Cultivating an education as if people and planet mattered

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'The volume of education has increased and continues to increase, yet so do pollution, exhaustion of resources, and the dangers of ecological catastrophe. If still more education is to save us, it would have to be education of a different kind. '

-EF Schumacher

It is all too easy to despair in the face of the inertia in our various systems that stifles the kind of changes that we so urgently need to respond to the crises facing us. This is true not least in the field of education.

Standardised global curricula that pay little heed to cultural and geographic distinctiveness. Lessons that engage the intellect but that park emotions and the body at the classroom door. Teachers trying – largely in vain – to transfer knowledge to passive and bored students, all the while overworked and oppressed by the ever-growing demands of testing culture. This is an education that, in the words of American educator, David Orr, ‘can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth’.

And yet putting one’s ear to the ground at the fertile margins, a quiet revolution can be sensed.  In Latin America, the arts are increasingly being used to animate the creative intelligence of students inside and outside of the classroom. In Zambia, educational norms are being challenged as students work directly in their studies with marginalised rural communities, bringing education to the masses. In India, the de-schooling movement is in rude good health as students seek to ‘unlearn’ much of the limiting worldview embedded in the values and practices that conventional education systems, generally subconsciously, imposes upon them. In England, a whole new tradition of ashram-based pedagogy designed to activate head, heart and hands is emerging. In Brazil, students are being invited into a creative space in which they can explore the process of colonisation of the mind and how they may imaginatively begin to find pathways beyond it.

Meanwhile, in the key discipline of economics, the hegemony of free-market, neoliberal ideology is being successfully challenged as even in more mainstream educational establishments, heterodox schools of thought are increasingly finding their way into school and college curricula. Nor, by any means, are these developments limited to the countries cited above. 

Rather, they represent a global impulse; this list represents a select sample of the myriad pioneering initiatives that are profiled in Gaia Education’s upcoming Regenerative Education course, starting mid-October. 

Find out more!

The seeds of educational revolution is upon us.  

In the words of educational innovator, Stephen Sterling:

“There's a fork in the road, and education has to make a choice. Young people are fervently waiting for us educators to catch up with them, to empower them and to help them make the future. By offering a holistic way of seeing and being, a regenerative, ecological, life-affirming paradigm can help shape new and energising pathways for a more hopeful, and secure future”

-Stephen Sterlingn Sterling