There is poetry in stone. Our first night’s camp on Powell Bay on the Canadian side of Lake Saganaga in the Boundary Waters was nestled in the midst of such poetry. From the water’s edge huge boulders, covered with textures and colors of different lichen and moss, spilled upward toward the crown of a hill. On top of the hills were relatively level spaces where we pitched blue, yellow, green, and brown tents.
What made the stone alive was the interweave of waters, trees, earth, sky, and stone. On a point across from tents and campfire a huge mass of granite humped gray into waves, sentinel spires of red pine clinging to the stone’s slope as it slid downward into a small cliff.
Boy Scout Troop 32 of Shawano, Wisconsin and assorted fathers and scout leaders had traveled a long road to reach this particular wilderness place. For a year and a half the scouts had mastered outdoor skills, camped out, learned how to cook, earned their tenderfoot, second-class, first-class badges, and a variety of merit badges, including ones for swimming, canoeing, and first aid. We had taken a shakedown wilderness trip at the Sylvania Wilderness area in Northern Michigan and learned about portages, lean meals, and hard days of paddling canoes. After our preparation we were ready for the real thing, an eight-day trip that would lead us to Powell Bay in Canada and beyond.
As I look back on over thirty years working in education, this particular trip still strikes me as an example of what the educational process could be. The scouts on this trip were all in middle school or high school, and I dare say none of them have ever forgotten that trek into the wilderness or the skills, knowledge, attributes, and values they found during that trip. I must admit that I, as both father and a teacher, have not forgotten any of the things I learned either. I remember especially when my son Kevin and his friend Jessie Windmiller, on the trip’s first day, confronted the reality of canoeing on a big lake into wilderness.
After enduring a cold, rainy night in tents when the temperature dipped to the freezing mark, we’d put into the channel that led from Gunflint in Minnesota to the islands and wide expanses of Lake Saganaga and Canadian customs. During the passage to the lake white capped waves larger than our canoes threatened to swamp us with water every time we topped a wave and the canoe’s prow crashed downward into the next white cap’s running, spraying lake water in our faces.
Kevin and Jessie were only 12 years old, but they paddled with all their strength as my heart beat the pattern of my fears. They were so young. Enormous clouds scudded overhead and a north wind blew cold and hard across the waters. Adult leaders only got glimpses of them and the other young boys as they traversed that frightening passage, but that night, as they pitched tents on a stone island and dragged themselves through chores necessary before bed, you could see they had matured. I suspect I, as a father, had matured also.
I do not know how to enumerate the lessons young boys and men learned on that trip into wilderness. They learned that they had no choice but to paddle for twelve to fourteen hour days. Food was not plentiful, though adequate. Everyone tired of ramen noodles and oatmeal soaked with water rather than milk. We studied animals, plants, and the ecology of the boundary waters and Quetico area with its lakes, wetlands, streams, islands, fish, loons and other waterfowl, rocks, cliffs, and forests. We even worked at cleaning campsites and stacking wood for other canoeists who would come to where we had spent the night. No one could have finished the trip without the help of others.
What can you learn from being in the presence of beauty? On the lake that spilled over into Saganaga Falls on the trip’s last day we paddled onto an immense mirror whose surface elongated shorelines and sky, each individual tree from both shorelines muted and softened by reflecting water. Above our heads sky was cloudless and deep blue, reflected even darker in the mirror that we disturbed with the steady rhythm of paddles. In such times even the most rowdy scouts looked into themselves and the world about them with wonder.
As I think about that long ago experience, however, I contrast its complex, spirit enhancing lessons with the lessons from classrooms in schools and universities to which I have dedicated my life’s work. Horseplay broke out as youthful spirits decided to act in inappropriate ways on that long ago wilderness trip. Sometimes fathers and scout leaders felt like bringing down the heavens on boys and young men as they whined or cussed about the difficulty of a day’s paddle or the inadequacy of a meal. Still, in too many classrooms the problem is not high spirits, cussing, or whining, but a deadening seen in young eyes or a sense of boredom so strong it resembles the soul-weariness of strong depression. No one measured the learning accomplished on our wilderness trip. I am not sure exactly how I would go about measuring the learning that took place. Still, I am sure that the learning was life transforming. I am sure that those who paddled canoes and pitched tents on rocky islands and lost sleep learned more than they would have by months of sitting in classrooms. I am sure those boys are better men and are more successful than they would have been if they had not belonged to Troop 32 and went on that trip.
Questions About Education and the Modern World
As I have aged I have been thinking increasingly intently about my profession as an educator. I believe I have done good in my time. I have helped found a tribal college, been a tribal college President, helped initiate national and international efforts to improve education, and helped numerous students, faculty, and staff in numerous ways. I do not believe I have done that good, however, effectively, or consistently, for all of those I have had the good fortune to meet in my professional capacities. When I think about education, its meaning to the modern world, and the immense challenges it is currently facing as political pundits threaten to kill the goose that laid the golden egg of American wealth and well-being, I have the disquieting sense that something deep and significant is wrong. I am not exactly sure what that something is, but the disquiet is powerful.
Part of the disquiet comes, I suppose, from my sense of wrong in today’s world. How have we got ourselves into this mess anyway? Where global warming, species extinction, water and air pollution, resource depletion, overpopulation, contaminated fish in the world’s oceans, lakes, streams and rivers, and a host of other environmental ills join the age-old human problems of war, hatred, crime, prejudice on racial, sexual, religious, or ethnic grounds, jealousy, famine, caste and class systems, and illnesses in battering who we are and should be as human beings assail us? Is the earth, or are humans upon the earth, truly sustainable given the multiple attacks on the natural world and our human community?
I do not find the answer to these, or other, questions easy to find. As an eternal optimist, though, who can still take a walk in the woods and look down a hill’s slope into a ravine or canyon and feel the wonder of existence, I still believe human kind has the ability to find good answers. I still believe education is part of the solution the future must find if it is to realize what must become if we, as an earth species, and the rest of the natural world, are to survive.
Still, do we not know good or bad by what has come out of the systems designed to produce that good or bad? Does not the result of work define its contribution?
The Contemporary View Toward Education
Education in the contemporary world is defined, more and more, by its economic impacts on individuals and communities. Alan Greenspan, the great guru that has advised both Republican and Democratic Presidents from the Federal Reserve offices in Washington DC aerie, is more positive than many politicians and businesspeople about education, but has a typical orientation:
The pressures we face today are not unlike those of a century ago, when our education system successfully responded to the multiplying needs brought about by a marked acceleration in technological innovation. As those advances put new demands on workers interacting with an increasingly more complex stock of productive capital, high-school education proliferated – enabling students to read manuals, manipulate numbers, and understand formulae. Students were thus accorded the skills necessary to staff the newly developing assembly lines in factories and the rapidly expanding transportation systems whose mechanical and automotive jobs required a widening array of cognitive skills. For those who sought education beyond high school, land grant colleges sprang up, as states reacted to the increased skills required by industry and especially agriculture, the dominant occupation a century ago (Greenspan, Alan. September 21, 2000. “Statement of Alan Greenspan, Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System before the House of Representative’s Committee on Education and the Workforce.” Washington DC: Congress of the United States. Accessed at http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings/106th/fc/mathsci92100/greenspan.htm, December 10, 2003.
He is telling us in the education field, hey, folks, you have done good for the country’s past, but you cannot rest on your laurels. You need to get out there and do for today what you and your brethren did for yesterday. You have to provide the workforce with skills our society needs to dominate the 21st century!
An article in the American Association of Community College’s Community College’s Journal points out one of the most common arguments for paying attention to education in the country:
While important to national wealth and competitiveness, the apportionment of economic opportunity among individuals and their families is also strongly influenced by access to college. Access to college has become the new threshold requirement for individual career success (Carnevale, Anthony P. and Desroachers, Donna M., “If America’s so Dumb, Why Are We so Rich?” Community College Journal. June/July 2003, p. 13.
First, the nation’s current well-being rests upon a successful, well-funded educational system. Secondly, individual economic opportunity is based on a successful, well-funded education system.
The latter part of this argument has led to the feeling by many that since individuals are the primary beneficiaries of education, they should, shopping in an open market, pay for it. The National Education Association’s (NEA) website develops different scenarios for the future of education, one of which is entitled, “Market Driven Futures.” In this scenario “society has determined that higher education is no longer a governmental responsibility, but the responsibility of the individual. Education budgets provide only the bare essentials, and an education is expected to be functional–that is, each individual should be educated to hold a job in a society” (National Education Association, “The Future of Higher Education,” accessed at http://www.nea.org/he/future, January 9, 2004).
Unfortunately the Market Driven Futures scenario seems to be slowly gaining the upper hand in today’s America. School districts all over the nation are being forced to eliminate art and music programs, close, or consider closing, schools, live with inadequate physical facilities, expand student to teacher class ratios, and struggle with falling revenues from tax and government sources. At one meeting, where I was present with the lobbyist for Minnesota State College’s and University’s (MnSCU) system, the lobbyist pointed out that many of Minnesota’s more conservative politicians believed that students should pay more of the cost of public higher education because they were receiving the primary benefit of that education. This is in a state with one of the most liberal records of support for education and higher education in the nation.
In several states, college and university enrollments are falling even as their overall populations are increasing, partially due to the increasing expense of higher education students and families without adequate resources are required to bear. Internationally during the 1990s the United States had the smallest decade-long increase in the share of young adults enrolled in postsecondary education among all industrialized nations, including countries like South Korea and Thailand.
In the “No Child Left Behind” policy of President George W. Bush’s administration, the assumption was that schools in the United States are failing on a number of important measures. According to this logic schools have to be tested through their students and then threatened with punishment if they are not achieving standards promulgated by those in political power. Information about prices and quality are essential to the workings of the free market, and the public, if it is given the proper information, will force market reform on educational institutions not achieving up to neighboring school standards.
Some educators still hold on to old-fashioned ideas about education that claims its primary function is to serve the common good. John Dewey put the case succinctly in one of his essays. After saying that our most natural inclination is to concentrate on individual student success, he said that:
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members (Dewey, John. John Dewey, The School and Society ● The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 7.
In other words, education is responsible to society, the development of civic responsibility and democracy, and future generations. Although it has a concern for individuals and individual success, concentration upon the individual is “narrow and unlovely” and is destructive.
However, when I was the Interim President of Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, I regularly sat in on MnSCU meetings between the Chancellor and the system’s college Presidents. Almost all the broader discussions were about the MnSCU system’s economic health and its economic impact on communities it serves. No one debated me when I brought up arguments about education’s importance to the nation’s community welfare as defined by scholars like John Dewey or Horace Mann, but those arguments were always shunted quickly aside so that the gathered Presidents could discuss how to convince Minnesota voters of the obvious, that their economic welfare and children’s economic welfare is tied inextricably into the MnSCU system’s financial health. The Presidents of MnSCU are good men and women. They are, however, shaped, as we all are, by the times in which they live. We are living in the “narrow and unlovely” era of the free marketplace, where well-being is measured not in earth, spiritual, or societal terms, but in national and personal economic terms.
As the political world keeps repeating over and over again that the United States is the richest, most successful, most powerful nation in mankind’s history, environmental and sustainable challenges, either ignored or denied, keep piling up without solution. Will the earth become a hive of business and commerce where all land disappears into canyons of city buildings as laborers who serve faceless multi-national corporations try to survive corporate masters in a desperate attempt to continue life? Will flows and ebbs of money define who we are to become? The optimist in me scoffs at such science fictionish notions. Still, I keep asking myself, are we seeing the last generations of humankind living on a living earth? Will the earth be able to sustain life as economic man buries the better spirit of men and women who believe in the earth community and its relationship to human community?
Education’s Burden
From where I sit education has a truly terrible burden to bear. Two of the greatest figures in American education’s history were Horace Mann and Henry Bernard, the New England leaders of the common school movement in the nineteenth century. These two men and their followers intended to create a universal school system for the American nation that prepared the nation’s children for the future where, as Henry Adams put it in his autobiography, “the dynamo became the symbol of infinity…a moral force” (Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 318.) Or, as Greenspan in his earlier quoted presentation before Congress put it, where “Students were thus accorded the skills necessary to staff the newly developing assembly lines in factories and the rapidly expanding transportation systems whose mechanical and automotive jobs required a widening array of cognitive skills” (Greenspan, 2003).
What Mann, Bernard, and the Common School Movement proved was that a universal education system could have powerful impacts on society. The Industrial Revolution’s dynamo was strengthened as a result of those who mastered in the nation’s schools skills, knowledge, attributes, and values needed by the revolution for its success. The result was a steady increase in American prosperity and success and the creation of the middle class. In a relatively short period of time the United States moved from its status as a colony of England to its status as a world economic, political, and cultural power.
Education can be a powerful agent of change. Educators have proven that it can be. It can help shape culture, society, and economic success. It is part of the spiritual fabric of what we as a people choose to be. The current practice of education bears the burden of shaping the near future and impacting those futures that weave from realities and values of the near future. Educators cannot sit in classrooms or administrative offices and concentrate only on students and the economics of education. Rather, they have to look at the fruits of what they and their brethren are doing and accomplishing, at the challenges and successes of the society where they live, the state of the earth community as it currently exists, and they have to consider how what they are doing impacts the future for good or ill. Is narrowness and unloveliness the result of today’s educational enterprise? Are we building through our schools an unlovely and narrow future?
Questions About Sustainability
In his summary of environmental problems besetting the United States at the end of the 1900s, Michael E. Kraft judged that human beings, even in the most advanced countries, were facing a number of serious, interrelated problems. These included:
Air quality as related to the indoor air of buildings, acid precipitation, and CFCs and the stratospheric ozone layer;
Water quality as related to the pollution of surface waters and degradation of drinking water supplies;
Toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes related to health effects, handling of hazardous wastes, toxic cleanup sites, contaminated government and business facilities, and radioactive wastes;
Growing solid and consumer waste volumes;
Expanding energy use related to climate change, the limitations of fossil fuel reserves, and the threat of planetary climate change;
Loss of habitat for animals, insects, and plants; and
Human population growth related to a host of human problems including famine, increasing poverty, territorial disputes, struggles between the developed world and developing world, racial and ethnic tensions, pollution, disparities in wealth, etc. (Kraft, Michael E. Environmental Policy and Politics (New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1996) pp. 23-47.
In his preface Kraft stated that we “must learn how to respond creatively and effectively to the risks of global climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, destruction of forests and soils, loss of biological diversity, and a surging population.” Otherwise, he indicates, “devastating impacts on the environment that sustains life” are our future (Kraft, 1996, p. xiii).
Edward O. Wilson, the great contemporary biologist, points out that “biological diversity…is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it.” He talks about the “assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve.” This assembly has “eaten the storms—folded them into its genes—and created the world that created us.” Then he asks, “how much force does it take to break the crucible of evolution?” (Wilson, Edward O. The Diversity of Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992). How long can the world endure the assaults on diversity that human society is now wrecking upon the earth? No year goes by before we discover another environmentally related crisis. The most recent to surface into my awareness is the discovery that fish from almost all environments where they live have chemicals buried in body fats that can be harmful to human beings—almost all the world’s fish! What are we doing to the earth? To ourselves? To the human family? To the earth community of which, as Aldo Leopold put it, we are plain citizens?
In the meantime, as the Non-Governmental Organization Forum at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil put it in 1992 in “The People’s Earth Declaration: A Proactive Approach for the Future”, transnational corporations seem to be eroding the “ability of the world’s people to protect their economic, social, cultural, and environmental interests.” Wal Mart has devastated small retail business in Carlton County, Minnesota, where I now live, illustrating how the pursuit of economic growth and consumption destroys the downtown of small communities. “Spiritual impoverishment of human society, the economic impoverishment of some 1.2 billion people, the rapidly widening gap between rich and poor, economic racism, institutionalized exploitation of women, the displacement of millions of peoples from their land and communities, marginalization of the handicapped, and the progressive destruction of ecological systems” all haunt our modern societies (NGO Forum, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, “The People’s Earth Declaration: A Proactive Approach for the Future.” Found in Korten, David C. When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian Press, 1996) pp. 329-333.
All of these issues pose questions about whether we, as humankind, can sustain the earth community and ourselves. In the ongoing War in Iraq powerful weapons that allowed United States soldiers to sweep through the countryside with minimal casualties characterized the war’s beginning. Destruction of buildings and city infrastructures was limited compared to damage created by other wars. Still, when the war of conquest was over, Iraqi fighters started coming out of the population to continue the war, killing American and its allies’ soldiers, fighting against progress the United States was trying to make. The war did not end with the conquest, but continued. In some ways this is a metaphor for our modern human condition. We have conquered and built so much, but out of the earth enemies keep popping up, threatening what we have accomplished. In Iraq, however, if the United States decided in the future to retreat, it would still have its country. Humanity has no such place to which it can retreat. If we remove one too many keystones from the ecosphere’s web, the earth’s community will unravel, and earth will spin through blackness of space, containing only evidence of a life community long gone from dusty plains and lifeless hills and mountains.
Imagining a Better World
The radical priest Matthew Fox, in his book The Reinvention of Work, argued that unemployment is a human invention. He pointed out that unemployment does not exist in nature. All of God’s creation, according to Fox, has a role. By fulfilling that role every life form provides sustenance for its self. He then goes on to challenge us to find ways to end one of humankind’s great scourges, unemployment. He calls on us to work on environmental welfare, human welfare, spiritual and physical needs and explorations that could taken hugely improved if humanity only had enough will and wisdom (Fox, Matthew. The Reinvention of Work (San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).
As has been true of so many of the powerful ideas that have affected me in my lifetime, I was a little outraged at Fox’s ideas when I first became aware of them. After all, where does this radical priest come from anyway? A house in Calcutta where he works side by side with Mother Theresa providing succor to the teeming destitute? A life where food is hard to come by or shelter does not exist? This is the world, by God! It is what it is. What does he want us to realistically do about what is? Isn’t confronting the pain of a young man in the lavatory at school who has decided to commit suicide enough for any one human being?
Yet, sitting by the St. Louis River not far from Jay Cooke State Park’s headquarters, watching dark river waters rumble over polished boulders into pools sweeping motionlessly toward more waterfalls and rapids, on a summer day filled with timelessness and infinity, can affect the mind in powerful ways. Can we envision a future that is better for human beings living as plain citizens of the earth community? Can we better interweave ourselves into the earth’s symphony of waters, trees, earth, sky, and stone?
My wife and I, aged, our joints aching, still holding hands, walk down a dark path through the woods on a spring night when peepers are piping insistently from ponds and wetlands surrounding us. Just ahead is an opening where a community of artists, writers, and craftspeople are surrounding a small campfire, talking about the creative work they have spent the day doing. Young kids run in and out of clumps of people as adults and elders talk about satisfactions and frustrations. Campfire light makes a flickering circle that tree shadows dance into with shadows, the movement of branches and leaves.
No one, at least that night, was talking, or even thinking about, how the world had changed. Most, who were old enough, could have told the story. They would have said, “Well, we really didn’t have a choice, did we? When the glaciers started to melt and the Alaskan tundra started to melt, we had to do something.” Life always forms reality around events and makes what is take precedence over what has been and what will be. The real point was that inside the everydayness we were living, a fundamental well-being was present, even in old people around the campfire nearing the end of their life’s journey.
How did it all happen anyway? When big corporations began collapsing, falling prey to the growing anxiety masses who were starting to confront the plight the world’s economic powers had lead them into, thousands of voices had proclaimed the world’s end. The end had not come, however. Instead the old dream of owning your own life and acting as your own boss took over. The work got done. It was just driven by human effort and creativity rather than capital and big bosses striving after short-term profits.
Then a bunch of radicals began converting people by the tens of thousands to the notion that we could achieve the old holistic dream of building God’s kingdom on earth. They didn’t call it God’s kingdom, of course. They talked about the importance of cycles and the preservation of the earth community. Followers of the radicals, by the tens of thousands, began volunteering and working endless hours to create work and businesses for the poor and good habitat for birds, animals, forests, and a more pristine natural world. They spilled over national borders and worked a miracle as more and more people began helping each other and the environment.
None of this seems like it could have happened, but the world is as it is, and this describes the world in which we live.
Wealth spread as spirituality of being human and part of the earth tamped down the drive to become rich and eternally safe in a universe where death is the final stop for all individuals. A host of new technologies took the place of old technologies. Reliance on fossil fuels fell as solar, hydrogen, wind, and other technologies provided heat and lights and drove engines. In cities mass transit became the preferred way to get around when you were not on foot enjoying the splendor of gardens and orchards planted everywhere, especially in old roadways.
So much happened. Looking back on all of that, it seems as if it was magic, that Merlin or Gandalf or some great wizard decided that enough of bad policy, government, thinking, greed, hatred, and narrow thinking and dreaming was enough. The wizard, maybe the good witch of the West, waved their wand, and everything changed so fast hardly anyone could keep up with the changes that had been made.
That was not the way it happened, though. It took decades and decades for change to take hold. The wizard was thousands upon thousands of people who started making changes locally to schools, churches, and their own thinking. Children, then college students, learned wisdom along with information and facts that permeated the breathing of contemporary society, and a new world came into being. Suddenly poetry was important. Women were important. Children were important. Old people were important. Having an SUV that could crush smaller cars was no longer important. Allowing a control freak with a need for endless power to have control over anybody in the name of making endless sums of money became downright odious.
None of this explains why the change happened. My wife and I, walking toward the campfire in the woods, filled with warm feelings for each other and those we were going to join that evening, only knew that people started paying attention. The result was that they started thinking, and it was in those thoughts the world changed. Economics and consumerism took a back seat to ecological preservation, human satisfaction, and the pursuit of spiritual happiness. Education, and learning, became a way of life, a way of knowing about who you are, what possibilities exist, and how you can contribute to earth and humankind. In a way love broke out all over, and we were whom we were, but that was different from what we had been. The world was a wiser and better place.
Imagining does not result in change, of course. Optimism can get out of hand and lead us down disappointing trails into woods much darker than we imagine them to be. Yet, sometimes imagining precedes change. The educational system that has helped create the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of humankind is under attack. The Market Driven Futures scenario seems to be gaining ground. Sometimes I believe we are standing on the edge of Royal Gorge in Colorado looking at the ribbon of water far down on the canyon’s floor, preparing ourselves to leap off the canyon rim’s edge into empty sky, all of us prepared to leap as one body together. The narrow and unlovely are the order of the day.
Yet, Mann and the common school movement proved that you can change and prepare society for a revolution. They accomplished exactly what they set out to accomplish even though they could not have known the consequences that have flowed from that accomplishment. Educators can make a difference. They can change the institution of education in this country, and by changing that institution they can make the world a better place.
The Contrarian Voice
Early in this country’s history Henry David Thoreau noted that, “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them” (Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1946), p. 27.) He believed, in his heart, as he said when writing about young phoebes getting ready to leave their mother’s nest, that wisdom is clarified by experience (Thoreau, 1946, p. 201). A man became educated, in Thoreau’s terms, when he left classroom, business office, and home behind and sailed into life and nature with an open spirit determined to master whatever experience would allow him. He thought hunting and fishing for young boys and men were fine pursuits because they would acquaint them with woods and fields, leading, eventually, in those with the sensibility to achieve the higher nature within mankind, the ability to leave behind gun and fishing pole for the elevated pursuits of truth and understanding. Nature provides in abundance the examples and experiences important to the pursuit.
The contrarian history in American education is a long and honorable one. Its thread runs through Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott through Thoreau, William James, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aldo Leopold, John Holt, George Dennison, Herbert Kohl, Jonathon Kozol, and Howard Gardner. Other educators and writers like Maria Montessori, A.S. Neill, and Ivan Illich have fed it from overseas. American education is, in many ways, rich. Innovative schools have been founded. Some have failed, others, like Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago and the Montessori schools found all over the country, have been highly successful. Still others, like the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, have survived and continued to evolve over more than a half century. Aldo Leopold, one of our greatest ecologists, led his students into the woods, prairies, and wetlands of Wisconsin to teach them about the succession of bird songs that greet the sun’s rising on a summer morning.
Although I do not support some of the current divisive policies of the National Boy Scout Council, the efforts of Baden-Powell to create an outdoors action-oriented learning program that linked boys together across national boundaries in some ways meets Thoreau’s ideal of getting young people out in the woods so that they can learn from nature and begin to grow as human beings. Emphasizing peace and tolerance, Baden-Powell helped define some of the promise in education. Troop 32’s experience in the Boundary Waters and Quetico was powerful and life enhancing. Boy scouts made that educational experience possible.
In recent years the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) has begun efforts to bring computer labs to poor communities, building education programs around YMCA programs much as Jane Addams did at Hull House in Chicago at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Voices such as those of Frank Lloyd Wright with his ideas of apprenticeship married to scholarship and the arts and George Dennison, who formed the First Street School in the 1960s, have tried to break down disciplinary boundaries and the rigidity found in so much of contemporary education. Jonathan Kozol has argued passionately, and demonstrated through personal example, that disadvantaged kids in even the poorest and most dysfunctional environments can learn and achieve if they are only given a chance. Howard Gardner has opened up a discussion about the nature of intelligence that has the potential for breaking down even more of the rigidities in the dominant contemporary educational system.
The Value of the Current Educational System
I do not want, or mean, to say that the American educational system is worthless. In the hue and cry over testing and the importance of building fundamental skills currently shaking our educational system’s foundations, and in the effort to turn education into even more of an industrial enterprise than it has been during the past century, a central fact about American society is being forgotten. Japanese test scores in math and science are consistently higher than those recorded by American students, but America also has a powerful creativity that allows its people to tinker, try new things, create a bewilderingly complex creative culture, and occasionally surprise even itself. Schools, if they do not nurture this impulse fully, still allow this essential part of American culture to flourish. It is central to the success and wealth of the nation. The necessity of encouraging creativity in students is being forgotten in the ferocious push for arbitrary standards. Matthew Fox believes that if creativity became the focus, rather than the tolerated, in schools, the divine and human would meet and a better world, based upon human and earth community values, would result.
I can also testify that educators in this country work much harder than they are given credit for by the voting public who see days spent in the classroom, but do not see hours spent at home grading papers, redoing lesson plans, and writing new curriculum. My daughter Mary, an English teacher in the Green Bay, Wisconsin public schools, has a flair for teaching Homer, Shakespeare, creative writing, and even grammar that catches the imagination of even the most problematical students. She is joined in that ability by thousands upon thousands of teachers in pre-schools, Head Start centers, kindergartens, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, community colleges, technical colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and universities nationwide. She works most weekends, reading and trying to come up with ideas that will engage students she teaches in activities that bring dead poets alive. During summers she goes to school and works on next year’s curriculum. She works during all twelve months even though she is only paid for nine months. We are blessed with talented administrators too, and concerned school boards, and even legislators who truly care about children and students and what the educational system means to the country. Unfortunately, we are seldom blessed with politicians who see beyond ideas rooted in elections rather than the good of students and society.
As I write this the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has successfully landed the robot Spirit on Mars and is beaming pictures of the red planet back to earth after traveling 302.6 million miles through space. The reason we can send robots to take a look at Mars and its rocks, hills, mountains, plains, and red soils is that we have not only taught the basics, but we have let students dream. We have given them good teachers who work with them with passion and ability. We have instilled in students not only facts and information, but given them the ability to reach for wisdom.
Yet, I cannot help but feel the shadow hanging over us. We have created a great and mighty civilization, but great and mighty civilizations have allowed hubris to bring them to the rim of the Royal Gorge before. They have celebrated themselves as they leaped off the canyon rim and plunged toward the silver ribbon of river far, far below.
Environmentalists, ecologists, sustainable economists, biologists, philosophers, protestors, educators, and a host of others who think and care deeply about this country are energetically waving warning signs. The science about climate change, the effects of deforestation, and species extinction continues to pile up. Famine is again visiting Ethiopia, again showing us children with big bellies and round, haunted eyes. In the Congo tens of thousands of people are dying in a Civil War that does not seem to end. In the United States so many good paying jobs have been shifted off shore that my wife and I are worried about our children’s and our grandchildren’s futures, especially in light of a budget deficit that seems to be out of control and cancerous growth of wealth at society’s upper end that deepens the deficit and erodes the well-being of 90% of society.
I have also looked into classrooms at the dullness of student’s eyes as they stared at ceilings and walls willing time to pass more quickly than it would. When I was a young teacher on the Menominee Indian Reservation I used to stand with young boys with black hair and black eyes who said nothing but looked at the floor as we worked gently, persistently with them in an attempt to repair emotional and intellectual damages, some created by the schools where they previously been enrolled, in their lives.
The Question
Changing American education is not an easy process. Too often, when I think about the American education system these days, the image that comes to mind is a circle of musk ox, long brown hair, curled horns pointed outward, facing a pack of arctic wolves on a frozen plain. Criticism about the system’s performance from government officials and the business community, along with complaints from students and families about rising costs, along with real budget cuts and a welter of demands from all kinds of sources, some of them unfair, has left administrators, faculty, and staff into feeling like they have to defend not only their jobs, but the academy’s role in American life. They have gathered in a circle and are stubbornly facing outward as they try to protect the schools and system that has given them their professional lives.
This musk ox reaction is not only contemporary in its nature, though. When the Indian control movement started trying to create Indian controlled schools and colleges in the late 1960s and early 1970s, professors and administrators from the educational establishment began picking at the new movement, throwing up a wall of criticism and employing delaying tactics that forced the movement to make compromises with its ideals. The Indian controlled schools movement died as a result during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The tribal colleges and universities movement succeeded partially because its leaders compromised some of their dreams in order to create the system that has made such a positive impact in Indian country, beginning the long process of changing what the United State Senate’s Special Subcommittee on Indian Education called, in its report published in 1969, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge, “four hundred years of failure” (Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, Special Subcommittee on Indian Education. Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge (Report 91-501). Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), p. ix).Implementing educational change in this country is especially difficult if it is linked to ways of looking at the world different from those supported by the country’s corporate and political powers. Climate change may be an immense threat that can negatively impact prospects for continued survival of humanity and the earth community. Bleeding jobs oversees may increase the gap between rich and poor, shrinking the middle class in the United States and threatening the nation’s long-term common good. But if changing skills, knowledge, attributes, and values that support coal burning power plants or multi-national corporations threatens free market business ideology and the welfare of corporate America, then that change must be defeated. Ideology must triumph over facts. After all, we are the most powerful, wealthiest society in the history of humankind.
This difficulty does not mean that we can afford to forgo the attempt at change. Our children, grandchildren and their children and grandchildren into the endless march of future generations demand we pay attention and make the attempt. There is poetry in stone. We need an education system that not only prepares students for jobs and recognizes the sanctity of lifelong learning for the purpose of helping all of us deal with changes humanity has always wrought on itself and the earth, but we also need to help young people as well as the rest of us recognize that poetry. We need to see what the boy scouts of Troop 32 saw in their boundary waters canoe trip, the interweave of waters, trees, earth, sky, and stone, the flapping of a loon’s wings on still lake waters as the sun descends into a red horizon setting clouds afire. We need to encourage the intensity of learning that occurred on that trip into wilderness where white capped waves, lashed by cold winds and stinging rain, rose above the heads of young boys and moved them toward a wiser manhood.
The question is not, should we change our educational system so that it helps us achieve a more sustainable world? Rather, the question is, how should we change our education system so that it helps us move into a future where we have the humility to recognize we are plain citizens of the earth community with a responsibility to help not only our fellow human citizens, but also the citizens and systems of the earth community? Only by asking that question can we start the process of building an educational system that successfully delivers us to a more promising future.
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