Will corporates ever allow people to be rational?
Mnuchin to Thunberg: “go to college and learn economics”. What a giggle!
We have said many times that education as we know it is anti-educational, that it makes people stupid. That is to take at least part of education’s self-declared purpose as valid. But education also turns out to be a disaster for certain key current agendas like climate change. It doesn’t matter what children and young people are taught; the destruction of the world is achieved anyway.
Let’s go back to Wendell Berry and his novel Hannah Coulter. We remarked on how there is an image in the book of working in service of a landscape, of feeling a joint membership with neighbours and friends for taking care. Hannah and her husband Nathan returned from a traumatic Second World War to start with essentially nothing and make a farm for themselves from a derelict property. They do it for love of each other, of life, and of the land.
They think the thing to do is to send their three children to college — a chance they never had themselves. Hannah, searching her heart, realises too late that college will one way or another take her children away from her. The tragedy is that love of land and family leads to an inability to take care of the land; the promise of education proved to be a bitter pill. Of course, exploitation of the land will follow and that is the fundamental driver of climate change.
In a conversation with our neighbour here, he explained that there are many Jehovah’s Witnesses locally. Indeed, they have been on my doorstep: Wednesdays and Saturdays apparently. My neighbour explained that many Jehovah’s Witness young people do not go to college/university. They are more likely to start small businesses and learn how the world works that way; it seems there is always enough money in the community to support this sort of development.
I think we can see the contrast here. Any, ANY, external educational institution works on the premise that it knows something that is worth imparting to students, even if that is mere credentialism. It is the implied value judgement in the value judgment that poisons the enterprise. Hannah Coulter knew that, in the eyes of college staff and students, farmers like her were a bit stupid and behind the times. Farmers don’t understand how to get on. We can see this coming through in the attacks on meat farmers by vegan twitterati like George Monbiot.
I have to admit that this is a difficult area for me personally. There are things I think I know about regenerating the land that my neighbours don’t know. But as we will see, there is no substitute for loving the land or for holding the community together.
History in two poles
A brief history indicates we shouldn’t be surprised. School education as we know it was invented by the Prussians to get boys to think sufficiently alike before they were inducted into the army. It is a device, a technology for making children the same. We can see here already the absolutely central purpose is to prise children away from the influence of parents and their values.
Education has been used to eradicate languages that were politically inconvenient. My father, a historian, said that it was as easy as paying children a small coin at the end of each day when they did not speak their mother tongue. As I recall it was the language of Haute Savoie that he referred to directly. We can see here also that the central purpose is to stop children thinking like their parents.
Of course, there is an abjectly disgraceful history of the underlying thought here: native Americans on the west coast of Canada right into the 20th Century were forcibly removed from their families to school them into successful citizens: that is the tap root of the huge drug addiction problem in Vancouver. Also not forgetting that the UK sent children from disadvantaged backgrounds to live on farms in Australia, where many were exploited and abused.
The other pole I would cite is the Reggio Emilia school system. It started when parents built their own small schools in the ruins of the second world war, and then went to find pedagogues who could educate them the way the parents wanted. Part of the move was to get children out of the clutches of Catholic nuns, another whole sorry chapter. The point I want there is that Reggio Emilia is successful around the world in actually educating children, when the other systems, not surprisingly err on the side of discipline and standardised knowledge. A curriculum of any sort does not sit comfortably with keeping strong ties to community and land.
You can see these issues dramatically and sensitively explored in Carol Black’s documentary, Schooling the World. The film explores the issue of whether children who have been away to be educated can still have the values and skills to tend land in their ancestral home. We don’t really have a way of valuing subsistence and the continuity of care for a landscape and we certainly don’t easily see when our values are destructive.
Some of the Victorians who went to Australia to farm sheep made huge profits in fifteen or twenty years and, when their land was wrecked never to recover, simply came “home” with their spoils. In the intervening 150 years we haven’t learned to moderate or modulate this behaviour. Does it drive climate change? You bet it does.
Thin ends of wedges
In Hannah Coulter, with the benefit of hindsight, Hannah can see that buying a tractor was the thin end of a wedge that allowed big companies to sell all sorts of things to the farm. All those buying decisions were justified, even canny in their own right, but together they led to debt that had to be serviced by doing things to the land that should not have been done. Her husband may have needed a tractor and made really good use of one over the years, but the land would have been better staying with horse drawn machinery. Isn’t that interesting?
The same applies to fertilisers and pesticides of course. They appear necessary. They lead to satisfactory economic returns in the short term. And in the medium term they are part of a decline and an increasing need for expensive inputs. You have to have an eye on the likely trajectory. The sales pitch will be attractive by definition, and it will not be a matter of checking the accounting. It is a matter of what the land and the landscape needs.
This is about education and learning from experience. The world of education is never going to be saying “you know what, tractors are great, but the old ways are best”. That is not what education does and no-one is going to pay to be told “just go home and do what you know needs doing”. The world of education has to be saying: look we are finding out about this process and evaluating that method and you need to be trying out these techniques.
Wrecking a landscape and its ecosystem is easy and you will do so on the back of expert opinions and learned books and detailed research papers. Indigenous communities have had some accidents but the ones who have survived with their environments intact after a hundred generations have to be held to know more than the experts who have a track record of twenty years at best. I saw an appeal from Amazonian Indians only this morning asking people to trust them to look after the forest the way they always have. Robert Macfarlane added some figures of what large percentage of the world’s remaining biodiversity is already being managed by these people who are off the map of what “we” “know” about the world.
Tribes of Amazonian Indians were subverted by missionaries with mirrors and knives that the Indians could be persuaded to covet. That is no different from the tractor and the artificial fertilisers — in Australia, “super” (superphosphate) was commonly sprayed from planes because it seemed to bring back fertility to degraded pastures…
Climate change
As we discussed last time in The landscape must live its own life, the landscape needs to function. It is the landscape and its soil that captures sunlight and uses it via the water cycle to regulate the temperature of our planet. There has been a distinct absence of discussion of cooling mechanisms, as though humans heated the planet and, therefore, they would have to do the cooling too. Heaven save us from geotechnical engineering.
We trample on and pave over the planet’s cooling mechanisms. Although people point to the rainforest, and losing rainforest is clearly a bad idea, it is the vast tracts of semi-arid grassland around the world that are both diagnostic and contain the main elements of any coherent response to climate change.
If we studied a bit harder, we would find that even the rainforests are largely human managed environments, and those grasslands are certainly human created landscapes. Did you catch news of the sophisticated water engineering works in Australia that date to before the pyramids? Humans know how to manage the climate, but we turn our backs on knowledge that it isn’t western-scientific.
So, there are two threads here connecting education and climate change:
Landscape management is only possible with deep love of the land, deep respect for the life of the land and continuity of those things over many generations. Education as we know it destroys the necessary continuity, disrupting families and cultures.
The knowledge about how to manage particular landscapes lies with its guardians and stewards. We disrespect and often literally destroy this knowledge. People know what to do but that doesn’t mean they know how to recover from the burning of their forest or the overgrazing and destruction of key species in their grassland. We destroy both the guardians of the knowledge that can save us all and the basis of that knowledge in the land.
If you think that Monsanto or Goldman Sachs or IBM or Nestle or Harvard is going to save us, well… If you even think they will even make a positive contribution to the solution, you need to pay attention to your mental health. It is not in their interest to do other than engage in predatory delay. They will be the ones killing off (all too literally) the knowledge we need. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
What links governments of all stripes and these iconic corporates is that they think people are muppets. If it was true that people held the only knowledge and agency that could save the land, their legitimacy would be completely undermined. They would all be partners. The geometry of power would shift altogether: therefore people are muppets who don’t understand hard-nosed truths.
I used to teach risk management using a classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. The pair are careering down a steep snowy slope on a sledge together. Each time they come to a tree they avoid it right or left. Their trajectory leads them over a cliff. That is the thin-end-of-the-wedge logic. You don’t know the implications of buying that tractor: a tractor cannot lead to disaster can it? Can it? Monsanto will sell you solutions that will drive the whole of mankind over the edge. What did oil companies know about burning oil and gas? More or less everything. What do Monsanto know about soil degradation? Probably more or less everything. Are the muppets going to be allowed to make rational choices? Hell no. And regulation is obviously a BAD THING.
We are claiming that the knowledge to heal landscapes and steward them in the future will not come from “science” or “education”. People need to act from love of the land and find the sort of teachers and scientists that they need. Nothing else will do.
