Capitalist society's failure to respond rationally to climate change can be viewed as a failure of the educational system. After all, schools and universities should inform the public about the imminent danger. Therefore it is interesting to read what those working in Higher Education have to say about it.
I'd like to discuss three blogs about sustainability education authored by G. Rendell from the watchdog web site "Inside Higher Education". The first blog, Teaching Sustainability in 21st Century America http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/getting-green/teaching-sustainability-21st-century-america begins with a few helpful general observations. The following observation bears repeating: "Two maxims on which I've relied for decades hold sway in the teaching of sustainability, as in the teaching of most anything. The first is that as a teacher, a trainer, a parent, any sort of authority figure, you're always teaching; the only question is whether you're teaching something you want the student to learn. The second (and it overlaps significantly with the first, especially in the realm of social challenges/paradigms) is that if you're not teaching/promoting/enforcing the solution, then you're teaching/enabling/reinforcing the problem." Then the first blog makes the more specific point that teaching sustainability means teaching the long view versus immediate gratification. The second blog http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/getting-green/teaching-sustainability-21st-century-america-2 adds another specific point: sustainability education means focusing on the good of society versus individual advantage. The third blog http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/getting-green/teaching-sustainability-21st-century-america-3 names some of the obstacles to getting the sustainability message across. Many students do not see how deep the problem is, they are not used to questioning the basic structures of our society but instead consider these structures as inevitable. All three blogs are worth reading, but I'd like to respond to the following paragraph from third blog: "Maybe one of the reasons students have trouble envisioning alternatives to our current market-driven society is that no fully explicit set of values it's supposed to provide and support has ever been made clear to them. Of course, to make explicit a set of values or objectives for a social structure would be to imply that other social structures could exist, and thereby to raise at least the potential question of whether any of those alternatives might do a better job. For many of the students I interact with, the question 'what's an economy (or a political structure, or a society) for?' seems entirely nonsensical. It is, of course, a radical question. But in the absence of radical questioning, radical change is impossible. And radical change of some sort will be required if anything resembling modern society is to long endure." My Marxist upbringing suggests that the above paragraph is based on a false premise. It is wrong to assume that our society is subordinate to some "value system" which, if changed, will lead to a change in society itself. Rather, the inner structure of society is determined by very material forces, namely, the control of the means of production, and the value systems are constructed afterwards to give justification and order to this unequal access to resources. Capitalism is enduring and successful because those behaviors which seem reasonable on an individual level to those who have no control of natural resources or the means of production and therefore must sell their labor-power, add up, on a social level, to preserving and deepening their separation from the resources which they should have access to as their birthright. The fight for the protection of the environment is therefore not only a fight for a different value system, for a more sustainable conception of what we consider a "good life." It is also a very practical fight to change the constraints which force people to recreate capitalism by their daily activity. Protection of the environment simply does not fit into the patterns of activity which everybody has to follow to stay afloat in capitalism. Even our most fervent wish to preserve a livable planet for our grandchildren cannot overcome the material constraints, refined over centuries, which have enabled capitalism to survive despite the misery it creates. Higher education is one of the enabling institutions of capitalism; it makes capitalism seem natural and inevitable to the population, and it demonizes the socialist alternative. Sustainable behavior on a massive scale cannot be reached without questioning capitalism, without addressing social injustices and applying democratic scrutiny to the most important economic decision, the investment decision. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
