Who will Educate the Educators?
Education is Socialization for the Dominant Paradigm
It is the highly educated, employed specialists who have rendered civilization so absurdly vulnerable to nuclear and environmental annihilation. Specialists invented, designed, and produced the weapons of mass destruction, the financial collapses, and the hybrid grains that require the pesticides, fertilizers, and fossil fuel that other specialists created.
It is this narrowness of focus and understanding that, says the teacher Erik Reece, “can result in an abdication of responsibility concerning problems that lie outside of one’s specialty.” And so in 2014, Republican lawmakers could blithely abdicate their responsibility as leaders of the Free World by taking the “I am not a scientist” defense and feigning ignorance about global warming.
Teachers and college professors in their specialties do their part to perpetuate the problem. They are some of the best educated and, therefore, some of the most indoctrinated into the society’s values, beliefs, and habits. And so they continue to propagate these same destructive memes. [Btw, I’m using a pre social media definition for meme: an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other nongenetic means.]
Sure, they are often passionate and dedicated to the children with whom they work. They work in a profession that often borders on voluntary service, frequently putting in long hours unremunerated. They learn the newest teaching methods, take advantage of thousands of peer-reviewed research articles, are involved in hours of post-college professional development. They take not just a professional, but often a very personal, interest in the lives of their students. They are some of the kindest, most compassionate people in our society.
And yet, as the environmentalist David Orr put it, “For the most part… they are still educating the young as if there were no planetary emergency.”
Educational institutions are little different in philosophy and structure than society’s other institutions. The primary and secondary schools are run top-down like most businesses and government agencies, with superintendents on top, principals as middle managers, and teachers at the bottom of the chain of command.
At the college level, the universities are deeply entwined with the other institutions of power. Many academics practice a revolving door professional life little different from the one found in the other institutions. Not only do they take on various positions in business, the military, and politics, but they also act as their consultants, write favorable articles and position papers, and acquire research funding from them.[i]
The historian Michael Parenti notes that, “Many academics are consultants to multinational corporations and to government agencies. Some are also corporate directors. Such scholars write frequently on public policy, while leaving their readers unaware of their ties to the business world and the national security state.” Corporations and the Pentagon fund most of the academic research.
And the academics’ positions, curriculum, research, and tenure are supervised by administrators and run by boards of directors and boards of trustees who, notes Michael Perenti, “are drawn entirely from the business community” and who lack “any special training in the field of education.” It is no wonder then that none of our environmental heroes—Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader, Chico Mendes—have come from academic institutions.
So, who is going to educate the educators? Who is going to raise their consciousness? Will it be the university professors? The administrators? The state legislators? Who among this group possesses a sufficient biospheric consciousness to be teaching the teachers and leaders? Aren’t they drawn from the same elite class who sit in the positions of power in all the other institutions, the very people who rose to the top because they tend to either be the most competent or somehow be the best at thriving within the existing toxic paradigm?
And then let us say that somehow the educators did get the message, and schools and colleges changed their curricula to inform students about the environmental crisis and the human predicament. Then what? Would that change the behaviors of the upcoming generation? Well, yes, according to the traditional thinking in the field of education and the way environmental education has continued into this century.
According to this view, if you change people’s knowledge base, their attitudes about the environment will change accordingly, and their behaviors will follow. Unfortunately, the research does not support this view. Knowledge is necessary to change people’s environmental behavior, sure, but it is not sufficient.
Indeed, knowledge alone is almost useless. These were the conclusions of two meta-studies—which are studies that analyze a group of studies on a similar topic.[ii] The first was published in 1987, using 128 primary research studies, and became a classic in the field of environmental education. The second, twenty years later, analyzed 57 samples from 46 studies conducted since 1995. It came to the same conclusion as the first: knowledge is a prerequisite to change behavior, but it is hardly sufficient.
We recognize this in our daily lives. Alcoholics know that drinking is not good for them. Obese people know that overeating is the cause of their bulk. And Americans know that the reason that they are in debt is because they buy more than they can afford. Still, they persist in their old behaviors. I have taught numerous environmental courses, and I wish I could say that I have helped young students change their environmental behaviors. They knew more about the environment than they did before they took the course, and some of their attitudes might even have changed, as well. However, I doubt whether they drove their big cars any less; flew to fewer vacation destinations (although perhaps with some greater sense of guilt); whether they heated their big American homes any less; and whether they went into professions of production and consumption with a diminished fervor.
Behavior is predicated on far more than a course in college or a nature project in elementary school. We are complex multi-dimensional creatures, and a host of psychological and social variables flow into determining the decisions that we make. Our personal inborn attitudes, our conscious views, our unconscious motives, the values held by our family and friends and by the larger society, and society’s institutions and infrastructure all importantly influence what we think, say, and do.
This is what the two hundred studies have shown. Transformation, therefore, will require a full-on complete education, by schools, family, church, the media, the whole society. Of course it will. We all know this. To change, we must ultimately feel deep inside of ourselves the desire to do something, either because societal norms have inculcated us, or—requiring far greater effort—because we feel the urgency despite society’s toxic values.
We are getting this message from many directions. From a well-known saying erroneously credited to Einstein there is, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Similarly, David Orr says, “My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will compound our problems.” And Jeremy Rifkin: “If we change only the skill sets of students but not their consciousness, we will have done little to alter the notion that being productive is the overriding mission of education.” And from Noam Chomsky: “Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.”
“Thus,” the philosopher Ken Wilber tells us, “simply learning systems theory, or the new physics, or learning about Gaia, or thinking holistically, will not necessarily do anything to transform your interior consciousness, because none of those address the interior stages of growth and development… But rarely will you find a discussion of the many interior stages of growth of consciousness that alone can lead to an actual embrace of global consciousness.”
How will we know our consciousness has changed? Our behaviors will have changed. How will we change? That is a far more difficult question to answer. It is not so easy to make the huge transformations in behavior that will be necessary to avert the disasters that Civilization is heading for. And to dismiss this fact gravely underestimates the power of paradigms.
Plato thought it was up to the leaders. In the Republic, he argues: “Unless either philosophers become kings in their countries or those who are now called kings and rulers come to be sufficiently inspired with a genuine desire for wisdom; that is to say, political power and philosophy meet together… there can be no rest from troubles, my dear Glaucon, for states, nor yet as I believe for all mankind...”
However, as we have seen, we cannot expect our traditional leaders to show us the way. They are caught up in the same paradigm as the rest of us. Indeed, given their vested interests (of wealth, status, and power) in the status quo, given that they are beholden to donors and voters, given that they are the most educated (to society’s beliefs and values), they are the least likely to lead our transformation. They have not only poured the Kool-Aid into our cups, but they have also drunk it with us and then had seconds.
So, the consciousness of individual and society, of mind and culture, must change together. It will require the mutual pulling up of our bootstraps. And there are those who claim that we—each and every person—can achieve this aim. In the words of the visionary Terrence McKenna, “We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future, no longer casting blame outward into institutions or hierarchies of responsibility or control, but realizing the opportunity is here, the responsibility is here,…” Two of the most promising ways to achieve this perspective are meditation and psychedelics, which I will discuss in coming posts.
[i] See Taubes and Couzens (2012) for one of many examples, this one documenting the collusion of academics and the sugar industry in deceiving consumers about the dangers of sugar. Taubes, G., and Couzens, C.K. (2012, Nov/Dec) Sweet Little Lies. Mother Jones: 35-69.
[ii] Or as Hines et al. (1986/87) define it, “Meta-analysis is the term applied to groups of precise statistical methods designed to integrate empirical findings of studies addressing the same relationship.”