On Education

This chapter presents educators with a conundrum: how to change educational systems so that they can in turn promote learning relevant to and commensurate with the multiple crises we face, without being co-opted by dominant cultural norms. Instead of seeking to integrate environmental and sustainability education into existing educational institutions, the challenge is rather the reverse. The task at hand is really to renegotiate, in conjunction with Earth and the more-than-human world, the idea and practice of education itself. Beneath what appear as crises, such as climate change and species extinctions, a more profound crisis lies in the way that many humans relate to the world - that is the dominant modernist way of being in the world. A renegotiated and renewed vision of education must include structures, curricula, and pedagogies that are fundamentally disruptive to these ways of being.