New forms of educational institutions that break from modern disciplinary “education for industry”, developing trans-disciplinary and immersive forms of learning in community
Context
It is not only the things we learn but the ways in which we learn—the environments, relationships, and boundaries inside and through which we learn—that establish our worldview, and direct the ways in which we inhabit the world. Critical Pedagogy, a discipline often traced back to the work of Brazilian socialist and educator Paolo Freire, links questions of pedagogical practice to issues of social justice. Most modern industrialised societies, Freire argued, practice education as a unidirectional form of “training” designed to reproduce the status quo. Separating forms of knowledge into disciplines, and separating humans from nature, eliminates the possibility of holistic thinking, and perpetuates a system whereby nature is exploited and people are separated by hierarchies. Freire proposed an alternative model of learning that is self-led, interdisciplinary, and anti-hierarchical. This model advocates for “education as the practice of freedom”, and with its liberatory appeal, invites a way of learning and living that takes greater care of the climate.
Practice
Across the world, a number of experimental colleges have adopted Critical Pedagogy in their provision of ecology and design courses, aiming to provide education for an age of environmentalism, not industry, and within a context of ecological breakdown. One of the longest-running of these is Schumacher College in Devon, founded by the environmental activist and pacifist Satish Kumar in 1991.
Schumacher College offers programmes on various aspects of agroecology, philosophy, and economics that follow a principle of educating head, hand, and heart together: learning by doing, as well as by living together in Schumacher’s community.
Responding to the frequent criticism that his style is somehow irrational, oddball, or overly-spiritualist, Kumar responds:
“Is my approach unrealistic? Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me ‘unrealistic’ to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed, and wholly exaggerated concept.”
Schumacher College’s postgraduate programme in Ecological Design Thinking encourages students to evaluate their own design practice through an ethos of whole-systems thinking, and approach design as a holistic and trans-disciplinary practice. This course speaks to the challenge of facing climate breakdown by addressing issues through their social, economic, human, and environmental relationships.
Working with some of the same principles, Black Mountains College, in South Wales, offers a single undergraduate programme in Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change. Established by a Welsh human rights researcher and a poet, both from the Black Mountains region of South Wales, the College provides environmentally-situated education in an immersive, sensory way. Its undergraduate programme revolves around asking what kinds of transformation are needed to build an ecologically sound and socially just future, and looks at ways of understanding the past, examining current practices, and experimenting with new futures, across disciplines. The College also offers free vocational courses, fully-funded by the Welsh government, which are designed to foster ecological care and stewardship.
The Schumacher and Black Mountains College examples demonstrate the viability and fruitfulness of shaping education around ecological and social principles of care. Numerous other examples, from the Centre for Alternative Technology (also in Wales) to the Indigenous University of the Territory in southwestern Colombia, could also be mentioned. In these centres for learning, as students are encouraged to rethink the world around them and to challenge institutions of power, education realises its full potential for working across disciplinary and methodological boundaries for greater social and ecological good. Such an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to education is paramount in facing climate breakdown’s combined social and ecological challenges.