Living Routes: The Power of Practical Education

Posted on October 29, 2010 by zoeweil

Last week I was a keynote speaker at the ESTIA Peace Conference and had the opportunity to hear another keynote by Daniel Greenberg, executive director of Living Routes, an organization that offers college students the opportunity to study abroad in eco-villages around the world. I loved this humane education opportunity – a chance to spend a semester immersed in how to live, experiencing what we might consider typical “subjects” through real life: practice rather than just theory.

In the same way that I hope to see overarching topics such as food and water, housing and structures, energy and transportation, protection and conflict resolution, products and commerce, become the lens through which we learn math, science, language arts, social studies, history, and so on, in high school, I imagined the power of a semester spent at an intentional eco-village offering students the opportunity to experience sociology, conflict resolution, economics, politics, engineering, architecture, and so many other “subjects” first hand.

Check out Living Routes.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: education, humane education | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Taxes: What’s the MOGO (most good) Choice?

Posted on October 27, 2010 by zoeweil

A number of years ago, a friend proudly told me about how she kept certain income from the government in order not to pay taxes. Her assumption was that I would find this admirable because our government was using a hefty share of our tax dollars for unethical wars. Like her, I oppose such wars. But I was not impressed at all. I asked her if she took that money that legally should have gone to pay her taxes and donated it to charities or causes she believed in. She stared at me in confusion and said no. This had apparently never crossed her mind. I explained that I thought that it could be a noble act to refuse to pay taxes, but only if one took the same amount of money and put it toward good works and did so publicly as an act of civil disobedience. She quickly changed the subject.

Over the years, I’ve been surprised by just how many people I know who withhold information to avoid paying taxes. These are not libertarians who philosophically oppose taxation, but progressives who believe in social security, medicaid, educational financial aid, interstate highways, funding for the arts and sciences, and so on. There is plenty that they don’t believe in, and I know how galling it can be to know that one’s taxes are going toward immoral, violent acts, whether to fund illegal wars or cruel experiments on animals, or to subsidize unhealthy and inhumane foods. But if that is how we feel, then I believe as U.S. citizens we have a responsibility to participate in the democratic process to the best of our ability (and to transform that process so that it actually is democratic). We have the choice to be activists and changemakers. And we have the option of civil disobedience, a brave decision to embody one’s values and then face the inevitable consequences.

What’s the MOGO (most good) choice regarding taxes? That’s for each of us to decide for ourselves, based on our values, but I would argue that “gaming” the system to avoid paying taxes and keeping the money for oneself isn’t MOGO at all.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: citizen activism, MOGO (Most Good), systemic change | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off

Class Desks as Office Cubicles

Posted on October 25, 2010 by zoeweil

In response to my blog post, “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? How We Educate Our Children,” educational visionary and activist Kirsten Olson shared this:

“Yesterday my husband was observing an elementary classroom in a nearby state. The children in this room, aged 7-8, were sitting in desks lined up in rows, and the teacher had used her own money to buy cardboard shields that the children had to place around themselves at their desks. The shields were high enough so that you couldn’t see anything around you, or anyone around you, and you couldn’t interact at all with anyone. Behind their shields, the children were completing worksheets on blending ‘gr’ sounds and ‘tr’ sounds. The children were to sit behind their shields for their entire ‘literacy block,’ and they use these shields for all seat work (math, social studies), every day. They would be graded on their worksheets.

The teacher calls the children’s desks ‘offices.’”

If only this were a joke. If ever there were a more obvious example of how some schools really have as their primary goal preparing students to be compliant workers doing the tasks demanded of them without thought, without interaction, without creativity, without innovation, here it is. And it’s a travesty.

Let’s consider for a moment the world these children are growing up in: a warming planet where species are becoming extinct at dangerous and tragic rates; an overpopulated world where a billion people go to bed hungry and don’t have regular access to clean water; a world rife with strife where war and genocide touch every continent but Antarctica; potential peak oil creating an energy crunch we’re unprepared for socially, politically, and economically, and much more.

Lest I sound like a prophet of doom, let’s also consider some other aspects of our world: a technological wonder where information is at our fingertips connecting our minds and discoveries in nanoseconds; abundant food – enough to actually feed our billions; dramatic increases in life expectancy in developed countries over the course of a mere 100 years.

In a world with such looming catastrophes and such extraordinary opportunities the last thing our children should be doing is sitting at cubicle-like desks filling out worksheets day after day. Their world desperately needs them to be educated, able to think critically, creatively and cooperatively to build a healthy future relying upon the great and amazing strides their forebears have already achieved and solving the problems those same forebears, often unwittingly, caused. They will never learn this doing worksheets behind cardboard screens.

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: creativity, critical thinking, education | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Do You Think About the Future?

Posted on October 22, 2010 by zoeweil

Michael Chabon wrote a thought-provoking essay, “The Omega Glory,” (pdf) which is featured on the Long Now Foundation website. The Long Now Foundation “hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s ‘faster/cheaper’ mind set and promote ‘slower/better’ thinking… to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”

Chabon’s essay asks us whether and how we think about the Future. I’ve capitalized Future to distinguish it from thinking about one’s personal future, or a five or ten-year vision of the future. Now I consider myself someone who thinks about the Future a lot, because my work in humane education is meant to help pave the way for a peaceful, sustainable and humane Future. I’m also a big science fiction fan, so I’ve been thinking about the Future ever since discovering Star Trek in 1974.

Yet Chabon’s essay made me pause. If I’m honest, I don’t think about the Future all that often. I think about the future a lot, but not the Future. If I did, such thinking would likely profoundly inform my present and would temper and make more meaningful and wise my thoughts about actions on behalf of the future and the Future.

Take a look at Chabon’s essay, and do share your thoughts.

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: critical thinking, mindfulness, MOGO (Most Good) | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Life Is Short. Stretch Your Boundaries

Posted on October 20, 2010 by zoeweil

This summer my son started CrossFit training, an intensive workout approach that amazed me. I watched one morning as he and a friend set a timer and for 15 minutes did repetitions of the following:

5 pull-ups
10 push-ups
15 sit-ups

After the 15 minutes were over they’d done 45 pull-ups, 90 push-ups and 135 sit-ups. Let’s just say that on a very good day I can do 3 pull-ups in a row, and normally just 1 or 2.

I decided that I wanted to get in shape like that. So I joined a CrossFit class. I try to go once or twice a week, and then practice on my own another one or two times. I’ve been so sore since starting this a few weeks ago. I’ve also been exhausted. But in 15 minutes, I can now do 60 push-ups and 100 sit-ups and 160 squats, and I know that’s just a start. It feels great to be 49 and getting into such good shape.

Yet my friends who are listening to me moan and groan about how sore I am are rightly asking, “Why would you do that?” It’s funny this desire to do things we may dislike for a higher purpose. I had a goal for myself a few years ago to be able to run the mile up our local 900 foot mountain. It took a summer of practice to achieve this goal, and I still do it periodically, although I dislike every minute of it. So why do I do it? It’s not for the endorphins, because I’m so depleted afterward that it hardly feels like an exerciser’s high. It’s for the sense of accomplishment. It’s for the sense of competence. It’s for the sense of personal strength.

In a previous blog post I wrote about providing students with the opportunity to experience such a sense of accomplishment using their minds. It is not always “fun” to push ourselves to our limits, whether physically or mentally. Almost 30 years ago I began reading the book Godel, Escher, Bach. It stretched my mind far beyond its limits, so much so that after just 1 hour of reading I would fall asleep – a rarity for a non-napper like me. I didn’t make it through the whole book, but I felt fantastic about what I did learn and how I stretched my mind to its capacity, even though it exhausted me.

In answer to my friends who want to know why I’m doing CrossFit, I’m doing it because I want to stretch myself to achieve all of what I’m capable of achieving, physically and mentally. Life is short. I want to reach my potential.

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: consumerism, positive choices | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Getting Behind the Meat of the Matter with Gristle

Posted on October 18, 2010 by zoeweil

I had the opportunity to meet Moby – an awesome musician – when he was playing a benefit concert at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary following a MOGO workshop that I had facilitated earlier that day. It was such a treat to meet one of my favorite artists and fellow activists, and we exchanged books. Moby has co-edited, with Miyun Park, Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety, a collection of short, powerful essays. I highly recommend this book.

In his introduction, Moby writes about growing up and hearing the golden rule to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“When I was young this made a lot of sense to me in an uncluttered and beautifully self-evident way. But it then begged a follow up question: who are these ‘others’ referred to in the golden rule? Should this rule only apply to me and my family? Should it extend to friends? Strangers? And what about animals? To my young mind, it seemed inconceivable that I would extend the golden rule to strangers, but not to the animals in my house…. I loved the animals in my house, so I decided that I should extend the golden rule to them. Which then begged another follow-up question: If I don’t want the animals in my house to suffer, well, then what about the animals who don’t live in my house? Shouldn’t the golden rule apply to them as well? So, at an early age, I decide that the golden rule should probably extend to all animals who seem to have the capacity to suffer.”

And so Moby, like so many of us who don’t want to cause suffering and harm to other sentient beings, became vegan.

I’ve had people tell me that they need to eat meat, and so I was interested to read the first essay in the book, written by an ironman triathlete, who presented the case that not only is meat unnecessary, but that for peak athletic performance a vegan diet is preferable. But perhaps the more powerful commentary in this essay came in the form of a question and a graph. The question? “Which is cleaner, the kitchen sink or the toilet? And the answer is the toilet. That surprising finding comes from University of Arizona researchers who discovered ‘more fecal bacteria in the kitchen – on sponges, dish towels, and the sink drain – than they found swabbing the toilet, even after washing everything with bleach not once, but twice, in a house with omnivores. It is safer to lick the rim of their toilet seat than the kitchen countertop… because people aren’t preparing chickens in the toilet.’” All that excrement on meat, courtesy of today’s (lack of) animal husbandry and slaughterhouses, means excrement in our kitchens. Yuck.

Bon appetit,

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: animal protection, books, consumerism, food and diet, oppression | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

My Overflowing Garden

Posted on October 15, 2010 by zoeweil

Last weekend I faced the reality of my garden. I had food enough to feed a village, at least if the menu was zucchini and cucumbers. My husband and I gathered boxes and baskets, and after several back breaking trips filled his car to take them to the food pantry after offering some to his coworkers.

How had I allowed this to happen? Why had I tended my garden, weeded and watered, put in so many hours, just to grow food I would never eat? My family doesn’t even like zucchini! Cucumbers are always good for pickles if you can’t eat them all fresh, but I’d already made 18 jars, and enough is enough. We gathered several more overstuffed bags of cucumbers growing monstrously large even after pickling those 18 jars a few weeks ago.

I think the reason I grew so much this year was because last year the garden was a fiasco. After just as much care and tending and hours weeding, the tomatoes got some sort of fungus, as did the potatoes; the corn crop was destroyed by an animal in a single night; the brussells sprouts never amounted to more than little bumps; the squash vines died from squash beetles, and my dog ate the asparagus as fast as it poked through the ground. I was determined that this year would be different. I planted zucchini not because I like it, but because zucchini grows no matter what, and I just wanted to produce food, even if that included food that I don’t much enjoy. And boy was it the year for food. This hot summer produced the biggest bounty ever, including a beet bigger than my head (but which I’ll thoroughly enjoy in a borscht extravanganza).

What lesson did I learn? I hope I learned to stop planting foods I do not eat, but I suspect I’ll forget this lesson. Oh, I learned it for next summer, but there will always be years of lack, and I’ll likely respond to those summers the way I did this year. And then I’ll put in hours of time gathering food to give away to others. I guess that’s not so bad. Maybe it’s even MOGO.

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: food and diet, mindfulness, MOGO (Most Good) | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off

Otter Bog Blog #2: Finding Treasures in the Moment

Posted on October 13, 2010 by zoeweil

 

British Soldiers

 

My husband and I headed off to Otter Bog on a crisp fall Saturday that followed a series of rainy days. We went in search of a chicken-of-the-woods, our favorite edible shelf mushroom that we often find after rains in autumn. The woods were full of mushrooms, including a giant puffball (whose time had clearly passed, alas), but despite bushwhacking for 6 hours we didn’t find a chicken-of-the-woods. We did find the largest bear scat we’d ever seen, and magnificent British Soldiers growing on a dead log, but these were poor substitutes for the delicacy we sought.

When we got back to the pond at Otter Bog it was close to 4 p.m. The beavers who live on the pond were likely to come out soon, so we sat down on one of their old lodges (across the pond from their new lodge) and waited. My husband asked how long I planned to wait, and I said that I thought they’d come out within the hour. “An hour!” he exclaimed, not planning to stay more than 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes passed with no sign of the beavers, but we saw a pair of Wood Ducks off in the distance, and then one male Wood Duck, in all his resplendent colors, flew in and landed about 30 feet in front of us. And so we stayed.

 

A beaver at Otter Bog

 

When the hour was up, I was getting cold and my butt was sore from sitting on the beaver lodge sticks, and so I got up to go. My husband was packing up his camera to follow. I waited in the car for about five minutes and then realized that the beavers must have finally come out, because he hadn’t come back yet. So I quietly walked back to the pond, and sure enough was greeted by the beavers. Turns out my husband had a leg cramp as he stood up and during the 20 seconds that the cramp waylaid him, the beavers came out.

The take home message from the day? When you’re on a treasure hunt, you’ll always find treasures you weren’t searching for if you’re open to what appears in each moment. Or, as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Zoe Weil, Author of Most Good, Least Harm

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: mindfulness, MOGO (Most Good), nature, reverence | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Thinking in School?

Posted on October 11, 2010 by zoeweil

In a recent Huffington Post essay, Eric Maisel presents an argument for adding thinking to school . His idea is simple. Carve out 45 minutes each day for students to ponder big (age-appropriate) questions, write down their thoughts, and present them if they wish.

I like this idea, and I would take it further. Readers of my blog know that I believe that the purpose of schooling ought to be expanded so that we are educating for a future of solutionaries, people who think critically and creatively as a matter of course so that they contribute to new systems that are healthy, just, and sustainable. What if these 45 minute sessions also built upon one another? The questions to ponder could be ones crucial to the health and well-being of the students, their school, their community, and their world. Each day would invite the students to think even more deeply and creatively so that by the end of a week or a month, groundbreaking ideas may have emerged. Imagine the sense of accomplishment. Imagine the sense of competence. Imagine the sense of personal strength and capacity. And imagine the good ideas that would be generated that could be incorporated into the kids’ lives and the well-being and health of their communities and even their world.

One of the questions Maisel suggests is this: “For seventh graders, a big question might be, “How do you decide if you should or shouldn’t support a war that your country is engaged in?”

What if the next day, the question was “Why do so many human cultures resort to war rather than non-violent means of solving their conflicts?”

And the next: “What other means to solving conflicts can you think of?”

And the next: “How could people be persuaded to trade weapons for other forms of conflict resolution?”

And so on.

Mohandas Gandhi managed to think of the idea of non-violent resistance when faced with the seemingly impossible quandary of “persuading” the British to leave India. And this idea managed to take root and work. What ideas and thoughts generated by our youth might come to solve entrenched challenges we face?

I would take this 45 minute thinking class another step further as well. I would make it 75 minutes, and I would imbue it with the kind of gravity with which we present math and science and language arts (and it would incorporate these in relevant ways anyway). Students would ponder their questions long after class, doing research as necessary, so that their thinking was grounded in facts and knowledge. They would take their own ideas seriously because the school and their teachers would consider this period the most important part of school – the time when all of the basics come into play for the great purpose of utilizing their brilliant and creative minds for good.

Imagine that.

Zoe Weil,
author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education and Most Good, Least Harm

Image courtesy of srphotography via Creative Commons.

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: creativity, critical thinking, education, humane education, learning, third side thinking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Making the World Better Through Education

Posted on October 8, 2010 by zoeweil

Jim Haas has written a powerful and crucial essay, “Question of Values: Are We Learning for Earning—or for Living?” in Education Week. Here is an excerpt to whet your appetite to read more:

Vartan Gregorian, the master educator and president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has spoken of liberal education as “the soul of democracy,” saying that “at its best, liberal education prepares [students] to appreciate the difference between making a living and actually living; to cultivate more than a passing familiarity with ethics, history, science, and culture; and to perceive the tragic chasm between the world as it is and the world as it could and ought to be.” Making the world a better place is, or ought to be, the most cherished function of any school in a democracy. Economic prosperity is surely a part of this, but not the only part.

Amen.

Zoe Weil, President of the Institute for Humane Education and author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Filed under: education, humane education, systemic change, third side thinking, values | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 445 other followers