What Is Schooling For?
This is a guest post from Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm.
I’ve spent over two decades in the field of education, first as a visiting humane educator who has brought issues of social justice, environmental preservation, animal protection, and culture to tens of thousands of students in secondary schools and colleges, and now, as the president of the Institute for Humane Education, where we train people to be humane educators through an M.Ed. and certificate program in humane education, workshops, online courses, books, and resources at our website: www.HumaneEducation.org.
As an “alternative” educator – someone teaching about topics not generally covered in the standard U.S. curricula – and as a teacher who has visited many kinds of schools, I’ve got lots of opinions about the current system of schooling, including critiques of homework, grades, disconnected subject matter, bells, rote learning, teacher training, standardized testing, textbooks, unhealthy school buildings and cafeteria food, and more. But my strongest beliefs about education – and my current life’s mission – revolves around answering one simple question: what is schooling for?
I believe that it’s time to shift the purpose of schooling from the narrow goal of educating for existing jobs – whether as factory workers or business owners, farmers or engineers, nurses or physicists – and expand our vision of what schooling can and should achieve. I believe we must educate young people so that they have the skills and desire to re-imagine and re-create systems in business, food production, construction, healthcare, transportation, law, politics, energy, etc., so that these new systems are healthy, humane, sustainable, just, and peaceful. We must provide students, in age appropriate ways, with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to become conscious choicemakers and engaged changemakers for a peaceful, sustainable, and humane world for all.
We can see the potentially catastrophic results of current systems in the prevalence of sweatshops and escalating slave labor, poverty, global warming, pollution, resource depletion, species extinction, institutionalized animal cruelty, and so on, but we have failed to teach our students, at least in any committed, systematic way, about these issues. Nor have we prepared them to solve these problems through their future work and careers or their engagement in democracy, volunteerism, and activism.
Imagine that instead of preparing students to simply find jobs, we prepared them for their roles as solutionaries in these jobs. We will certainly need people working in production and business, growing food and building structures, keeping us healthy and advancing technologies, but imagine if these “workers” were taught and inspired to revitalize and revolutionize their fields so that they did the most good and the least harm – what I call the MOGO (most good) principle – for all.
Given the grave problems we face, shouldn’t we educate our children to play a role in solving pressing challenges? Given the extraordinary qualities we humans possess, shouldn’t we provide an education to our children worthy of their imaginations, hopes, and intelligence?
I welcome your thoughts and your ideas for making such a paradigm shift in the purpose of education take hold.
Zoe Weil is the President of the Institute for Humane Education and author of Most Good, Least Harm, The Power and Promise of Humane Education, Above All, Be Kind, and Claude and Medea.
You may also like:
- How To Be A Good Human.
- Quick Green Reads For The Weekend Volume 117.
- EarthTalk: Starting a School Environmental Club.
- Realizing The Finite Availability Of Fossil Fuels Is Fundamental To Climate Change Talk.
- Imagine.
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When schools focus on scores and providing a single solution for many complex personalities and needs, the competition factor runs high, suppressing the natural tendency for children to want to collaborate and work together for good. Instead they are more focused on competition to get ahead of their peers and get attention in an environment that removes individual freedoms and individual creativity.
In good schools that promote individual creativity and democracy among students, innovative solutions are created by children themselves and adults provide support and guidance for a safe and consistent environment where the students can best express themselves.
Children who learn with freedom whether in alternative schools or child-led/ interest led learning can grow up to be productive members of their local and larger community and form an interest in helping one another rather than just earning top dollar for their own good.
I’ve recently been hearing about Transition Towns on the hyperlocavore site, and one of the things they stress is that a better future will involved ordinary people on the ground making group solutions, instead of waiting for Experts to Solve the Big Problem. A different kind of education would go a long way toward getting more of the kind of practical innovative sense we need for this.
I’m currently reading Zoe’s book, Above All Be Kind. I have twin 3 1/2 year old daughters and am acutely interested in teaching them to be humane people.
I have also taught at the secondary level and couldn’t be more convinced that our current education system is lacking. I don’t have the answers, but it seems that teaching children not only to pass tests, but to think creatively about solving problems would be a good place to start.