It is time for you to learn how to drive a car. The driving instructor takes you into a room full of tables and chairs, the walls covered in shelves lined with books, at one end of the room is a black-board. The instructor takes a book off one of the shelves and hands it to you. The title is “How to Drive a Car”. The instructor then leaves.
After you have read the book, you go outside, get into your new car and drive off. Within five minutes you have crashed.
This is the parody of learning purely in abstract and, of course, we don’t learn to drive a car this way – it would be fatal. We do however, largely learn how to live this way, which is proving equally dangerous, if less immediately dramatic.
What is education? The word itself derives from the Latin educaré which roughly means ‘to bring forth’. This is different from ‘training’, which is about ‘putting in’, about overlaying patterns of new behaviour on existing ones. Training is derived from external factors, education from internal ones.
Training is systemic – it is useful to help people fit into a shared system for doing things. Education is deeper than that, it’s about you and your relationship with the world around you, about bringing forth your true self into the world in which you live, it’s about realising yourself: Self-realisation.
In the UK we don’t have much of an education system. Instead we train our young people how to conform to the predefined systems of society. We even sometimes make them wear a ‘uniform’ perhaps just to emphasise the importance of being ‘uniform’. In fact, we don’t even train them that much either, we don’t need to – there are bigger more powerful and much better resourced institutions for achieving that. Our children are trained by the mass media. Advertising and television are the biggest influence on our children’s behaviour – and of our own behaviour too. Here comes Christmas!
The training we get is to work hard, buy more and keep quiet, in the firm knowledge that we will become fulfilled as individuals – realise ourselves – only by being respected by others for working hard and by owning the right things. The measures of a successful human being are the things they own, the holidays they can afford and often, ironically, the schools they can afford to send their children to.
The first schools were opened by Victorian industrialist to feed the human resource demands of early industrial Britain. From the outset education was about training and conformity, about output and production. It was early corporate “spin” to create a system of society that fed the dominant system of economy, for the benefit of the super-rich elite.
Today though, that system of economy is undermining the larger system of life in which it is embedded and upon which it depends. It is, as one environmentalist famously said, “as if the brain has decided to mine the liver”. It is time that, at very least, schooling became focussed on fitting into the real system with which we must conform – the global ecosystem.
Better still, how about some education? How about letting us ‘bring forth’ who we really are? I wonder what we might find if we gave ourselves the time and space to let our authentic selves, the self that is left once we have struggled free of the molasses of industrial culture, shine through.
Education – all education – should be about ecological self-realisation and learning to read the metaphorical maps of the ecological landscapes we inhabit. “All education is”, for that very reason, and as educationalist David Orr pointed out, “environmental education”. I would go further, all education is ecological education – not just about the physical environment but also about the relationships that connect it all together – biological, social, political, cultural, psychological, mythological… Ultimately, of course, we realise that we are indivisible from this web, in every term conceivable. This then, is to realise who we are – self-realisation is about marrying together our biological reality with the way we perceive ourselves.
Like trying to learn to drive from the manual, we cannot learn about our interconnection with the global ecosystem if we shut ourselves away in little rooms full of books. Direct experience of the world around us is the only way to learn how to live in that world successfully, the only way to realise who we each are.
Direct experiences of wild Nature are fundamental to ecological self-realisation. Without a tacit and real experience of the wild Earth, how can we understand the human place in the grand scheme of things, how can we gain a sense of our own frailty and realise that control and supremacy are dangerous illusions? The world actually works through mutual respect and cooperation and is held in balance through bio-diversity. A journey in the wild leaves no doubt about this.
The modern educational challenge is to teach ourselves and our children how to realise that we are ecological beings at a deep and intuitive level. This must be done while offering practical training in how to live in a finite and closed planetary ecosystem.
The text book has it’s place, but without the actual driving lesson – without getting out there and engaging with the world for real – this lesson is merely an exercise in remembering abstract theory from which only more abstract theory can be the outcome. Isn’t this, in fact, the treadmill-plight of so much of modern academia?
Outdoor education is the perfect medium for meeting the challenges of learning to live in ecologically sustainable ways. The Outdoor Education industry has largely ignored this possibility, determined to keep outdoor education as a marginalised branch of “sport”. We are left with an outdoor education sector in crisis – it’s “too dangerous” in these mollycoddled, nanny-state days to send our children out into a wild environment. Many outdoor centres have been shut down and others have been left struggling with licensing, litigation and the spiralling costs of liability insurance.
It is time to put this ailing industry back to work by re-visioning outdoor education, at least in part, as eco-education. By letting it realise it’s immense, unique, and critically important potential in educating for the real world.
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