The Power and Promise of Humane Education
Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs
So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals
Thomas Friedman’s recent New York Times op-ed, “The New Untouchables,” brings up an important point: that the failures in our educational system and the current recession are related. He ends his editorial with this:
“Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.”
The problem, though, is far more nuanced than Friedman suggests. While his essay promotes education that fosters creativity, initiative, and critical thinking — all things I agree with — there is a lack of creativity in Friedman’s own solution. We cannot go back to the good old days. Instead, we must move forward to better new days, and we won’t do that by trying to educate solely for flexible thought and innovation within current systems.
Yes, we have huge problems in our educational system that rewards rote learning over creative and critical thinking, skills now relegated to the heroic efforts of especially imaginative teachers who must figure out how to foster creativity and critical thinking when they are burdened with teaching to multiple choice tests that punish creativity. (Imagine what would happen if you took a creative approach to a multiple choice test – you’d be pretty much doomed).
But more than this, we have an even bigger problem with our educational system. We have the wrong goal. Tom Friedman wants us to return to the good old days by being more competitive in the global marketplace, a refrain that’s become cliché . The problem is that we have grave challenges to solve: global warming, rampant species extinction, desertification, deforestation, overpopulation, escalating slave labor, lack of access to enough food and clean water for a billion people, inequitable access to basic resources, to name a few of the biggies.
Making our kids more competitive won’t solve these problems unless we shift the goal of education to include graduating solutionaries for a better world. The good old days actually set the stage for all the problems we face today. They only appeared good because the problems they were causing took some time to appear. Were we to graduate a generation only with the wherewithal to compete better in the global marketplace and work innovatively in essentially the same systems, but without the knowledge, tools, and motivation to change pervasive, entrenched, and destructive systems into ones that are just, peaceable, and sustainable, we would not necessarily produce good days. We might, instead, cause even greater suffering and destruction.
Yes, we need to fix our schools as well as our banks. We need to educate a generation that understands the challenges we face and which has the skills and desire to face them and create a healthy, restored, and humane world. And when we do this, we will create new economic and production systems that bring both prosperity and peace.
~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind
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Filed under: changemakers, education, humane education, systemic change | Tagged: creativity, critical thinking, education, educational reform, goals, humane education, New York Times, recession, systemic change, teaching, Thomas Friedman
In one sense, so much of what was handed down through the corruption of our financial markets WAS the result of education — the profitability aims of an MBA in our banking and financial institutions paired to an unethical mentality of win-at-all-costs. This takes a special breed of people who can stomach the type of job in which the way one works the way up the ladder is to take advantage of someone else’s ignorance (complex lending documents or poorly understood financial instruments, as the case may be).
What we’re lacking in all scenarios, whether it is helping the planet, helping ourselves or helping one another is a moral underpinning. We have a strong tradition of individualism in this country but that was also tempered, historically, by people who were “God fearing” believers in life, liberty and justice for all (the Golden Rule).
If we lived in a world in which initiative AND ethics were equal partners in our definition of success, we would achieve that free market ideal in which all parties have equal access and opportunity. Too often we say the flaw is in the market or system of governance or education, when in truth it’s the breaking of that “social contract” or ideal that brings down markets, economies and individuals alike.
The breakdown of the social contract always starts small: It starts with the little decisions we make day-to-day: The teacher who does too little to make sure that students receive the help they need to succeed before they develop a poor view of themselves and/or education in general. It’s the financial trader who says “I’m just doing my job. It’s not personal” — and then proceeds to undermine a company that employs real people with real families at stake. It’s the politician who is elected by the voters but crafts legislation to give certain industries unfair advantages in exchange for a cushy consulting gig offered by that industry the moment he/she steps out of office. (This was the case with the de-regulating champion prior to the Enron/WorldCom collapse due to electric deregulation, and more recently the end-result of deregulating the financial industries — work that Sen. Phil Gram, among others.)
Every problem we see, environmental, social and spiritual stems from greed, selfishness and corruption. To the extent the educational system falters, you can bet the parents who fail to make a priority of their own child’s success are contributing factors. To the extent the government fails, it is because it has become an object of manipulation and coercion by select groups financing members of both major parties.
When we think of ourselves as islands and rationalize that our individual crumbs of apathy and irresponsibility “don’t hurt anyone” that is the slippery slope that undoes individuals first, families second, communities third, countries fourth and entire civilizations in the end. The history books are filled with examples of vaulted civilizations faltering under the weight of their own corruption (Roman Empire).
This won’t change until people begin to reawaken spiritually. And they are not going to do that if they don’t believe that spirituality and truth and all those other intangible “abstracts” have a place in the “real world”. Those principles matter all right: They are the underlying motives — or lack of motivation — for a better, more equitable world. Without them we are only as moral as our paychecks and self-interest dictates.
It starts with us, and it ends with our children: If we only took more time to educate children about what it means to be a spiritual, ethical person, the environmental, educational and economic problems we face would begin to reflect the more positive attributes of a more equitable and charitable people. It may not be politically correct to say so, but I firmly believe that if people believed in a higher power who had a personal interest in their character, it might ultimately make people in our society more accountable to one another (insofar as they believe this is what a loving God wants of them and for them). Spiritually and ethically speaking, better that we shoot for the stars and land on the moon, then aim too low. We’ve been aiming too low ever since it became fashionable in the mid 20th Century to say that religion and faith served no real purpose, and children — future MBAs, bankers, teachers, CEOs and politicians — had no real need to learn of them. Perhaps part of our educational aim — in the home, not the schools — should be to reacquaint ourselves and our children to faith traditions so many of us have largely neglected in recent decades.