Education

Unfortunately, formal, mainstream education today is rarely place-based. Instead, a single model – based on schools and age-segregated classrooms, formally-trained teachers, standardized curricula, and competition – is implemented almost everywhere, regardless of the cultural or ecological context.

This form of education prepares the most privileged and successful children for jobs in high technology, business, and finance, while the rest are prepared for minimum wage service jobs or unemployment – thus hardening the divisions between rich and poor, and between "professionals" and those who work with their hands. Subjects thought to be universally applicable (science, technology, engineering, and math) are emphasized, while the nuances of local ecosystems, and the skills and knowledge needed to thrive within them, are largely ignored.

In traditional cultures, children have always been educated alongside other family members, neighbors, and skilled farmers and craftsmen in the community. The education they gain represents location-specific knowledge and skills accumulated over centuries. But because that learning takes place in the home and community and in nature – rather than a cement box labeled "school" – many people assume that those children are not educated at all. Meanwhile, replacing traditional, place-based education with western-style schooling breaks the chain of knowledge handed down from generation to generation, undermining traditional patterns of life and erasing cultural diversity. It also shifts the provision of basic needs from local land-based economies to institutions, industrial infrastructures, and global corporations.

Many of the initiatives in this Guide seek fundamental alternatives to mainstream, western-style schooling. Others are programs within existing schools and universities that raise awareness of the realities of the dominant system; reclaim education’s role of supporting local self-reliance, strong communities, and healthy ecosystems; and give every child the opportunity to participate fully and meaningfully in the life of their community. Though most of these projects emphasize local context, none aim to close off information about the rest of the world. Most of them actively seek to increase children’s understanding of, and respect for, other cultures and other ways of being.

Through changing our perception and practice of education, we can re-root ourselves. We can begin to listen again to the rhythms of place, the intelligence of the land, the stories of our people. Across the world, this kind of learning is beginning to emerge in ways both quiet and radical. People are building schools, programs, and learning communities that resist the extractive models of the dominant system, and instead nurture relationships: to the earth, to each other, and to deeper forms of knowing.

Gratitude to Thais Mantovani for writing part of this essay.