Education Can Lead the Way to a Sustainable Society

Wendy Priesnitz

Much of the developed world is facing an economic, social and political crisis. The financial and emotional gaps between the rich and the poor are growing. Child poverty and the abuse of women and children are at epidemic proportions. Indigenous people are still fighting for their basic rights. At the same time, our social safety nets are being stretched and torn. Logging companies are ravaging the last of our old-growth forests. Tobacco companies are cynically trying to buy their way out of responsibility for their deadly product. The ozone hole is growing, our garbage dumps are overflowing, our nuclear power plants are leaking and toxic chemicals have been found in mothers’ milk.

We are experiencing the results of a global economic restructuring based on the premise that the world is no longer made up of cities or even countries, but a single world order dominated by transnational corporations and mass consumerism. Governments seem incapable of responding. Worse than that, their agendas appear to be set by corporations and financial institutions. Our political parties – including the so-called progressive and populist ones – are no longer attached to community life; they have become the creations of pollsters and media advisors or are paralyzed by lack of vision or preoccupation with money. We have evolved a type of “democracy” in which the elite have centralized power for their own benefit.

The Roots of the Problem

This situation has crept up on us, and it is only recently that most people have begun to notice. In order to understand the roots of this complicated problem, I have begun to examine our institutions and how they work. One of the main problems with institutions is their use (and abuse) of power. We learn early in our lives that power usually flows from the top down, often as a consequence of physical domination: big kids over little kids, teachers and principals over students, strong men over physically weaker women, big countries over smaller ones. Those of us who dislike the consequences of this distribution of power usually work outside formal channels of society and arrangements of power to protest, resist and sometimes overturn decisions made by the “powers that be”. We learn that democracy involves citizens influencing public policy, rather than authoring it. We learn that the object of political debate is one of persuasion, in the same way that children learn to wheedle and pout and throw a tantrum in order to get their way. Because we are never able to take the initiative, we resort to criticizing and complaining. Our negative experiences with power lead us, in our organizations, to fear and condemn power. We confuse misuse of power with the positive power to lead and to propose alternatives. Many of us have never even experienced the kind of collective power that can be used to build alternative institutions. We have been told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, and to put up our hands when we have to go to the bathroom.

Goring the Sacred Cow

If we are going to improve the lives of our communities, we must recreate our institutions and rethink how we relate to them. And if we look critically at how we educate ourselves, we’ll find an institution that long ago ceased to serve our needs. Unfortunately, the public education system is sacrosanct among most progressive people. In the past, a strong publicly funded school system contributed to a democratic, egalitarian, socially just society. However, schools, as they are currently constructed, do just the opposite. They create institutionalized values, perpetuate social hierarchies, disempower us, and encourage a destructive level of consumerism and consumption. To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. Of course, the process of changing such an emotionally charged institution is a highly politicized one, as author Ivan Illich realized almost three decades ago when he wrote his book Deschooling Society. The process challenges not just our beliefs about education and learning, but a lot of vested interests – like how corporations make profits and who manages the affairs of our communities. And that is precisely why we must make major changes. Those who care about social equality and democracy must examine how the institution of schooling creates and reinforces our current unequal, non-democratic, consumer-based society.

Let’s face it: The majority of the problems facing society today – pollution, unethical politicians; poverty, unsafe cars…the list goes on – have been created or overseen by the best traditional college graduates. Whether these problems were created by design or accident, we cannot fix them by continuing the status quo. We need to create a society that chooses action over consumption, that favors relating to others over developing new weapons, that encourages conservation over production. And this just won’t happen unless we de-institutionalize learning. Here’s why. Beginning in Kindergarten, young people are treated as unneeded and legally minor. They are obliged to attend an often unfriendly – sometimes threatening – place, which robs them of their basic human rights. They are taught about human rights and government in social studies class, but they’re not allowed to experience – let alone practice – these vital components of good citizenship.

School is a substitute for everyday life, and childhood a rehearsal for personhood. It replaces real experiences with pseudo experiences. It dismisses the value of children’s own experiences, thoughts and opinions, substituting the opinions of a textbook author who often has a different worldview than the student. At the end of the school assembly line, students with little authentic knowledge are bumped out into the adult world like so many sausages – and expected to suddenly make mature decisions. Fortunately for their sanity but unfortunately for the state of the earth, the parameters of their decision making have been defined by their school experience and mostly involve choosing whether to buy Coke or Pepsi.

And that’s not surprising. The chief function of state-run public education is not to empower citizens to make responsible decisions about the future of the earth or the harmonious cohabitation of the people on it. It was created to groom workers for the factories of the Industrial Revolution. And if those factories are to make a profit, somebody has to buy the stuff they make. The educational system is the perfect mechanism for ensuring a culture of consumers. For this reason, we should not expect politicians and their corporate masters to look eagerly toward changing the educational status quo. On the contrary, schools and corporations are quickly merging. A good example is the principal of a school in the American south who recently suspended a young boy because he dared to wear a Pepsi T-shirt during an event sponsored by Coke. This corporate agenda is being pursued to all corners of the developing world. The majority of people who don’t go to school – but want to – are motivated by a desire to emulate the North American way of life. In virtually every country, the amount of material consumption by college graduates sets the standards for everyone else. The trouble is, of course, the planet won’t survive if the developing world ends up replicating North America’s levels of consumption.

The Cult of Experts

Our society worships a cult of experts, which promotes the belief that education is the result of treatment by an institution called a school, just like the cult of medicine teaches that wellness is the result of treatment by another broken institution – the hospital. In fact, learning does not need manipulation by others. Real learning is a result of experimentation, making mistakes, correcting mistakes, creating hypotheses and proving them.

Delivering “Received Ideas”

As author and schooling critic John Taylor Gatto explains, after we fall into the habit of having other people do things for us, we lose the power to think for ourselves. Maybe that’s why so few of us challenge the premises of nursing homes, television, day-care centers, schools and the global economy. These things are received ideas, not the result of individuals thinking about what would make their own lives – and those of their families and communities – better on a day-to-day basis. School measures a student’s mastery of a prefabricated curriculum on a standardized scale. When we submit to others’ standards to measure our own growth, we put ourselves and others into assigned slots. When everything fits so nicely together, there’s no need to look for an underlying agenda.

Aside from these covert agendas, schools don’t accomplish their stated goals very well. Experiments conducted 30 years ago in Puerto Rico showed that students were more effective at introducing their peers to the world of science than their teachers. After having received 12,000 hours or more of teaching, many people can’t read well enough to function in their daily lives. Many high school graduates have no skills to make a living or even any skills with which to talk to each other. Of course, education is more than just skill development. Unfortunately, schools also aren’t very effective in delivering what may be called a liberal education. In fact, most of the desirable things we learn in life – an understanding of our heritage, how to love and to play, to think, to work independently, to listen to music, to appreciate poetry or Shakespeare, to facilitate a meeting – are seldom learned in school. We learn these things by living our lives and, in most cases, in spite of attending school. The ability to interact well with others – to be well socialized – is one of the recognized goals of our school system. Ironically, most homeschoolers will tell you that the main reason they want to avoid school is the competition, aggression, bullying and violence that occur there.

So What is the Solution?

The solution to this crisis of learning is to de-professionalize the educational environment and put learning back into the hands of the learner. This will not be easy. Deschooling ourselves is as difficult as renouncing limitless consumption. But here are some ways to begin.

  • We can rid ourselves of the idea that learning can be produced in us – and that we can produce it in others. We can abolish all curriculum that’s not created by the learner. We can get rid of text books, lesson plans, testing, grading, report cards, course requirements, homework assignments, schedules and attendance regulations.
  • This will allow us to treat young people in ways that demonstrate our trust in their desire and ability to learn. We will then be able to create a learning environment – which includes role modeling, safety and respect, access to requested resources, consolation when things go wrong and celebration when things go right. Then we can get out of the way and not meddle in the process unless we’re invited.
  • There is no reason to judge people’s employability (or anything except their ability to write tests and essays) by their degrees. So if you’re hiring someone, learn about their abilities, personality and character, rather than their university degrees. Of course, to really embrace this idea, we’ll all have to stop flaunting our own university degrees!
  • Another step is to de-expertize teaching. Many people, in a variety of different roles and occupations, have much to offer children – as role models and as learning facilitators. So why should teachers and schools have a monopoly on helping people learn things? Sharing skills can be done informally, or there is an increasing number of more formal mechanisms, like skills exchanges and Natural Life’s Mentor Apprentice Exchange.
  • We also need to place more value on the knowledge and experience accumulated by our senior citizens. We need to find ways to help people of different generations teach and learn from each other.
  • On the same theme, we can work together in our communities to create a learning society. We need to tell our politicians to fund museums, theatres – and yes, even school buildings – so they can afford to provide spaces for people of all ages to explore, interact and learn on their own initiative. Institutions should exist to be used, rather than to produce something. If they’re effective, people will use them willingly.
  • One of the most challenging changes we need to make is in our attitudes towards childhood. In addition to trusting children to learn, we need to respect and advocate for young people’s right to make their own decisions (within parameters that address their physical and emotional safety, of course) and their ability to live democratically and co-operatively if given the opportunity.
  • Lastly, we need to like children and to want them around all day. This means trusting them with access to the tools of our trades and allowing them to participate in – and learn from – the life of their communities.

No, these are not simple solutions. But we have a choice. We can continue to pour increasing amounts of money into a system that is delivering proportionately declining returns – and creating a generation of angry, frustrated people who aren’t much interested in democracy. Or we can put money into creating appropriate opportunities and infrastructures to help people learn in ways that do not require huge amounts of real estate and bureaucracy, ways that do not make people abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, ways that allow children and young people to participate fully in the lives of their communities…and get a good education at the same time.


Wendy Priesnitz is the editor of Natural Life Magazine, a 24-year-old Canadian newsmagazine. She has written nine books, including School Free – The Home Schooling Guide (The Alternate Press, 1987) and Challenging Assumptions in Education – From Institutionalized Education to a Learning Society (The Alternate Press, 2000). She is also the founder of The Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers (1979) and a former leader of The Green Party of Canada.

Essay reposted from Creating Learning Communities