"Green-edu": Invitation to join a chatlist for Education for a Green World by Samuel Day Fassbinder Recently a debate about Green national organization has been in the foreground of the discussion about Green politics. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, one major fact of Green politics in America remains; a massive educational program will be necessary if Green politics is to be made credible to Americans. At the end of this chatlist I will post a "platform statement" illustrating why I think a discussion in this direction is of particular urgency. Feel free to disagree with it -- I will read all arguments with open eyes. The chatlist for Education for a Green World will hopefully grow a list of teacher-students and student-teachers for the purpose of expanding the educational matrix of Green politics. Discussion topics might include: How to support the role of dialogue in the educational process How to promote democracy within the schools "Grassroots Democracy" and "Community-based economics" as activities which need to be taught A reading group that would center around a central text of innovative pedagogy such as Paulo Freire's PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED or Jeanne Gibbs' TRIBES. Environmental education, in the public schools or outside it Are public schools or private schools more useful for creating "education for a Green world?" Public schools as a fact of life Trends in schooling e.g. E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, Theodore Sizer's Coalition of Effective Schools, Lee Canter's Assertive Discipline etc. Instruction in sustainable agriculture, composting, sustainable energy technologies etc. Green educational policy (at all electoral levels, from the principal-level and the school board on up) Non-coercive schooling Alternative schools, homeschooling etc. Philosophy of education: What is "teaching"? What is "learning"? CLASSROOM NORMS I would like "green-edu" to be considered a classroom of sorts, a newsgroup where learning can happen undisrupted. For this we may want rules, to avoid the spamming of our mailboxes with flames, irrelevance, and/or commercial pitches. We can start with no rules and then have a discussion of what rules may be necessary if rules are necessary. I would like to suggest that teachers could post advertisements for their classes on green-edu@envirolink.org and that this could be a space for reading-groups, electronic classes etc. HOW TO POST MESSAGES send all messages to: green-edu@envirolink.org HOW TO SUBSCRIBE Send the message: subscribe green-edu (your name) to listproc@envirolink.org when you're on, send messages to: (green-edu@envirolink.org) Or just e-mail me with your request. HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE The machine will tell you that -- remember everything can be done, nothing is permanent. Samuel Day Fassbinder Pomona Valley Greens 1150 N. Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont CA 91711 (909) 624-1147 kcauq@ix.netcom.com ************************************************ EDUCATION FOR A GREEN WORLD: BEYOND GLOBAL INDUSTRIALISM by Samuel Day Fassbinder There are many problems with public education as it strives to cope with today's world, just as there are many complaints about how it functions; but regardless of whether complaints about the educational system have anything to do with education itself, concerns about "the quality of education" must be addressed as symptoms, or side-effects, of an overall process of modern life; the reproduction of social classes. Today's world, obsessed as it is with money and power, has fitted us into its industrial scheme according to how much money or power we have within this scheme. What class we belong to depends, monochromatically, on how much we have, and our staying in that class depends upon role we have in supporting the overall administrative functions of producing power and profits and consumer goods. Education within the class system can either help or hurt the "fluidity" in the class system -- either it can help people move from lower to upper classes, or it keeps people in "their place." Education for the status quo is life-preparation for the industrial scheme within which the classes struggle; it does little to disrupt the entry of students into the social classes, the gradations of money and power and consumer participation the industrial schemes of the world use to distinguish their participants. Maybe today's schools empower people to enjoy their off-time, their time not occupied by work, sleep, or other essential bodily functions, under industrialism more; insofar as they do that, they don't touch the controversy of "progress and poverty" within industrial life, they perform little virtues as a supplement to the world of consumer culture (and are maybe deserving of as little of government budgets as they get today). But if that is all schools do, then education may not be significant enough to deserve a Green platform statement. In today's world-society, a relative few are the owners of power, another group of people are the managers, and a third, larger, crowd, are necessarily the workers, and a fourth crowd, integrated within industrialism and consumerism too much for their own good, are the unemployed, workers at best, but often just given the role of "surplus population" which wait idly as a resource for the INVESTMENT of power and money of those running global industrial schemes. Even if we proclaim equal educational opportunity within an industrial scheme dependent on this investment, we will still end up with a class system. It makes little sense to prepare everyone to be a manager or an owner, for instance, if not everyone can play such a role under industrial schemes. The point is that if it is a done deed that the world is to be entirely conquered by global industrial schemes, there is no issue to be made of what education is to prepare one for. We can legitimately say that restoring community is central to expanded opportunity in America, and that access to quality education for all Americans is the difference that will lead to a strong and diverse community. But community will only be central to opportunity if education actually helps to build strong and diverse community instead of merely contributing to industrial servitude. The point is not merely to proclaim the necessity of schools, as competitors for today's tax dollars with America's burgeoning prison systems; it is to change forms of schooling that do not help their students build a Green world. Otherwise opportunities will in fact be determined not by the local presence of diverse community but by external corporate consideration of the bottom line, or by external government creation of "jobs." This is not to say that expanding opportunities or building communities within industrial society is a bad thing. But here I also want to address, within educational processes, the logics of ecological and social sustainability that are the special proclamation of the Green Party among political entities in America. Now Green politics is itself an educational apparatus, regardless of its connection to a form of schooling; and what distinguishes it from the educational apparatus of industrial schemes is its dream of placing us OUTSIDE OF the schemes of class, money, and power that place us, at present, within industrialism. But this is merely to say that engagement in Green politics is not preparation for industrialism, or more specifically it is not preparation for life under the corporate oligarchy that runs the Third World cheap labor markets of the New World Order, the maquiladoras of northern Mexico or the slave factories of China or whatever. A genuine Green politics dismisses the apologetics for exploitation that are an integral part of the Alvin Toffler "third wave" postindustrial utopia as publicly proclaimed today by House Speaker Newt Gingrich. These things, this utopia, is what Green politics is NOT. But how is Green politics to be distinguished by what it IS? The answer to this question is an open one -- but the clues are supplied by the Ten Key Values. FUTURE FOCUS Education for a Green world will be necessary, first of all, because of the increasing instability of economic life in the non-Green world. As wealth accumulates in Wall Street and the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks records every week, so also does poverty, as rural Third World dwellers are enticed into the lifestyles of industrialism only to find that they have been commissioned to lifetimes of labor at extremely low wages, and that industrialization has turned their neighborhoods into slums. There are financial costs of increasing poverty of the Third World, but today those costs are externalized by the perpetrators of global industry. The overurbanization of the world will eventually demand more resources than the world has, and will create more of a mess than the world's ecology can dispose of. But that day is deferred by the expansion of the business world today, at the cost of impending crisis tomorrow. Education for a Green world will focus on bringing about alternative futures, avoiding the dark scenarios predicted by books such as Donella Meadows et al.'s BEYOND THE LIMITS or Jeremy Seabrook's VICTIMS OF DEVELOPMENT. The curricular focus on SKILLS coming from Green education will therefore have to bear mainly upon the OUTCOME of teaching particular skills as opposed to other skills. The whole matter of skills revolves around the question of what kind of skilled people is skills-teaching supposed to produce. Education for a Green world will push for diversity in skills, it is true, but an educational effort that seeks to transcend the status quo will demand of its teachers that they work to create a particularly innovative focus on skills. Such a focus will concentrate on the practical skills and global understandings necessary for COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS so that students can learn to create economically self-sufficient communities (as opposed to the complicity with de-skilling necessary to produce cheap laborers for global industrial schemes), and will also emphasize the skills of cultural translation necessary for RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY (as opposed to the cultural homogenization one sees in the New World Order). GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY Green education does more than provide the lip-service to democracy one is supposed to receive in one's high-school civics class; it is democratic in PROCESS as well, starting from the existential perspectives of the students to teach them what Paulo Freire calls "conscientizao," the bringing-to-consciousness of popular empowerment to take action within a larger community. And the only way this consciousness can be fostered is if teachers (teach students to) introduce the procedures of democracy or democratic thinking within their own classrooms -- given that centuries of undemocratic education process have contributed to the current despair about democratic process evidenced by massive public nonparticipation in elections. Grassroots democracy cannot just be preached; it must be practiced. FEMINISM Now, within the various statements of the Ten Key Values, there are various interpretations of what counts as "feminism" in the overall philosophical framework. The simplest one is given by the Green Party of Canada: "Feminism -- The Green movement is profoundly influenced by feminism. The ethics of cooperation and understanding must replace the values of domination and control." The creation of democratic institutions of education, from school districts to universities to classrooms, will require these values. If education for a Green world is to be anything, it will not be merely a matter of teacher manipulation and control of students. More specifically, it won't be run according to what Paulo Freire calls the "banking model of education," where the students are to be regarded as little banks into which the teacher is to make deposits of knowledge. The ethics of cooperation and understanding require that we see the roles of teacher and student not as supports for a patriarchal ritual of one-way respect but as creating opportunities for teachers to become students, learning freshly and anew, and for students to become teachers of what they can firmly show they know. NONVIOLENCE Education cannot merely be diverse in today's era; it must take a unified stand against the violence of weaponry in school, against school implements as weapons, against the violence of negative words and negative deeds. (For practical ways of accomplish this, one might wish to start with Jeanne Gibbs' TRIBES, a book written for elementary school teachers.) And to really end the violence pervading society, we will eventually have to end the forced marches inspired by preset curricula and by truancy laws, awaiting the economic transformation that liberatory education will encompass. PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY Responsibility is the key to educational achievement, to be sure, but it is also a vague term which begs the question of how responsibilities are to be assigned. Clinton's famous Welfare Bill was titled the "Personal Responsibility Act of 1996," yet the Green Party ran a Presidential candidate in 1996 who was in stated opposition to this "Personal Responsibility Act." How could this be so? Isn't personal responsibility one of our stated values? Let me suggest a way out of this dilemma. Responsibility follows power. Insofar as each of us possesses us some type of power (and I would qualify knowledge as an accompaniment to power), we are all responsible, and this personal responsibility is important in the sense that we are human beings, political animals potentially capable of democracy. The "Personal Responsibility Act" foisted responsibility on those powerless to accept it, e.g. children on welfare. Education is our "global" responsibility to EVERYONE, not just children, whatever that responsibility may be to each of us as individuals. We who have the power and knowledge are responsible for nurturing democracy according to a feminist ethic of cooperation and understanding and to guide it toward the best possible future. CONCLUSION The concept of education that is outlined above will not be a concept that will meet immediately in electoral campaigns with widespread approval. It focuses on an "education is learning" concept of education, as opposed to the "education is schooling" concept of education as many people have already digested, understood, and endorsed it. My intention is to disrupt the supposedly diverse status quo, for the sake of all those who are legally or economically trapped in educational institutions, who know too much to appreciate the false "education" they are being given, who think the school they are required to attend is too punitive, who are fed up with the mania for standardized testing in the schools they are required to attend, or who think the mass social grubbing after credentials at their university is a phony substitute for real learning. This above "platform" is a platform for the long haul, for a Green politics that would attempt a large scale social transformation and not just an improvement here-and-there in the status quo, or a minor skirmish with the cops just outside the Demopublican and Republicrat Party National Conventions. Certainly many conceptions of Green education can operate together on a Planet Earth of great (yet shrinking) diversity. But ask yourself this; what type of education will really teach you what you want to know? Samuel Day Fassbinder Claremont California, January 28, 1997