Don’t think of two elephants: Education as if people and planet matter
“You know… they say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant.”
- Bill Murray
In June 2021, the news broke to hundreds of newspapers and televisions about a herd of elephants that had left their natural habitat in Yunnan (Southwest China) and were wandering north. No destination. At that point, they had travelled 500 km in fifteen months, causing damage valued at more than a million dollars. Environmental researchers were asking the other million-dollar questions: what had happened? why such a journey? where they were going? Some explanations for such a quest arose out of a mix of both social and environmental reasons; the population in that reserve had increased twofold and the habitat area had decreased fourfold since the 80s.
Education in this 21st century is also wandering in its ivory tower and can’t seem to find its north. It is undoubtedly at a crossroads. On the one hand, there is an inertia that comes from the nineteenth century where the main formal educational systems were created with the main objective of serving the productive model of the industrial age and the main goal of most of us who study through it is how to earn a living. On the other hand, another more informal education that teaches us how to live. The latter has been on the margins of the former one and was more restricted to the family and local sphere but, it is beginning to gain visibility and is emerging as a possible destination in the jungle in which we find ourselves. The followers of the first type of education seem not to see this “elephant in the room” or perhaps ignore it on purpose. The second ones perceive it as adults in the room and a more figurative sense are touching different parts of this elephant like a positive version of the six blind men of the Indian parable, listening to each other and collaborating to “see” the whole elephant.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the linguist George Lakoff told us with certain reverse psychology not to think of an elephant to make us do just that. They are the techniques of framing. And if we really want to try this game and think about that elephant of education, what we observe is that most countries put their focus or education policy and most of their budgets in a single acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Those disciplines that were very useful since the emergence of the industrial paradigm seem to suggest a techno-optimistic narrative ready to solve the environmental, social and personal problems that are shaking the world. On the other hand, another acronym HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) emerged as a counterpart and as a complaint to the greater amount of funds and educational prestige carried by the STEM disciplines. In 2020 an initiative for the UK rebranded HASS as SHAPE, (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy/Environment), to promote and highlight the importance of these subjects in education, society and the economy/environment. A few years before, Dr Rudd from the Environment Department of the University of York asked himself the following question: “Why should societies invest resources in humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) research?” In an exploratory study he carried out with almost two thousand people, the key findings were that HASS research awareness acted as a powerful predictor of levels of community activity, cultural engagement at the local level and threat perceptions (among them climate change, deterioration of water resource, unforeseen consequences of rapid technological change, human health relating to unhealthy lifestyle choices and/or environmental contaminants…) That is, an interesting triad that suggests the importance of belonging, participation and prudence, values very close to that education that teaches us how to live.
More than eight decades before that elephant odyssey, some Chinese newspapers had advertised another great journey. It was the spring of 1937. One of the great physicists of the twentieth century, the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, came to China to give some lectures. It was a great academic event and one of the first foreign scientists in modern times was honoured with such a grand reception. It is highly probable that from that trip came what happened ten years later when he received a title, Knight of the Order of the Elephant, a prestigious Danish distinction normally reserved for royalty or distinguished generals (the only other Danish scientist who received that honour was the astronomer Tycho Brahe, in 1578) The point, which goes beyond the anecdotal of the title, is that it seems that since Bohr did not have a coat-of-arms that could be displayed on a wall-of-fame at Frederisborg Castle, he had to design or commission one. Thus, Bohr proposed for his coat-of-arms that the Taoist symbol of yin and yang be inserted in the centre along with the phrase or maxim, ‘Contraria sunt Complementa’, (Opposites are complementary).
An education that teaches us how to earn a living does not have to be at odds with an education that teaches us how to live. They are complementary. And that living does not have to cost us the planet or the other people who accompany us on this journey of life, our human herd. On the one hand, there are the STEM disciplines with their technical utility for our future, and on the other the arts and humanities that investigate, among others, literature, the past, culture and human values. A conundrum that needs some art to balance it. And what better art than to be smart and recur to the creativity of the playwright Eugene Ionesco, one of the architects of the theatre of absurd and anti-play. The author of the famous play “Rhinoceros”, another pachyderm, gave an address to an audience of other writers in 1961 where he stated:
There is nothing “useless” in any educative discipline. The trunk of education needs equity and here is another acronym that arises in that educational path, SHTEAM (-Natural & Social- Sciences, Humanities, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) and as two little elephants balancing calls for a SHAPE of the STEM in education. And that does not mean excluding the complementary, but rather being flexible and bending like bamboo in exceptional circumstances.
In 2012, nine years before that trip of the Asian elephants through China, another extraordinary trip was undertaken by a group of African elephants in South Africa. According to various news outlets, a herd of elephants travelled a great distance through the savannah to possibly honour the death of Lawrence Anthony who had recently died. They were on vigil for two days around Lawrence’s house before leaving for the savannah. But, who was Lawrence to receive such an honour? Lawrence was a South African conservationist and environmentalist who had dedicated part of his life to protecting the elephants and other animals of South Africa. Although at the beginning of his career he focused on the insurance and housing businesses, his life took a 180 degree turn when he worked with the Zulu tribe, at which point his passion for the environment was awakened and he changed profession. His nickname of elephant whisperer comes from the time when he managed to save a group of nine escaped elephants causing havoc in KwaZulu-Natal. Intervening before they were shot, he successfully redirected them by communicating with the matriarch using his tone of voice and body language.
I do not know which path education will take in this century, the only thing I hope from the reader of this post is that, if I have managed to make you think or open your eyes, you will probably never be able to close them again and not think of two elephants that remain in your memory and offers you beautiful teachings of nature and society. Regarding nature the biologist Janine Benyus would call it biomimicry and as she once said: “What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked,” how would nature solve this?” Also from language, indigenous thinking, legends or children’s stories (there we have Elmer, Horton, Dumbo …) in a figurative and an anthropomorphic way, elephants give us lessons in social wellbeing or even frames for creativity. The economist E. F. Schumacher would shrink them and add to that toolbox of ideas with which, through which, we experience and interpret the world.
Twitter: @ResWellbeing @BienestarRespon
