Don’t Do Sustainability

New regulations for buses? Sorted by morning break. A surprise government announcement requiring an immediate and significant change…no problem, we will have a new timetable, staffing and resourcing by end of day. A new inspection regime stating that we must up the ante on student progress? No worries, my students will now make accelerated progress on top of their already accelerated progress. The rate of progress in my school is increasing so fast that I sometimes wonder if we are a school, or a large hadron collider. Everyday hurling more and more stuff through a small tube with greater and greater speed, just to see what occurs when reality collides with subjectivity. Kaboom! What will happen? New and wonderful ways of learning? An almighty explosion and complete meltdown of the system? The formation of a strange new artificial intelligence that transforms our ways of doing? Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. The weird thing though, is that all of these ‘tweaks’ to the existing ways of doing assume that the current way of doing is the best way. That if we can just tweak a bit here, adjust a bit there, accelerate a little more everywhere, we will somehow get to the future we envision, regardless of the fact that it is receding further and faster with every day we stare at the horizon. How do we reconcile this ontological position, this implicit understanding that the way in which we currently see the world is the correct way to see, and therefore act, within it? How do we reconcile this position with the fact that the way in which we have seen and acted up until this point has got us to, well, exactly where we are today? Which, without putting to fine of a point on it, does not seem likely to be ‘sustainable’ for too much longer.

Sustainability in schools is both easy to do, and hard to achieve. Which is interesting, because this article in some ways is an ode to, and critique of, dualism – the separation of this from that. The doing is easy. Schools are littered with the debris of great stuff that has been done. The achieving of, i.e., whether the doing resulted in any permanent improvement, is debatable and largely unknown in most schools. We use proxies to assess the degree to which things improved as a result of the doing. Exams as a proxy for learning. League tables as a proxy for school quality. Staff turnover as a proxy for staff wellbeing… there is very little we explicitly KNOW. Sustainability is the new high priority wave of doing – I wonder what the proxy will be? Eco-councils. Green flags. Designated students with the responsibility to be the tap turner – offers and light switch monitors in each class. We do, do, do, because as educators we optimistically believe that the world can be made better through tweaks and adjustments to the existing way of doing. Well, in a strange deviation from the sustainable development goals, carbon literacy and eco-councils, let me propose that to achieve the kind of education that we need, in order to achieve a sustainable future for our planet and the humans and non – humans who inhabit this earthly household, we require not merely the reformation of existing systems and ways of doing, but a transformation of how we think, know and ultimately do. Lofty goal? Maybe.

So, lets start with dualism and sustainability. What’s the connection? To cut short the journey through time, philosophical traditions, and pugilistic purists on the internet, essentially since we (I use ‘we’ in the general sense of most of humanity) left our indigenous hunter-gatherer traditions, we have separated nature from self. Various influential philosophers reinforced this, and Renee Descartes finally sealed the deal as he ascribed man and soul to be one, and everything else to be the ‘machine’. We separated ourselves from the natural world, our selves from each other, and gave ourselves the freedom to maximize our own health/ wealth/ wellbeing at the expense of everyone and everything else. We followed this with a scientific epistemology that supported that notion, the evolution of a monetary system (capitalism) that was based on that separation, and pressed ahead as if it had always been thusly. So whilst indigenous world views saw self as an extension of, and connected to, nature; modern views saw us as separate. Given that separation, we dug up, burned, and generally exploited all of natures bounty with the god given grace to do so as it was not ‘us’. We ‘othered’ nature. So now that we see we have perhaps erred in our philosophical ruminations, the solution would seem not to be to simply tweak what we are currently doing, but that we need to ‘un-other’, or to use a more reasonable word – reconnect, to eventually rebalance our account with nature. Philosopher Alfred Whitehead, coming down on the other side of the philosophical fence a longtime after Descarte,  preferred ‘Organic Realism’. The notion that everything is a process, and that by perceiving or experiencing something, we are both changed by it and it by us.

“Thus as disclosed in the fundamental essence of our experience, the togetherness of things involves some doctrine of mutual immanence. We are in the world and the world is in us.”

To sum the paragraph, the fundamental change needed starts not with doing more with the current mindset, but with recalibrating our mindset and eventually accepting that we are connected to nature and therefore what is good for ‘it’, is good for us. If this connection is made, what follows is the realization that sustainability and the maintenance of status quo is nowhere near a lofty enough goal if we truly desire human flourishing. Stating ‘sustainability’ as the goal, is kind of like saying ‘I just want to feel ok’. Whilst that may be a reasonable interim goal, I want more than that – for myself and my kids. I want them to thrive. To flourish. To face each day with a smile and know they are loved and that they belong.  And if human flourishing and the environment are intrinsically linked, we therefore don’t want mere sustainability – we need abundance.

So where to start in a school if the stakes have been raised from a desire to maintain the status quo, to a desire for a world of abundance. (By the way, we can maintain ‘status quo’ for quite some time without realising things are not actually getting any better. Green washing does just that. Green washing helps us feel better without actually having to make any meaningful changes). So where to start?

First, I acknowledge that all of the things I have facetiously mentioned above – the eco-councils, light switchers and tap turners are inherently good things and should not be abandoned. I do not want to discourage the small and individual acts in sacrifice to the large and heroic. But I would ask teachers and schools to slow down the doing. Not only is it exhausting, it runs the risk of falling upon the debris heap when that passionate eco-leader moves on, when we run out of money for the recycled paper we purchased, or when light switching becomes less of a priority than pen licenses.