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What if Permaculture Was Taught in Schools Everywhere?
WHAT IF PERMACULTURE WAS TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS EVERYWHERE?
What if there was a curriculum series for all children and young adults to learn permaculture?
What if it was the holistic context for all the other courses they took in school?
Imagine living in an urban area where you pay for your trash to be taken away – this is actually common; imagine returning home from 3rd grade with a bag of oyster mushroom inoculated substrate in a little baggy to mix with your household paper and cardboard waste, to turn it into mushrooms and spent substrate, and then, using worms mixed with kitchen scraps, into compost for the balcony or community garden. Imagine what it would be like to end that cost for your family & to turn it into rich soil for growing food in the garden.
It would be like magic. You’d probably want to grow up to be a mycologist. If you also recognized it as sequestering carbon and fighting climate change, you’d likely, as any 3rd grader would, want to help setup the rest of your extended family with the same advantageous system which would in turn be even more empowering. Imagine if we gave this opportunity to all children right now in the world, what kind of generation of people would that create?
When I took Geoff Lawton’s online permaculture design course (’14), I instantly wanted to share all the information I was receiving with my family but had nothing tailored to them. Since I was a full time teacher with a masters degree in education writing curriculum daily at a charter school, I felt obligated, so with Geoff’s encouragement and promise to look it over before I went public, I started writing The Permaculture Student 1 textbook and workbook. I wrote it to be readable by everyone from middle school on up.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Schools for Disaster: Rethinking Endless Growth in Education
Schools for Disaster: Rethinking Endless Growth in Education
Among our best-educated are the climate scientists who since the 1980s have tested and re-tested the theory that human activities are changing the climate. Despite the criticism many of them have endured, we trust them precisely because we trust their education.
Right from the start, North American public education was designed to assimilate immigrant and working-class children and prepare them for the workplace. To my generation of teachers who started in the 1960s and ’70s, it was the great equalizer — the way underprivileged kids would gain their share of the postwar golden age. Thanks to us they would get good jobs, vote and make this a better country.
We were just beginning to realize that “the environment” was a real issue. Problems like oil spills and smog and rivers catching fire were not the cost of progress — they were obstacles to progress. We teachers figured that our educated students would soon get around to cleaning up the planet.
Just as we didn’t foresee climate change, we didn’t foresee that our students would settle for a good job, two cars and a house in the suburbs, just as we had. A society built around endless growth and development was the subtext in everything we taught. Only with growth could we ensure more high-paying jobs and the promise of upward social mobility.
Consumption and more consumption
The purpose of such jobs and mobility, of course, is consumption and more consumption: a bigger SUV, a bigger house with more appliances, more air travel, more everything. More consumption demands more energy, especially fossil energy. Consuming energy costs money. And that is why business schools are crammed with students while liberal arts schools fight for their lives.
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Learning beyond Growth
Deschooling as a Path to Social-Ecological Transformation
“Deschooling is at the root of any movement for human liberation”, wrote Ivan Illich, today almost forgotten but once a world-renowned critical thinker, in 1971. With books like “Deschooling Society” and “Energy and Equity” he inspired in the 1970s both the emerging environmental movement and the renewed interest in progressive education. But where are the connections between growth critique and critique of school education? And how could a world beyond alienated learning and growth pressure actually look like?
Growth, we keep hearing from politicians and business leaders, is indispensable in order to guarantee prosperity, peace and liberty. However, fewer and fewer people believe these incantations, as it has become too obvious that growth does not benefit all, but only a small class of the rich and super-rich. In many countries the damages caused by growth already outweigh its benefits: environmental destruction, stress, noise, loneliness and social divide. In the global competition for increasing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), much of what makes life worthwhile is destroyed. On top of this, economic growth is ruining the ability of global ecosystems to regenerate – thereby threatening the long-term survival of humanity. In the face of these destructive consequences of growth, an intensive quest for alternatives to growth started in the 1970s, a debate which has been revived over the last years with the term “degrowth”.
Degrowth in this sense is not a static concept for an alternative system but rather an umbrella for a bunch of uncountable initiatives run by people who want to bring change to our day-to-day life: politically active people who oppose the continuous destruction of our environment and our societies as well as scientists who ponder how particular sectors of the economy or the infrastructure, e.g. transport or public health, could be designed in an ecologically and socially compatible way. These ideas have in common that they rely on the potential of alternative forms of social organization rather than on merely technical solutions. Nonetheless, the issue of learning and schooling is hardly ever discussed in this context, although it is deeply connected to the topic of growth.
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Pope Francis Calls For A New Global Political Authority To Save Humanity
Pope Francis Calls For A New Global Political Authority To Save Humanity
Pope Francis says that global warming is a fact and that a new global political authority is necessary in order to save humanity from utter disaster. The new encyclical that was scheduled to be released on Thursday has been leaked, and it is being reported that this new global political authority that Pope Francis envisions would be in charge of “the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions”. The funny thing is that this sounds very much in line with the new sustainable development agenda that is going to be launched at the United Nations in September. This radical new agenda is already being called “Agenda 21 on steroids” because it goes so much farther than Agenda 21 ever did. The new UN agenda does not just address the environment – it also addresses issues such as poverty, agriculture, education and gender equality. It is essentially a blueprint for governing the entire planet, and that sounds very much like what Pope Francis also wants. In fact, Pope Francis is going to give the speech that kicks off the UN conference in September where this new sustainable agenda will be launched. For some reason, this Pope has decided to make the fight against climate change the central pillar of his papacy, and he is working very hard to unite as much of humanity as possible to get behind that effort.
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Income, Education and Inequality in the “Recovery”: Prepare to be Surprised
Income, Education and Inequality in the “Recovery”: Prepare to be Surprised
Note to the higher education industry: issuing diplomas doesn’t magically create new jobs in the real world.
By virtually any standard, wealth inequality has soared to historic levels in the six years of “recovery” since the Great Recession of 2008-09. Economist Emmanuel Saez, who has long collaborated with Thomas Piketty, described the recent extremes of wealth inequality in a recent paper Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States, which provides an in-depth look at the widening gulf between the top 1% and the bottom 90% from 2009 to 2012.
Here is a chart of the top 10% share of income, based on their research (the note in red marking the beginning of financialization in 1982 is my own):
As author David Cay Johnston noted in an insightful review of Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Trickle-Up economics: “The top 1 percent of Americans raked in 95 cents out of every dollar of increased income from 2009, when the Great Recession officially ended, through 2012. Almost a third of the entire national increase went to just 16,000 households, the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, Piketty and Saez’s analysis of IRS data
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from the archives: “they teach people ignorance” | the irresistible fleet of bicycles
from the archives: “they teach people ignorance” | the irresistible fleet of bicycles.
Todays post is the text of an opinion piece written by William C Gehrke and published in The Kansas Union Farmer on April 16, 1936! Gehrke does an incredible job of articulating the benefits of organizing farmers, the challenges posed by hegemonic education, and the insufficiency of “rugged individualism and the gold standard.” His remarks are stunningly insightful and relevant to our situation today.
Union Farmer Editors: The following article by Mr. Gehrke contains so much that is good that we feel it is worthy of a front page position.
“They Teach People Ignorance”
William C. Gehrke
I am taking up the suggestion of A.W. Ricker of Minnesota by giving my personal reflections in the following comments.
Having lived on the farm for 27 years, only absent long enough to take my four years of college work, I still feel my interests are just as strongly with you. However, any views I hold I do so in the interests and welfare of all concerned, rather than just our particular class. I feel highly honored to be a member of the Farmers Union because of the principles for which they stand and the democratic procedure that governs the organization. In the Unions [sic] workings and philosophy, I can see the more abundont life so many desire yet I can see many of the shortcomings that prevent this attainment. I sometimes marvel at the faith, patience, and endurance of the leaders and its members knowing what the odds are against them. In spite of these known odds they struggle on slowly gaining those things necessary for the abundant life. I wish we had a better way to get more people including the farmers to see all our problems from a social viewpoint. By that I mean that every action of ours should be tested in the light as to how it will affect our fellowmen rather than the selfish motive that prompts each individual to get the better things at the expense of someone else.
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