Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rather than the neoliberal image of the school as business and ‘exam factory’, the image of the common public school is as a public space and public resource, a place of encounter for citizens of all ages where they participate together in projects of environmental, social, cultural, political and economic significance.
Given US capitalism’s control of the American economy, the economic system’s educational needs are best served by ensuring that the nation’s school achievement does not get out of hand; that is, schools cannot become too successful in producing well-educated graduates for the purportedly vast (but actually small) number of STEM jobs.
We are now challenged to fundamentally redesign the human presence and impact on Earth to shift from a mainly exploitative, destructive and degenerative impact to becoming co-creative collaborators with the wider community of life in the healing of our ecosystems and the regeneration of the Earth and our communities. Life itself is a regenerative community!
With over a decade-and-a-half of American schooling under my belt, I feel that I can assert with absolute certainty that there are some fundamental flaws in how we have chosen to structure education.
I am dreaming of the school birthed in flames. The work that I do has no place in current universities. It is too holistic, too integrative, and too practically oriented toward the real world.
If we are to understand how social-ecological resource systems can be better governed, we need to come out of our narrow academic cubicles and interact with other scholars who may themselves be confined in equally narrow academic cubicles.
Everywhere on Earth there are problems with the buildup of pollution, runoff of topsoils, bleaching of coral reefs, and thinning out of forests. What I propose in this article is that we use the well-known fact that universities have been located in cities as a “platform solution” for creating bioregional-scale learning ecosystems.
Major societal change in the coming decades necessitates new pedagogical design and sustainable instructional methodology. This proposal makes the case for using a permaculture design model as a resource to create an ecologically regenerative pedagogy for a sustainable future.
A professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former political adviser, Nichols argues that the country has shifted from a healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge to a proud, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of expertise. Across American society, intellectual authority is resented, resisted and disregarded, with every opinion ostensibly holding equal weight.
At Rizoma Field School, we hope to educate a network of individuals who can hack, subvert, create, resist and share strategies across contexts. We encourage mutually beneficial partnerships so that we can work together in envisioning and creating a world that can be continually better for all its inhabitants.
The climate crisis presents a challenge that justifies a vast mobilization of the public as much as the Great Depression did. One means of doing this would be to form a National Community Resilience Corps (NCRC), which would harness the untapped passion, creativity, and labor of millions of young people to implement projects to grow resilience and build sustainability in tens of thousands of communities across the country.
At this school students are activists first, students second. They’re learning by doing and, in the process, bringing about positive social change in their city, their country, and their world.
