human life is only one such system, which we now know is changing conditions for all life on planet Earth. Agriculture and the industrial age ushered in conditions within which the human population is exploding and humans now dominate and destroy virtually every known habitat and niche on Earth. The chapters of the book are divided into seven parts. In Part One we will identify first a series of problems that beset schools and that a culture has developed that has alienated society while society has heaped more and more on the bureaucracy of schools, and schools have assumed a role as a social services agency. Accordingly our systems of schooling have abrogated the social contract and the contract should be annulled. Part Two makes the case that teachers are unable to fulfill social expectations because they have been subordinated to a middle-management position in a hierarchy that is fundamentally authoritarian and undemocratic. Expectations for innovation are fraught because of schooling structures that are maintained by well-meaning but misguided actors. Ten chapters of Part Three develops the theme that entire societies in the form of communities of geography and interest are moving fast, likely way too fast for the ancien regime of school to cope, adjust, innovate or transform. Seven chapters of Part Four make the case for refocusing our thinking about education as a process of change rooted in biology and the biological principles of Evo/Devo or Evolution and Development. The chapters of Part Five we will dwell more inclusively on our global problems and the planetary imperative for education. Part Six focuses attention on technology and the emerging peril and potential of artificial intelligence across growing forces of capitalism as well as an unchecked autocracy or oligarchy that is anything but democratic. Finally in Part Seven two chapters are devoted to our near universal neglect of spirituality in education and how it needs to be embraced in a system that is fully secular and untainted by the rituals, practices and traditions that were established in world religions long before the reckoning of contemporary science. In the Epilogue I will make or stake a claim for new ways of considering education in the future. All of the potential for education's futures will call upon a new paradigm based on Education’s Ecology. Enabling the future will call for making just one change—begin with questions in a planetary dialogue and evolutionary developmental conversations. My constant question is: What should education look like and how should it function in societies of the world? Let's discover together new ways that out thinking can and should develop.
Recommended Reading & Sources Chronicle of Higher Education. Higher Ed News and Opinion. https://www.chronicle.com/ Subscription required for article access. EdSurge — Education technology news and resources. https://www.edsurge.com/ Parent Organization: International Society for Technology in Education. Free content. EdWeek — K-12 education news and information. https://www.edweek.org/ Publisher: Educational Projects in Education, Inc. . Subscription payment required for access to most articles. ERIC — Database and search engine from the US Department of Education. URL ERIC is a free search tool but articles may require subscription to a particular journal or access to academic journals through an academic institution. Hechinger Report — Covering innovation and inequity in education. https://hechingerreport.org/ Special Reports cover a broad range of topics. Most content is free. The namesake, Fred M. Hechinger, was education editor of The New York Times, an author of several books and an advocate for public education. Inside Higher Education — Higher Education News. https://www.insidehighered.com/ Monthly limit on article access. Teacher's College Record — Scholarship in Education. Columbia University Teacher's College. https://www.tcrecord.org/ Monthly peer-reviewed journal. Subscription required for search and access to current and most archived articles. A newsletter provides time-limited access to selected freely available articles. The 74 — News focused on K-12 https://www.the74million.org/ Founded in 2016 by former CNN correspondnet Cambell Brown, The 74 refers to the 74 million children under age 18 in the US. Newsletter highlights current articles. Free newsletter and access to most citations.
1 Australia may be an exception. 2 Throughout this book I will try to avoid the use or our familiar word, learning, but will instead refer to human development or, simply, development. It is my contention that learning carries connotations that have become far too vague. Last revised 29 March 2020 |