Post-Carbon Schools: Back from Hell by Dan Allen

My favorite educational quote in this vein comes from Wendell Berry, in his wonderful little post-9/11 book, ‘In the Presence of Fear.’ In it, he says:

"The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."

This quote, like all great quotes, challenges us. It challenges us to ask: What then should we put first? What are the key ideas around which we should construct our educational structures? This starting point is key, because if we screw up on this (as our present civilization has done), everything else comes out shit. And we’re up to our eyeballs in shit. Enough!

THREE CORNERSTONES: MORALITY, COMMUNITY, AND THE LAND ETHIC
I humbly suggest we adhere to three basic cornerstones to support the framework of a saner post-carbon educational system; cornerstones based on the essential features/tendencies of the human species that we must consciously promote. I propose these: morality, community, and stewardship of the environment (or the Land Ethic).
By morality, I mean the mental and behavioral patterns of our species that are most admirable: honesty, kindness, empathy, generosity, thrift, frugality, and forgiveness, among others. These ideas must be woven through every lesson in every unit in every subject taught in every grade of our schools – not as asides, or occasional features, but as key, indispensable parts of everything we teach. Our students should be bathed in morality daily. Nurturing a strong sense of morality in our youth is not only the sole path to ensuring a livable future, it is our only barrier protecting against the ever-present monstrous side of our nature. To neglect or pervert morality, as we have done, is to court and eventually ensure apocalypse.

By community, I mean the patterns of inter-dependent human interactions at the local level that bind us together in a common goal: the goal of thriving mentally and physically, as best as possible, in our everyday lives at our chosen place of residence. The studies of what factors contribute to strong communities are well-advanced and common-sensical: well-developed inter-personal and conflict-resolution skills, lack of ‘globilization’ distortions to the local economy, strong knowledge of (and sensitivity to the health of) local ecosystems, strong basic skill set for supplying basic necessities, robust mechanism for transferring knowledge down generations, etc.

The key factors that contribute to strong communities must be made explicit to children at a young age and consciously nurtured throughout their schooling years. Threats that tend to rip communities apart must also be made explicit and consciously guarded against.

We have lived for so long without coherent communities in our atomized industrial deserts that a strong conscious effort must be made to reinstate community-friendly patterns that were, for ages, second nature to everybody. The fossil-energy safety nets that have ‘protected’ us (smothered us?) for several generations will soon be gone, and it is only through the creation and conscious maintenance of strong communities that we can hope for resiliency in the trying times ahead.

For the third cornerstone, I used the phrase, “stewardship of the environment” above. By this, I simply mean a conscious and unwavering application of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic by every person to our chosen localities. This Land Ethic, as discussed by Leopold in his masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, involves the extension of our ethical sphere to include not just humans, but all members of the local biotic community.

Leopold says: "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. …[A] land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."

And Leopold summarizes the ethic thusly: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

While it has been intuitively obvious to ‘primitive savages’ in many past civilizations, we in our ‘advanced’ industrial civilization have never quite wrapped our collective heads around the fact that to chip away (or blast away, as the case may be) at the ecological foundations of Life, is profoundly immoral; it is murder at first, and then ultimately suicide. In our collective insanity, we have given such destructive madness the name of ‘progress’ and put it on a pedestal. The results have played out predictably.

This Land Ethic has been expanded on eloquently by Wendell Berry (among others), and should be common knowledge to every child. We must immerse our children in the Land Ethic, just as we should for the more traditional human moralities discussed above. When obeyed, it holds incredible power to enrich our lives. When ignored or flouted, it guarantees destruction.

ENSURING KNOWLEDGE OF BASIC SKILLS

I am tempted to stop here with the three cornerstones, but there is something else weighing heavily on my mind concerning the education of our children.

I love my high-school students to death. Despite their occasional misdeeds, they are great kids. They make me laugh; they make me think; and (almost) every day they renew my oft-wavering faith that everything might just turn out semi-OK in the end.
But I have to admit, I’m a more than a little embarrassed for them.

These are 17 and 18 year-old biological-adults who have the life skills of 7-8 year-olds. Confronted with a rapidly approaching physical/cultural paradigm shift, they are as helpless as the plump beetle larvae I sometimes reveal when splitting firewood during the winter – full of potential, but helpless to deal with an unexpectedly-changed reality.

They have essentially zero knowledge on how one might secure the basic necessities of their species without, say, a credit card. Left to their own devices, these biological adults cannot obtain food, water, shelter, or manufacture any of the countless items they would need for even basic survival in their everyday lives.

It has reached the bizarre extreme where several generations of Americans are wholly disconnected from the sources of every single material thing they depend on to function as biological organisms.

This, of course, will no longer be possible as the fossil-fuel-based sources of our ‘material things’ abandon us. It must change, and it will change.

In light of this change, a fundamental part of our children’s post-carbon education must include hands-on experience with the essential life skills required of their species. This is not to say that every kid must become an expert gardener, seed saver, nutritionist, chef, composter/soil-builder, forester, miller, architect, and carpenter, etc., etc. But every kid should have learned the basics of each of those ‘basic life skills’ jobs (and many others) by actually doing them under some guidance.

This apprenticeship in basic skills should be a key part of every child’s education – not as a replacement for classroom-based studies of the natural and social sciences, math, etc, but as an essential supplement.

In addition to helping kids ‘find their true calling,’ incorporating this type of education with the more traditional classroom forms would arm our entire population with a basic skill-set. Such skills would ensure a strong resiliency within our population, enabling us to weather even severe disruptions to our infrastructure with minimized misery.

Because, if anything, our post-carbon world will be defined by the requirement to deal with rapidly and unpredictably changing circumstances – politically, socially, economically, and climatically. Monumental change will be the norm. Resilience will be crucial; basic skills essential.

The logistics of this basic-skill education would, of course, be complex, and it’s precise implementation would heavily depend on the still-unknown nature of our post-carbon civilization. But I think it’s worth thinking about now.

There are those who would argue families are the units of a community but it does not matter what form families have, so long as those who desire to form a family consent to it. Those who defend traditional sexual morality would argue otherwise, but can an alliance for relocalization be made between traditionalists and progressives? How much of a community can there be if one part has to shun social relations with the other because it is deemed "bigoted" or "morally lax"?





Apparently the principal of a certain school decided to become a first-grade teacher after getting (re-)married. I saw her today after the end of recess but didn't really get a chance to say hi or talk to her since I was trying to manage the line. How much money does her new husband make?