Already we are witnessing a growing movement around this country and in other parts of the world, in response to narrow and disenfranchising political and economic policies of the political-corporate state. Community circles and action groups are springing up daily, out of the recognition that the welfare of our communities are inextricably bound to the well being of all peoples and of the planet. Self-selected change agents are giving freely of their time and energy to redefine what constitutes business as usual for our communities – promoting citizen dialogue and participation, increasing access to alternative information and solutions, and offering a range of new educational opportunities. Here in our area of southern New Hampshire, various citizen groups have recently formed, that are offering educational programs about democracy, non-violence, the Bill of Rights, life purpose, community currencies, and other topics that build and strengthen the commonwealth. These groups are engaging average citizens, high school and college students, the elderly, and representatives from many local organizations. In just a few months, many new projects have been initiated or accomplished locally:
•a new business for youth-elder mentorship and apprenticeships was formed
•a wilderness experience for elders and youth was designed
•non-violence training was held
•several educational lecture events were sponsored
•a community currency initiative was started
•a Peace and Reconciliation dialogue between local Hawks and Doves is being planning
•a variety of youth training initiatives are actively being considered
If this is happening in a town of 23,000 people, how many opportunities for training and community transformation are happening elsewhere in the US and abroad? Through the concerted power of groups of concerned citizens working in collaboration, these initiatives will open a multitude of opportunities for our children to manifest their visions and exercise authentic creativity and leadership. It is our responsibility as adults to prepare the way, and not put the onus on the backs of our children, expecting them to reverse our errors of omission and commission. It is time that we adults model the truth that education is a life-long endeavor, and to recognize that the challenges facing us today are calling us to the task of inner and outer transformation.
Emerging organizations can enlist a veritable army of caring adults who are themselves seeking ways to manifest their spiritual purpose – a true “coalition of the willing.” We can quickly multiply the number of people speaking and acting from passion and calling, and modeling the integrity of a spiritually centered and grounded philosophy for today’s world. As they step forward to enlighten their communities, these adults can in turn use their economic, intellectual and voting power to change the nature of the institutions, laws, and policies that keep the old story of competition, domination, and scarcity in place. We will be doing our part to bridge the old world with the new, creating the conditions that will allow our children, down to the seventh generation, to stand up and step forward into their power to create a sustainable, just, and caring world.
Already we are witnessing a growing movement around this country and in other parts of the world, in response to narrow and disenfranchising political and economic policies of the political-corporate state. Community circles and action groups are springing up daily, out of the recognition that the welfare of our communities are inextricably bound to the well being of all peoples and of the planet. Self-selected change agents are giving freely of their time and energy to redefine what constitutes business as usual for our communities – promoting citizen dialogue and participation, increasing access to alternative information and solutions, and offering a range of new educational opportunities. Here in our area of southern New Hampshire, various citizen groups have recently formed, that are offering educational programs about democracy, non-violence, the Bill of Rights, life purpose, community currencies, and other topics that build and strengthen the commonwealth. These groups are engaging average citizens, high school and college students, the elderly, and representatives from many local organizations. In just a few months, many new projects have been initiated or accomplished locally:
•a new business for youth-elder mentorship and apprenticeships was formed
•a wilderness experience for elders and youth was designed
•non-violence training was held
•several educational lecture events were sponsored
•a community currency initiative was started
•a Peace and Reconciliation dialogue between local Hawks and Doves is being planning
•a variety of youth training initiatives are actively being considered
If this is happening in a town of 23,000 people, how many opportunities for training and community transformation are happening elsewhere in the US and abroad? Through the concerted power of groups of concerned citizens working in collaboration, these initiatives will open a multitude of opportunities for our children to manifest their visions and exercise authentic creativity and leadership. It is our responsibility as adults to prepare the way, and not put the onus on the backs of our children, expecting them to reverse our errors of omission and commission. It is time that we adults model the truth that education is a life-long endeavor, and to recognize that the challenges facing us today are calling us to the task of inner and outer transformation.
• Craft-based enterprises -- selling t-shirts or jewelry, for example
• Student banks
•Peer mediation training
•Conflict resolution training
•Elder-youth tutoring
•Peer tutoring
•Life skills training
•Apprenticeships and other business-sponsored enterprises
•Art projects and exhibits, music concerts, and other public events for community fundraising
•Coalitions with community organizations to create work and work-study opportunities for youth
•Youth-run crisis hotline and intervention center
•Youth-run credit union
•Youth-run recycling and neighborhood cleanup programs
•Expanding youth programs at churches
•Cultural organizations involving youth in diversity celebrations or educational events
•Youth creation or renovation of parks
•Youths involved in community centers, for example, organizing events, tournaments, and other activities
•Youth librarian programs
•Youth teacher programs, such as reading, preschoolers
•Youth-run programs in self-esteem and alternatives to drugs, crime, and gangs
•Police-youth advisory panels
•Youth theatre events
•Interactive theatre educational programs
•Latchkey-Seniors telephone program
•Youth helping those with disabilities
•Youth helping elderly with shopping and other chores
•Community Youth Councils that work with local government
To create the kinds of partnerships that make education relevant, communities need change agents who have the vision, time, and capacity to facilitate community-transforming meetings and events. Again, these change agents are anyone who is looking for a way to be of service in creating a more sustainable and just world for everyone. Emerging social and educational organizations can support the capacity of change agents by providing spiritually-based leadership trainings, coaching programs, and other educational opportunities that can help communities access more of their spiritual and social potential. By empowering citizen activists to manifest their visions for community encouragement outside of the traditional definitions of school, we can dissolve the counterfeit barrier that separates schools from the communities in which they exist.
Community is our shared culture. Community is comprised of the stories we tell each other -- whether “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” or “Small is Beautiful” – and how we identify ourselves in those stories, and the actions we take that either reinforce or contradict those stories. Education that purports to free the spirit and creative power of the learner must therefore not only work to heighten awareness of the stories that vie for the consciousness of our children, but to actively offer new stories that speak to and help them manifest their higher spiritual possibilities. These new stories must be articulated by the adults in all walks of life, because it is the adults in today’s word who hold the economic, voting, and intellectual power to validate the cultural story. We need therefore to work to transform the whole community in which we live so our children can find a place to plant and grow their spiritual visions. Failure to do this is to reinforce the false division between community and education, and to continue to doom our children to irrelevance, isolation, despair, and depression. This failure means dooming our communities as well, both because by failing to involve our youth in community development, we fail to appreciate and benefit from the idealism and energy of our youth, and because of the exodus of creative minds from our communities as they look elsewhere to satisfy their hunger for meaning and connectedness.
The kind of education that will be relevant for creating a life that works for everyone on the planet, involves a radically new vision. This vision recognizes that children are society’s “growing edge” – and that education should therefore be a hands-on laboratory for creating the best possible expression of ourselves and of living communities. To accomplish this, we need to empower adults who have the vision and the desire to offer children a connected community context for learning. These adults may be social or spiritual activists, teachers, social workers, ministers, farmers, retiring baby boomers, mid-lifers seeking more meaningful careers, parents who recognize that the mainstream cultural stories lack eternal values, or any of the estimated 50 million adults in this country identified as Cultural Creatives (http://www.culturalcreatives.org). Because community and education should be totally aligned, the movement to transform education should reach out to people from every profession, race, political and religious persuasion, and to the young and elderly alike. This growing subculture of adults are aware of or are now waking up to realize that the political and economic systems of today’s world are suicidal, and they are eager to make their contribution to the creation of a world that works for all.
Connected Community Education that involves different stakeholders in the community can take many forms:
•Elder-youth mentorship
•Youth-youth mentorship
•Internships at community farms and businesses
•Youth empowerment initiatives and leadership trainings
•Wilderness education and ecology
•Youth entrepreneur projects and school-based businesses, for example:
• Restaurants and catering
• Student stores, farms and greenhouses
• Computer repair and training
Just as critical for the "Honoring All Life" domain is the recognition of our daily choices about what to eat; about how fertilizers and pesticides kill rivers and lakes as well as damage the human body; about how globalization and the rush to the cheapest prices we can find at Wal-Mart are creating slave under-classes around the world that support the American Way while overturning local environmental protections. To fail to address these issues by actively raising the social consciousness of the community is to amplify the cultural schizophrenia between our actions and the awareness of their consequences. It is to keep learning in the theoretical domain of the ivory tower, where much sound and fury can be heard that ultimately signifies very little.
In education today, the primary place where community connection is made is through Civics class. Increasingly these classes have been dropped from the curriculum in many localities, or relegated to a single course during middle school. That leaves students with precious little connection to the land or people that constitute the daily life of their community, and it cuts them off from any sense of power or connectedness that would help them develop civic or environmental responsibility, or participation in government. This approach unwittingly teaches disdain (i.e., lack of value) for the local community, inspiring many children to leave their communities after they graduate from high school. Only in a community that consistently fails to provide meaning and purpose to its youth does this kind of wholesale exodus make sense. We teach our children that value is "out there," in the pursuit of disconnected knowledge, money, and fame. The modern system of education has done its job well: students do not recognize their own purpose or value, or their connection to the community or planet, and so are well prepared to live lives of quiet desperation while being convinced that they are pursuing the American Dream.
Imagine a world where students can learn about their bioregion and local history; where they can talk with veterans about the real nature and consequences of war; where they can learn about the varieties of local economies and what it takes to live sustainable lives; where they can develop true sense of inclusion and compassion for the diversity of races as well as life forms in nature; where they can help take care of babies and help design a park; where they can develop a sense of the sacred; where they come to regard themselves as spiritual beings of limitless potential. For any of these goals to be realized, Heart Light must go much further than instituting a powerful learner-centered model; it must also engage the community in which learning happens. This vision is articulated by Edmund O’Sullivan, a proponent of Transformative Learning:
Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender; sexual orientation, able-body-ness and our body-awareness, our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy.
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~tlcentre/index.htm
Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.
--John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education
It seems to me that the question of the learning environment is inextricably linked to the development of the life-enhancing skills. That is to say, in what environment or context will these children have to be able to explore and exercise these new skills? Without an environment that recognizes, validates, and encourages the application of such skills, teaching the skills will be more of a theoretical exercise -- rather like school is now for most students.
It is only in the last 100 years or so that a wall has been erected between schools and community life; that wall has only grown thicker over time, until we have arrived at the current modus operandi, where schools are almost completely cut off from the life that is actually happening in a community. For example, in my son's 9th grade “World Perspectives” class, there has been no discussion of Iraq or the war at all. No talk about the local tensions between Hawks and Doves who protest in Central Square on Saturday morning. I also doubt that the local housing crisis is being discussed. Or the recent taxpayer revolt in our county, or how our new governor's fiscal policies will affect property tax rates. Neither is there any connection to local agriculture, water quality, or the business climate. Children do not learn about economics, about balancing checkbooks, about raising children. Traditional schools are terminally disconnected and largely irrelevant.
The task of transforming education as it is currently being discussed addresses only half the issue. Of course it is a major step forward to bring spiritually-based, learner-centered education to the world. But as soon as we proffer this new model, the question must be asked: In what context can the student actualize his or her purpose, experience connectedness, develop meaning, exercise collaboration, and show competence? The answer can only be found in the environment outside the school walls. And that environment is created and reinforced by the social consciousness of the larger community.
I do not believe that school reforms will ultimately be successful without simultaneously addressing the consciousness of the community within which that education takes place. We cannot, for example, address compassion and collaboration without also reflecting on how our families and neighborhoods function. Children will immediately see the discrepancies, and will long to reconcile them. Parenting education and support and "EQ" education are therefore critical because the dynamics of the horizontal dimension of the Heart Light model is first inculcated in the home.It comes as no surprise to any of us to hear that our world is at the precipice; theories and political positions wilt in the face of the illness, pollution, poverty, hunger, disenfranchisement and despair that are visible everywhere. It is clear that bold visions are needed to turn the tide of fear, violence, and domination that is rampant in all of our social institutions. We need a radical new educational vision that tears down the walls separating schools from community and nature. However, most public schools are crushed under the weight of age-old paradigms (aptly described in Bill Spady’s books, Paradigm Lost and Counterfeit Reforms), and so cannot adequately address the needs of modern students, or of the communities in which we live. If we are to succeed in our quest to transform education, it must not only attend to the self-directed growth of students, but enlarge its view to encompass the socio-political environment that surrounds students and mediates their ability to bloom and flourish. With a broad-based initiative that can potentially reach into every community, we can help change agents from all walks of life to promote community dialogue and transformation. Only then will our efforts to honor the uniqueness of every student have any impact. Only then will our children experience deep meaning and authentic connection. Only then will they be able to come out of the caves and down from the towers, to live and breathe and joyfully co-create our communities and our world anew.
« return.