teaching

How could our pedagogy and our schools support degrowth?

I’ll be busy this July promoting 10f.io, a tool for teachers.

“This is not the time to teach children how to be in the world as is.”

The comprehensive demand on students and teachers alike is this: You must change. You are living in the world as it is, of course, but right next to the world-as-such lie worlds that could be or should be but are not yet. We are products of this world, but as we reach toward a possible world, or as we work to create a more joyful and just, peaceful and loving world right here, we must simultaneously change ourselves....

When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger works at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it. (Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, 1977, p. xiii) I rediscovered this quotation the other day—completely out of the blue—and have been thinking about how it relates to teaching and schools....