Education for Survival:
Culture, Curriculum, and Catastrophe in the Twenty-first Century
Randall Curren
University of Rochester, USA
There are some 600 surviving language groups and 5,000 ethnic groups in the world today, many of them threatened with extinction through assimilation, genocide, and cultural, economic, and geographic encroachment (Kymlicka, 1995, 1, citing Laczko, 1994; Gurr, 1993; Neilsson, 1985). In this context, it is not surprising that the survival of cultures is a matter of concern to political and educational philosophers. Among liberal political philosophers, Will Kymlicka has played a prominent role in advancing a qualified defense of minority rights (to certain forms of representation, self-governance, and cultural protection) as means to ensure that all national groups have the opportunity to maintain themselves as a distinct culture, if they so choose (Kymlicka, 1995, 113). The language of survival recurs through Kymlickas writing, as it does in the writings of others concerned with the political and educational issues at stake (see, e.g., Appiah, 1994; Reich, 2003): National minorities often demand various forms of autonomy or self-government to ensure their survival as distinct societies (Kymlicka, 1995, 10). They are concerned with ensuring that the larger society does not deprive them of the conditions necessary for their survival (38). Their survival & is heavily dependent on protection of their land base& [which] is vulnerable to the greater economic and political power of the larger society (43). Some who oppose minority rights argue that cultures do not need state assistance to survive&. the members of a culture [worth saving] will sustain it through their own choices (108), but this ignores the inescapably national& aspects of political life [that] give a profound advantage to the members of majority nations (194).
Philosophers of education have responded to Kymlickas and others defenses of minority rights in ways that are understandably focused on the exercise of educational discretion and its potential to restrict the liberties or autonomy of members of the minority cultures themselves. The arguments are by now widely familiar. External protections are enacted in response to group claims against the larger society, whereas internal restrictions are permitted in order to limit internal dissent, defection, or departures from cultural norms; but the distinction is not always easy to draw, Kymlicka notes (35, 42). Religious organizations in the USA secured an exemption from federal prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of sex, and are thereby free to school the children of consenting parents in their traditional norms of male dominance and female exclusion from the workplace (Dwyer, 1998). In this instance, a right of self-government against the larger society is used by some groups I do not mean to imply all religious groups to internally restrict deviations from a cultural norm and thereby the opportunities or autonomy of females. In instances in which language, rather than religion, is the salient cultural factor, a national minoritys exercise of self-government in matters of education may preserve the possibilities made available by a culture in a way that is not illiberal. Kymlicka offers a liberal defense of external protections that are essential to the survival of national minorities but not internal restrictions that would violate the civil rights affirmed by liberal theory (164). Yet, he does not endorse forcible intervention & to compel respect for liberal rights, at least with respect to self-governing national minorities such as the Pueblo of North America (165). Liberal reformers must rely on advocacy, dialogue, and peaceful negotiation, not force, he counsels (167, 168, 171). Matters are different, and sometimes more difficult, with respect to ethnic immigrant groups whose ways of life are not institutionally distinct from, but rather parasitic on, those of the dominant national culture (61 ff).
The limits of tolerance and special legal accommodation of illiberal cultures' educational preferences is an issue of unquestionable importance. A systematic investigation of it might begin with the notion that in the USA tolerance of illiberal education is not a substantial threat to liberal-democratic citizenship (Galston, 2003; Reich, 2003, 300), and would focus on the theocratic dominionist movement, the almost complete absence of public oversight of evangelical and home schools, and the evidence of a growing illiberal indeed fascist presence in American culture and politics (Dwyer, 1998; Hedges, 2006). My concern today is not with the limits of tolerance, however, but to note an aspect of Kymlicka's concern with cultural survival that philosophers of education have ignored, and to push beyond that toward a curriculum of survival adequate to the challenges of the decades ahead. I want to stimulate a wider discussion of the educational dimensions of survival, instead of allowing this theme to be obscured by discussions of autonomy that focus on conceptions of the good available within a culture while ignoring its capacity to provide the means to live well or secure those goods.
Kymlicka recognizes, and notes repeatedly, that cultural survival depends in part on a cultures material basis and ability to control and ensure the adequacy of that material basis. He notes the fundamental importance to some cultures of fishing and hunting rights, and that indigenous struggles over land are the single largest cause of ethnic conflict in the world" (39, 43, 44). Fishing is an important aspect of some Aboriginal cultures, and guaranteed fishing rights ensure that they are not outbid or outvoted by the larger society on decisions regarding access to fishing, he writes (44). It would be easy to concede this point and consider it beyond the concern of educational philosophy, were it not becoming clear that it is beyond the power of individual countries to provide meaningful long-term guarantees of fishing rights, or water rights, or rights to land that can sustain life. The collapse of fisheries, the disappearance of mountain ice packs and other fresh water sources, the impact of human induced drought, soil loss, and salinization, and the global population pressures that outstrip any foreseeable growth in basic commodities or public services, are conspiring with other aspects of globalization to transfer the focus of political philosophy to a world stage on which the fate of individual countries, let alone national minorities, is not in their own hands - a global stage on which cooperation in the survival of diverse ethnic groups, cooperation in enacting a fair global social contract, will matter to the survival of a civilized way of life in general. The truth I will try to convince you of today is that educational philosophy must follow suit. Its capacity to be a constructive force in the world of the twenty-first century will depend largely on the quality of its engagement with issues of global citizenship and survival.
I'll conclude this prelude by noting that education that gives unfettered expression to a culture is not the same thing as education that is most conducive to a cultures survival. Aristotle observed (in Politics V.9) that the education that enables a regime to survive is not what those in power typically prefer. Democratic education, or education that preserves a democracy, is not as singularly favorable to the poor, nor is oligarchic education as singularly favorable to the rich, as the friends of unfettered democracy (lawless rule by the poor) or oligarchy (lawless rule by the rich) imagine. What preserves a regime is education that is constitutionally moderating, or conducive to an equitable distribution of political power among constituent groups and conducive to cooperation in the direction of that power toward an equitable distribution of the means to living well. In our world, a world in which so much of the material basis of human existence is profoundly constrained and damaged by global capital and unsustainable consumption, the education that will enable individual governments and societies to survive is not likely to be the education of our partisan dreams and patriotic pride. As an American, I accept the burden of casting the first stone in my own direction. I concede that the culture of the American suburbs using culture now in the sense of the customs of a group or lifestyle enclave (Kymlicka, 1995, 18) is unsustainable and will surely collapse before long. Our schools in the meantime can be seen as rather blindly and naively replicating and reinforcing a lifestyle or culture of consumption that is not only doomed, but also hard to reconcile with any conceivable global regime compatible with the survival of many other linguistic and ethnic groups, and arguably the survival of civilization itself or the modern industrialized form of social life shared by nearly all modern societies (18).
Ive now invoked all three of the senses of culture distinguished by Kymlicka: (1) the "customs" of a group; (2) the "civilization" of a people, or institutional form of human society broadly conceived; (3) an "intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history" (18). Cultural survival and education that is conducive to survival may pertain to any of these, though the order of priority should by now be clear, at least in principle. I want to ask what a curriculum for survival might look like. To ground that, I'll need to sketch a somewhat more detailed picture of the global situation of humanity (Part I), and I'll draw some lessons from the meager precedents I am able to identify in the history of philosophy of education (Part III). Taking these and some embedded moral arguments (Part II) as starting points, I will formulate some unsurprising curricular suggestions (Part IV).
I.
I'll start with some facts about where humanity stands collectively with respect to sustainability, for "sustainability" is the language currently used in discussing the prospects of societal collapse or survival. Civilizations that exceed the limits of sustainable demands on ecological resources and persevere in attempting to sustain or increase those demands sooner or later collapse, and in collapsing suffer catastrophic population declines and simplification of their social systems (Tainter, 1988; Redman, 1999; Wright, 2004; Diamond, 2005). Because the problems are problems of aggregate consumption, I'll comment on the coordination problems involved, the importance of fairness as a basis for any coordinated solution, and the desirability of a globally coordinated policy to reduce the human population.
Let's begin with human population growth and unsustainable demands on water resources and the ecosystems that convert wastes into renewable resources. Between population growth and rising levels of material consumption, the human ecological footprint or demand on the biosphere tripled between 1961 and 2003. The World Wildlife Funds (WWFs) Living Planet Report 2006 pegs human demand on the biosphere at 125 percent of carrying capacity, or twenty-five percent beyond what is sustainable, having crossed the threshold of unsustainability in the mid-1980s (WWF, 2006). Carrying capacity cannot be long exceeded without causing long-term or permanent destruction of that capacity, and the Report projects that
A moderate business-as-usual scenario, based on United Nations projections showing slow, steady growth of economies and populations, suggests that by mid-century, humanitys demand on nature will be twice the biospheres productive capacity. At this level of ecological deficit, exhaustion of ecological assets and large-scale ecosystem collapse become increasingly likely (WWF, 2006, 2-3).
In stark numbers, world population, currently 6.5 billion, is expected to reach 9.3 billion by mid-century, at which point human demands on the environment would be double what is sustainable. Assuming a comparable average material standard of living, a first approximation to a realistic mid-century population target would be 4.6 billion or about 2 billion below the current number, except that the longer we exceed carrying capacity, the smaller the long-term sustainable population will be.
The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a comprehensive set of reports sponsored by the UN Foundation and coauthored by 1350 scientists from 95 countries and 22 national academies of science, is consistent with this in finding that sixty percent of the worlds ecosystems are being degraded or used unsustainably" (UN Foundation, 2005). Walt Reid, the MAs lead author, has noted in interviews that local and regional ecosystem collapses are already occurring, and we are putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planets ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.
It bears emphasizing that global per capita grain yields have been declining steadily since the mid-1980s, and are critically dependent upon enormous quantities of fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel, all derived from oil and natural gas. World oil reserves are expected to peak and begin their inexorable decline within six or seven years. That decline will accelerate once it has begun, and the sharply higher prices that will be required to keep supply and demand in equilibrium are likely to precipitate crises across a number of economic sectors including agriculture. There is no ready substitute for the twenty-five billion barrels of oil being consumed each year, and the time-line for shifting from an oil based economy to one based on other energy sources will not be short. New technologies and vast infrastructures will have to be created and scaled up, and that is a lengthy and enormously expensive process. Looking a little farther down the road, the fossil fuel age will be spent by the end of this century whether or not effective policies to combat global warming are enacted: natural gas supplies are not many years beyond oil in peaking, and coal, though abundant by volume, is a far less concentrated energy source than oil.
This brings me to global warming, which is already contributing to drought conditions that are limiting food and water availability (Connor, 2007). Writing in the New York Review of Books in the fall of 2006, Bill McKibben observed that
Very few understand with any real depth that a wave large enough to break civilization is forming, and that the only real question is whether we can do anything at all to weaken its force (McKibben, 2006, 24).
Here in the UK, Chancellor Gordon Brown has committed your country to world leadership on climate change, and called for reducing European carbon dioxide emissions thirty percent by 2020, and sixty percent or more by 2050. With the release of the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on climate change, there is finally some serious legislative activity in Washington, with emission reductions as deep as 80% by 2050 under discussion (sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer). Worldwide reductions in this range are predicated on the IPCCs atmospheric carbon dioxide stabilization target of 450ppm. This amounts to a reduction from current total annual emissions of about nine gigatonnes to about three gigatonnes by 2050, and is predicated on a goal of holding additional warming to no more than 2ēC (IPPC, 2001). These are benchmarks of what would suffice to prevent runaway warming that would create a different planet, on which perhaps only 200,000 people could survive, mostly in Antarctica (McKibben, 2006, 23; Lean, 2004). Given the current state of affairs, holding the line at 2ēC would be a colossal achievement, but it would not prevent a future of drought and storm related death and destruction.
Jim Hansen, a leading climatologist, argues that with emissions rising two percent per year - a rate faster than ever before - the window of opportunity to meet these benchmarks will close unless a change in direction can begin during the current decade (Hansen, 2006, 14).
McKibbens uncertainty about whether the warming we have set in motion is already irrevocably beyond our control arises from a steady flow of recent data:
virtually all of it showing results at the very upper end of the ranges predicted by climate models, or beyond them altogether. Compared with the original models of a few years ago, ice is melting faster; forest soils are giving up more carbon as they warm; storms are increasing much more quickly in number and size&. [A] new study shows methane [a potent greenhouse gas] leaking from Siberian permafrost at five times the predicted rate (McKibben, 2006, 23; see also Walter, et al., 2006).
These findings imply that the IPCCs predictive models may underestimate climate sensitivity to increases in carbon dioxide, and that the stabilization target of 450ppm may be too high.
II.
With this in mind, I would observe that most governments do not find it possible to ask any sector of their populations to accept lower material standards of living. Overwhelmingly, they promote economic growth as an alternative to promoting a more equal distribution of existing wealth. This pattern is replicated in global affairs too, of course, and one measure of the problem we face is that raising just the current population of China to the living standards of the North would yield a doubling of the current, unsustainable human demands on ecological services (Diamond, 2005, 495).
The most promising solutions to both global warming and problems of sustainability would require international cooperation based on accords that are perceived to be fair (Athanasiou and Baer, 2002). This would require significant equalization of standards of living, such as the equalization entailed by a uniform per capita emissions cap based on current population levels. This equalization would be more palatable to the North and thus more likely to succeed if the leveling down it must accept is moderated by planned reductions in population, predicated on equal but limited rights to procreate.
In light of this, and the inevitability of steep and more or less catastrophic population decline, and the desirability of placing a limit on aggregate environmental impact sooner rather than later, prudence would seem to demand a global conversation about the design of a policy framework for limiting and reducing the human population. I think we would all readily agree that it should be fair and non-coercive, and give priority to educational measures that enable people to make informed and responsible decisions. Any chance of success would require heavy investments in education, especially universal, basic education for girls, which reduces fertility by promoting autonomy or a greater capacity to exert procreational choice. One might picture it, as Brain Barry does, as also providing assurance of a secure retirement independent of one's children for the poor of the South, and as making it expensive to bear children, perhaps through heavy and progressive taxes on both income and wealth for any children beyond the first (Barry, 2005, 263). I won't speculate as to the likelihood of any such policy succeeding, but I feel compelled to emphasize that the alternative to such success is a status quo which allocates substantial procreational rights through markets that will increasingly deny those who are poor the means to sustain the lives of any children they bear.
In the circumstances of a prospective global population collapse, an extension of Kymlicka's arguments for minority rights would embrace David Archard's claim that,
If the existing members of a population subsisting on scarce resources would be put at risk by any addition to their number [then the right to bear children is limited]&. The general goal of maintaining population at a desired level may be argued to constrain the exercise of any right to bear (Archard, 2004, 141).
The embrace of this claim would militate against the status quo and favor a globally coordinated and equitable population policy. Such a policy would, at the very least, provide prospective parents with the information and capacity they need to make free and informed decisions about whether they, for their part, will impose on future generations and children of their own the risks inherent in a civilization living far beyond its means.
One of the bases on which one could defend universal education of this kind, which is to say environmental education that is factually accurate, adequate, and conducive to critical thinking and informed, rational life choices - is an appeal to children's rights. Within the context of a conception of human rights which assigns rights to children, one can argue, as Archard does, that "it is wrong to bring about a life whose prospects you can be reasonably sure will fall below a minimal threshold of decency" (Archard, 2004, 141). A collective corollary of this principle is that it is wrong for those who understand, or should understand, our global circumstances to fail to seek and support a morally acceptable coordinated approach to providing prospective parents with the understanding and means to voluntarily avoid committing such wrongs. This provides one kind of moral basis for a form of universal education for survival that is informative and capacity building. I'll suggest two other moral bases for it, and each of those will also provide a bridging link from Archard's principle to my collective corollary.
One of these alternative bases for such education could be constructed along lines suggested by Allen Buchanan's alternative to Rawlsian liberalism (Buchanan, 2004). Buchanan appeals to social epistemology, i.e. to our inevitable and significant epistemic reliance on others, in defending liberal institutions - institutions that reduce prudential and moral risk by sorting truth from error and disseminating truth. We all have fundamental interests, both prudential and moral, that are served by truth, he argues: we have an interest in truth, both to advance our own well-being and to avoid doing harm to others. From this perspective, we all have a prudential and moral interest in the existence of educational institutions, including but not limited to schools, and an interest in their thoroughness in disseminating the truths we most need to know in order to live well and without fault. Given the state of the world as I have described it, those truths would surely include the ones I have relied on and a great deal more that is conducive to survival. An argument of this kind does not rest on any assumption about children's rights, and it has the added attraction of offering one kind of connecting bridge from Archard's (parental precautionary) principle to my collective (educational precautionary) corollary.
A second alternative defense could be constructed on a principle of beneficence. Most philosophers would agree that there is a universal duty of beneficence, which places a burden on all persons to come to the aid of those in harms way. That is a general duty, but its demands are non-specific and it is not entirely clear what it entails. The world I have described is a world in which we are all to some extent in harms way, and in which many exercises of property rights undermine incrementally and over time the value of property rights held by others. What do we owe each other by way of beneficence? What we owe each other most obviously is full awareness of our circumstances a fair warning of what awaits us as a basis for self-protective measures, and to establish the basis of understanding on which transparency in negotiating a cooperative basis of response to our problems would necessarily rest. From a Kantian moral perspective, there is indeterminacy in the content of our concrete rights and duties who owns what, e.g., and how much risk it is morally acceptable to impose on others. Because this is so, and because this indeterminacy can only be remedied through establishing a civil society existing under a common law, we have in Kantian terms a moral duty to settle the details of our moral relations with each other with all those with whom we cannot help associating or interacting by entering into civil society or binding ourselves by mutual consent under a body of common law and legislative and judicial capacity. In an age of globalization and global peril in which we all interact through incremental impacts on resources and climate, this implies a moral duty to enter into a global social contract to create institutions of world government. Those institutions would make concrete and specific the general duties of beneficence we already owe each other, and would almost certainly extend the forms of self-restraint (such as limiting carbon dioxide emissions) entailed by duties not to injure others' property and health. In doing that, they would have to regulate and provide for the adequacy of environmental education.
It is important to note that the legitimacy of such a contract would be contingent upon contractual transparency, which could scarcely be achieved without prior coordinated efforts to provide the very kind of education in question. This might happen through such a mechanism as voluntary adoption by individual countries of the environmental components of the curriculum of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, aided by voluntary subventions from wealthy nations Those national educational efforts and the needed subventions would be highly rational, of course, given our circumstances of mutual peril, and in the Kantian scheme they would be required by beneficence and by the moral necessity of settling the limits of our other concrete duties to those we interact with outside a common body of law. Insofar as this concerns the specification of our mutual duties to aid each other in avoiding wrongdoing and harm in the world, it also provides a second possible bridge from Archard's (parental precautionary) principle to my collective (educational precautionary) principle.
The practical obstacles to providing universal education of the kind in question are daunting, of course. Most notably, there are cultural barriers to educating girls in many parts of the world, and half a million people per week are currently being added to the roughly one-billion inhabitants of urban slums, which lack not only schools but every other basic service and prerequisite of human dignity (Davis, 2006, 22, 126, 155).
III.
Turning to the history of our field, we find some attention to the theme of surviving the uncertainties and political upheavals of eighteenth century Europe in Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Emile. The limitations of his view are instructive. He writes in Book I that:
In the social order where all positions are determined, each man ought to be raised for his.& But among us where only the ranks remain and the men who compose them change constantly, no one knows whether in raising his son for his rank he is not working against him.
In the natural order, since men are all equal, their common calling is mans estate& natures call to human life (Rousseau, 1979, 41).
Position is not easily transmitted, and a child educated to survive only by the sweat of others is ill served, he warns. In Book III, he amplifies this message by invoking the specter of revolutions that would put the ranks themselves in question:
You trust in the present order of society without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions, and it is impossible for you to foresee or prevent the one which may affect your children. The noble become commoners, the rich become poor, the monarch becomes subject. Are the blows of fate so rare that you can count on being exempted from them? We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions (194).
The lesson Rousseau draws is that education should be predicated on equality, the value of work that provides the necessities of life, and the premise that no one is too good or too secure to master a trade and be prepared to secure the necessities of life with his own hands. Education should prepare one to survive without the conveniences of rank that are dependent on a system bound to collapse (195-96).
Rousseau could see that only so much destitution and opulence could coexist side-by-side in one society, but he was a philosopher of his time and place in focusing on the proportionality of individual production and consumption, but not on the inevitable limits to aggregate production and consumption. Why would Rousseau, or John Locke, or any other European philosopher of the seventeenth or eighteenth century concern himself with limits to progress when vast continents awaited conquest? When natures harmony seemed sufficient proof of a divine plan in which a human future was assured? We must look all the way back to Plato to find a philosopher of education who is squarely focused on the reality of collective limits.
Philosophically, Platos Republic is most of all about the nature of justice or goodness, and the relationship between goodness and happiness. If we inquire about the nature of the background concerns that animate the dialogue, however, the answer in a word is over-consumption. The theme of excessive and ruinous consumption is intoned in the language of greed and injustice, and more specifically in the language of unnecessary and lawless desires. The true and healthy city of Book II (369-372) is contrasted with the luxurious city with a fever (372e, 373). People in the former live simply, and everyones needs are met even in old age (372d); the city is sustainable across generations (372d); it is a classless, unregulated partnership, with free and mutually advantageous exchange of goods (369d ff; 372c); people enjoy sex but limit children to no more than their resources allow (372b-c); they thereby avoid both poverty and war (372c). This healthy city might be Platos image of Eden.
The unhealthy city is, expressly or by implication, none of these things. Its first unhealthy choice is to eat meat, which requires hunters, herds, more land, and doctors (372b-d). The addition of further luxuries requires more resources, even more land, and hence an army and a policy of military expansionism. This is a portrait of Athens itself, which lived without limits and exported its poor to colonies established in conquered territories, until the ruinous Peloponnesian War ended all that. The story of the ensuing books of the Republic is one of restoring the luxurious city of Athens, which had to continuously grow to keep the tensions between rich and poor in check, to a healthy state of equilibrium. The justice and education that establish this equilibrium are profoundly equalizing in the sense that they steer those who hold political and military power away from material wealth, and toward the enjoyment of the highest goods those of the mind which are public goods that can be enjoyed simultaneously and equally by everyone.
We know from other texts that Platos concerns about sustainability and excessive consumption were not limited to the relationship between war making and limited resources. By the time Plato was born, the landscape of Greece had already suffered from overgrazing by sheep and hillside deforestation, which had given rise to a number of legislative acts to replant hillsides and limit erosion (Ponting, 1991, 76-77; Williams, 2004, ch 4). Writing with a sound understanding of floods, erosion, and water scarcity caused by deforestation, Plato observes in the Critias that Attica of today is like the skeleton revealed by a wasting disease, once all the rich topsoil has been eroded and only the thin body of the land remains (111b). He goes on to describe a mythical city of Atlantis, densely populated, incessantly occupied with commerce, and ultimately ruined by intoxication with luxury and wealth (117-121). The lesson, as in the Republic, is that when possessions become pursued and honored (121a), human beings exceed the limits of prudence and justice, and come to a bad end. The antidote he prescribes is an education that contests materialism.
IV.
Our circumstances call for an acute awareness of the global condition of humanity and a readiness to act creatively and within the framework of broad international cooperation. We can envision ways in which schools can contribute to the required understanding and mobilization of effort, and I would argue that contributions to this end are entailed by the fulfillment of any other ends we might reasonably impute to schools. Whether our aim as educators is to enable children to lead flourishing lives, or to promote the conscious reproduction of democratic communities, or to secure any other good whose fulfillment requires an indefinite civilized future, our educational mission requires the survival of a civilized world order and must take some responsibility to incorporate a curriculum of survival.
My suggestions for the design of such a curriculum are as follows:
1. Begin with honest history and prehistory. We need honest, warts and all history; not a Whiggish history of progress that obscures the perils of growth without end , but a history that begins with what we know of the thousands of prehistoric societies that perished in deserts of their own making (see Tainter, 1988; Redman, 1999; Wright, 2004; Diamond, 2005). Every child should know the story of deforestation on Easter Island, of irrigation and ecological catastrophe in the Fertile Crescent, and the Malthusian demise of the Maya. Without the big picture and many salient details of how societies undermine the basis of their own existence, as ours is in the process of doing, our childrens prospects of averting catastrophe will be dim.
2. Teach environmental studies more systematically. The environmental studies curriculum should include the basic science, the problems, the regional and global distribution of impacts, and the state of cooperation or non-cooperation in solving the problems.
3. Integrate economics and environmental studies. Students can benefit from honest instruction in production methods, both agricultural and industrial, and the environmental controversies surrounding them. They should come away knowing how much energy and water resources are consumed in the production of common products, and how atmospheric carbon and other wastes are released. Here, and throughout the curriculum, the focus on critical and inventive thinking should be as effective as possible and engaged with vital questions: How can production, marketing, and distribution systems be redesigned to be more environmentally friendly? How can we best live without economic growth, if growth is precluded? To what extent would more egalitarian distributive policies help? Who, if anyone, gains from growing populations and growing demand for property, goods, and services, and who doesnt?
4. De-commercialize schools. Commercial messages to consume, to define ones identity through consumption, and to address ones problems though material consumption, should be banned from schools except as objects of critical thinking exercises. This would be one modest step toward making it easier for children to distinguish between what they need and what they want, and to resist inducements to excessive and imprudent consumption.
5. Encourage the enjoyment of environmentally friendly activities as a basis for flourishing lives. These would include intellectual, musical, athletic, and social pastimes, with modifications from their present forms as needed, such as to reduce demands on transportation and energy resources. The growing body of research on what actually makes people happy, why they buy things, and the surprising extent to which buying things makes them less happy, can be taught as one component of this (Kasser, 2002).
6. Encourage resourcefulness, inventiveness, and adaptability. Schools can promote a readiness to examine, rethink, and redesign every aspect of how we live, in order to promote the most rapid adjustment to a sustainable human ecological footprint. In connection with this, they can nurture skills in diverse practical arts, with an emphasis on design, economy, and adaptability. With regard to adaptability and the cultural barriers to it, public schools with students of mixed (or recalcitrant) cultural backgrounds can at least provide lessons in the hardship that societies have brought upon themselves by failing to adapt. The failure of the Greenland Norse to abandon disastrous aspects of their European heritage provides one vivid illustration of this (Diamond, 2005, 211-276). Another telling case study could be constructed around the culture and economics of gold. Many people continue to regard the exchange of gold (e.g., in weddings) as a cultural necessity, even as the environmental toll of producing gold far eclipses any substantial good achieved by it. The decision to buy gold should at least be informed by a vivid understanding of the fact that the gold ore that remains is of such poor quality that the extraction of a single ounce the gold in one ring requires thirty tons of ore and commonly involves the use of a cyanide leaching process that contaminates the thirty tons (minus one ounce) of debris that remains, as well as everything downstream and downwind (Perlez and Johnson, 2005; Perlez and Bergman, 2005). In the interest of dietary adaptability, which could substantially reduce ecological burdens, students could also be engaged in hands-on experiments in food preparation to broaden their culinary horizons.
7. Prepare children for global cooperation. There is much that could contribute to an openness and ability to participate in global cooperation, beginning with serious instruction in geography, languages, world affairs, the history of the UN, and an understanding of the faltering capacity of existing governments to secure a livable future for their citizens. The matter of inculcating patriotism must be rethought to its foundations, and the cultivation of sympathetic attachment to the institutional basis of international cooperation advanced. Writing in 1916 during the First World War, John Dewey suggested that schools treat national sovereignty as provisional (Dewey, 1916, 98). I would second this at least to the extent of urging openness to accepting limitations on national sovereignty as the price of escaping a global state of nature and the short, nasty, and brutish future it offers.
8. Prepare everyone for a world with fewer human beings. Let me add to what I said above, only that the human population of Earth will be far lower at the end of this century than it is today. That is all but certain. What is uncertain is how large a human population is sustainable, and how humane or catastrophic the path of descent will be. This is not what I would wish for my children or yours, but it is what they must be prepared for.
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