by Jay McDaniel
A new kind of education is needed today: an ecological education that takes place in families, schools, and communities; that includes hands-on learning as well as the acquisition of ideas and values; that engages the whole person, heart and body and mind; and that helps a person learn how to live wisely and compassionately in community with other people, animals and the earth. We call it Ecological Education.
This education is much more than reading and memorizing that too often define classroom education. And its purpose is not simply to help a person get a job, although that is important, but rather to help a person find meaning and joy in life. Its aims are to foster personal fulfillment, healthy community life, and service to the common good. The common good is we understand it is an Ecological Civilization, the building blocks for which are local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, diverse, inclusive, humane to animals and good for the Earth, with no one left behind.
The need for Ecological Education is arises many contexts: environmental, social, personal, and political. A reading of the daily news with its litany of problems – political dysfunction, economic injustice, environmental degradation, loneliness and social alienation – makes the need obvious. The good news is that forms of ecological education are appearing in many parts of the world in small and large ways. In this website we will be developing a list of exemplars. We want to celebrate the many educators who are developing ecological education, learn from them, encourage them, help foster a sense of community among them, and add to their wisdom as influenced by the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead.
Ecological education includes, but is more than, environmental education. It teaches people about the more than human world through study, field work, and hands-on experiences. But it is humanistic education, too. It does not separate the world into human beings and nature, as if they could be treated separately; but instead sees human beings as co-creators within, and part of, the larger web of life. And its aim is not only to protect the more than human world, the “environment,” it is also to help human beings flourish in their capacities for personal fulfillment and living together with respect and care. Ecological education includes three kinds of connections: human to human relationships, human to earth relationships, and earth to earth relationships. These relationships are interwoven. As we treat one another so we treat the earth; as we treat the earth so we treat one another. The aim of ecological education is to encourage mutually enhancing relationships.
Ecological education is also life-centered education. It takes life itself, human and more than human, as its subject matter; and it assumes that there is something like life and vitality, self-enjoyment and beauty, all the down into the very depths of matter. It does not divide the world into the living and the dead; it sees all things as energetically alive, as ‘living’ in a deep sense. People are alive, but in a different and complementary way, so are trees and mountains. In the words of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: “There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.”
With this focus on life, ecological education cannot be easily divided into compartments or disciplines; it does not see the world as consisting of fragments to be brought together. It begins with the assumption that all things, all forms of life, are already connected one way or another, and that an important part of education is to awaken to those connections.
Accordingly, it does not think that education occurs in, and only in, the classroom. Instead, it sees education as happening at home and in the community, in the field and in the marketplace, in the classroom and the coffee shop. In this spirit it does not limit teachers to those who have teacher qualification certificates; teachers include farmers, workers, villagers, store clerks, and small business owners.
Just as importantly, ecological education recognizes that the more than human world – the hills and rivers, plants and animals, soil and stars – are teachers, too. The soil teaches us as we farm; the plants teach as they grow; the hills teach us as we climb them. Indeed our bodies, if we treat them with respect, are themselves among our teachers. In ecological education there is no sharp dichotomy between mind and body, flesh and spirit, reason and feeling. They are all part of that living ecology we call life.
These many teachers – these many manifestations of life – are always becoming. They part of a process which is life itself, and this process is filled with the beauty, the intrinsic value, of life itself. In this sense ecological education is fact-oriented but also value-centered, not simply in the sense that it subscribes to practical values such as “wisdom” and “compassion” and “creativity,” but also in sense that it sees value, or beauty, in each manifestation of life.
This has relevance to how students and teachers alike are understood. Ecological education understands students and teachers, not as cogs in a machine or test-takers, but as whole persons. It also recognizes that the very role of student and teacher is in process. A farmer can be a teacher in some contexts and a student in others. In ecological education teachers and students alike are both learners, learning from one another and with one another in many circumstances.
Ecological education further recognizes that education itself a process, a verb rather than a noun. The philosopher Whitehead suggests that it has three phases, and we find his ideas helpful for articulating our own understanding of education as process.
In The Aims of Education, Whitehead writes that “The stage of romance is the stage of first apprehension. The subject-matter has the vividness of novelty; it holds within itself unexplored connections with possibilities half-disclosed by glimpses and half-concealed by the wealth of material. In this stage knowledge is not dominated by systematic procedure. Such system as there must be is created piecemeal ad hoc.” (p.17) Hence, this stage is notably relevant to children who are less one years old to about 12 years old. During this stage, the main task of learning is to focus on curiosity. It guides children in how to appreciate the beauty of life in order to keep and strengthen their curiosity. This will provide children with a strong motivation to learn and feel the learning is full of enjoyment. The second stage is precision. Whitehead tells us that “The stage of precision also represents an addition to knowledge. In this stage, width of relationship is subordinated to exactness of formulation. It is the stage of grammar, the grammar of language and the grammar of science. It proceeds by forcing on the students’ acceptance a given way of analysing the facts, bit by bit. New facts are added, but they are the facts which fit into the analysis.” (p.18)
This stage is notably relevant to adolescents from 13-17 years old. During the precision, the learning focuses on gaining, understanding and analyze knowledge of the different field via the specific way; and romance is not gone but will become background of learning. It still has some roles to play in the stage of precision.
The third stage of learning is generalization. “It is a return to romanticism with added advantage of classified ideas and relevant I technique. It is the fruition which has been the goal of the precise training. It is the final success. I am afraid that I have had to give a dry analysis of somewhat obvious ideas. It has been necessary to do so because my subsequent remarks presuppose that we have clearly in our minds the essential character of this threefold cycle.” (p.19) This stage is especially relevant to students who are 18 years old and adults. Via this journey of learning/studying, students gain the capacity of integrating and know how to use the knowledge. They gain wisdom. In the meantime, they enjoy of their achievement from this stage.
The three stages mentioned above are not separated but help and fulfill each other. Romance is the main task of the first stage but permeates the second and the third stages. It provides the students with strong motivation for learning, but also leads students into the stages of precision and generalization. In addition, it provides satisfaction for those students who are struggling in the stage of precision. It is intensified and deepened by the stage of generalization.
In a word, the only subject matter for education is “life in all its manifestations.” Therefore, education is the whole of families, communities, and schools. Secondly, education is a process with three stages: romance, precision and generalization. Its final goal is to gain wisdom via learning, understanding and the application of vision and ideas to helping build communities that are good for people, good for other animals, and good for the earth. In doing so ecological education will be “the last best hope of the earth.”
