Accidental Education
Education’s Ecology demands new thinking. Thinking must be outside the boxes we too casually call school, classroom, curriculum, psychology and childhood. These boxes are accidental habits of mind.
As long as you keep thinking in terms of schools, there will never be adequate space for reform of education. That is because schools impose a way of thinking about education that will preclude rethinking groups, grades, mandatory attendance, an authoritarian curriculum, managing the unmanageable, and critical thinking about sources of oppression. Education will remain locked into a paradigm that considers qualification far above self-actualization, socialization above responsibility and conformity above real freedom of the soul.
As long as you keep thinking about teachers as managers of classrooms there will never be a role for integration of education with social needs of people living in neighborhoods. That is because classroom management is an absolute prerequisite for the delivery of lessons that are ostensibly intended to fill the minds of students with memorable connections to what has preceded the lesson and hold those connections until the students have been tested. Connections are laden with facts and too often do not require anything resembling critical thinking. Managers and managers of managers value conditions where everyone performs uniformly and comfortably; meaning no conflicts or problems.
As long as you keep thinking about top-down curriculum there will never be a place for acting on the needs of the planet. That is because the needs of the planet cannot be solved my mass action. It is also because schools and teachers are confronted by the prevailing views of a planet that is an unlimited source of natural resources and an unlimited place for discard of those resources at the end of their useful life. The pollution of our atmosphere, soils, water is reducing the diversity of life upon which the economy is fully dependent. Every living creature, whether plant, animal or microbe, is connected to the critical cycling of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur. Non of these can be allowed to acculate in the earths crust indefinitely and none can be wantonly extracted for short term, exclusive human needs.
As long as you keep thinking about a psychological foundation for education there will never be space for the light of biology to shine on the realities of human development, evolution and a neuroscientific basis for what happens through education. That is because psychology has been, essentially like religion, constructed to explain the meager visible fragment of what is displayed by human behavior and to enable speculations about the invisible fragments of behavior and mental imaging that is not accessible to any science. Until our mental modeling is fastened to neuroscience through explanations that are falsifiable, humanity is left with only non tested and non testable conjecture about the interface of mind and body and environment. The critical connecting links cannot ignore any established principles drawn from the scientific study of life.
As long as you keep thinking that education is for children, you will continue to egregiously neglect the essential importance of educating the adults who will make the critical choices that children require to pass from dependence to full emancipation. That is because no child ever picks their parents or the regional environment into which they are born. All of a child’s choices are made by adults. If the education of a potential parent, has failed to include the responsibility of parenting, a child’s life is left to an accident of conception.