Transforming Work, Reimagining Education
A proper reorganisation should be based on this understanding of work as just one of several realms of life; a life brimming with moments of connection, rest, labour, contemplation, education, and idleness.
A proper reorganisation should be based on this understanding of work as just one of several realms of life; a life brimming with moments of connection, rest, labour, contemplation, education, and idleness.
The body politic was sick long before the virus arrived, already at risk of collapse under the weight of its elite hierarchies. When its fever breaks, we must learn the right lessons about how to overcome the underlying issues that threaten its very existence.
The United States was founded on ideas that reflected Enlightenment thinking, including the importance of science and the separation of church and state.
“Education for regenerative cultures is about the life-long process of enabling and building the capacity of everyone to express their unique potential to serve their community and the planet and in the process serve themselves.”
Education must prepare the young students to make the most of the opportunities which the coming crisis will offer, or at the very least, to be resilient to those changes and be able to adapt to the emerging new world.
But a college that finds spiritual expression in service to the others with whom we live (human or other-than-human) and to the land beneath our feet, that scrutinises and decolonises itself without fragility, that privileges listening before speaking, and that acts mindfully and soulfully in the world, would be a college that meets the needs of the time.
This final part of the series presents a vision of new type of university, exemplified in the world-spanning Ecoversities Alliance, and dreamed of in Transition U and Eco Vista U, two prototypes that I am involved in co-creating with students, staff, faculty, and community members in Santa Barbara, California, and in the Transition US movement.
JoinedUp is a scheme proposing to re-open our unused cultural institutions for the use of these ‘bubbles’ during the periods they aren’t at school, and create local programmes to alleviate the pressure on teachers, parents and the economy.
We are aiming high: to assist in laying the foundations for the establishment of an ongoing, multigenerational, student-community initiative for an equitable and just transition in Isla Vista, California, and to put the result, Eco Vista, forward as an experiential model that other small towns with college students might want to freely adapt for their communities.
So, how do we connect this many dots? Every movement, organization, systemic alternative, and countless activists, theorists, and intellectuals are asking this as the crisis unfolds.
The time has come to ask new questions of our own as teachers.
As local authorities in Scotland point out, outdoor learning could be the best means of getting children back to school, as it permits physical distancing. It lends itself to re-engagement with the living world.
To return to the pre-coronavirus assumptions about the world is to return to a way of thinking and living that cannot be sustained and that will destroy the planet. We need to reinvent modern civilization and we need colleges and universities to take on a leadership role in this great task.