What is the role of education in the Anthropocene?
“What used to be called nature has erupted into ordinary human affairs, and vice versa, in such a way and with such permanence as to change fundamentally means and prospects for going on, including going on at all”
I grew up in a world where development and progress were assumed to be good; a linear and inexorable force that, in the long run, always improves the human condition by leaving behind anything that was uncomfortable or uncontrollable about nature. The fact that humans are nature too was to me unthinkable. Yet, as noted by a number of scholars, the idea that humans and nature are essentially different is a distinctive construct of modern Western thought (Latour, 2013; Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 2009; Bird Rose, 2017). The ongoing withdrawal of humans from nature was significantly reinforced in the 16th and 17th centuries with the scientific and industrial revolutions. Grounded in dualistic, rationalist, cartesian thought, the human mind was thought to be “enlightened” to master and tame the wild (Merchant, 1980).
Acknowledgedly, a detached (so called “objective” or “rational”) perspective of the world allowed humanity to systematize the understanding of nature through science and capitalize on that knowledge effectively improving human condition in multiple ways (for a review see Pinker, 2019). However, our planet is struggling to sustain the expansion of modern lifestyles and we are starting to realize the implications of conceiving the earth as passive matter or a set of natural “resources” for human consumption. The human-nature ontological schism legitimized a world where land and life are routinely commodificated, commercialized, and industrialized through violent practices of extraction, mining, draining, deforestation, and pollution (Haraway, 2016).
Such is the impact of humans on the global environment that ecologists Stoermer and atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize winner Crutzen (2000) coined the term Anthropocene to refer to the present geological age in which the intertwined forces of both human and nature are currently defining the fate of each other. The very chemistry of oceans, air and soil has been altered, habitats are a mingle of wild but also cultivated and introduced species (IPCC, 2021). Human-made stuff now weighs more than all remaining living biomass (Elhacham et al., 2020), and mountains of waste are piling up or degrading into microplastics and other particles that flow through living bodies (Wright et al., 2013). At every scale, detangling natural and artificial is practically impossible (Purdy, 2015; Morton, 2015). In fact, as confirmed by the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, much of the damage produced by anthropogenic environmental derragement cannot be undone and will stay with us for the decades and even millennia to come regardless of the actions we take now (IPCC, 2021).
Growing up in the Anthropocene may feel very different. According to recent studies, nature is perceived by children as both fascinating and threatening (Correa, 2020; Evans et al., 2007; Phenice & Griffore, 2003). Through their family, education, or media, children may learn early on about the precarious times we are living in and what the future holds for them. The fragility and tension between human and non-human worlds is latent. In words of Malone (2018) a “dance of daily survival, hanging on, it seems, by sheer grit of determination, with children’s lives being the most precarious in this shared vulnerability” (p._). As a practice concerned with the future, the role of education is critical and often takes two alternative approaches leaning towards nature or technology.
On the one hand, mainstream education continues to educate children under the assumptions of progress and towards the demands of the global economy. Education, as formulated by recent 21st century reform, is understood as a driver of economic growth and national competitiveness under globalized market conditions (see Howard, 2018). Education, broadly understood as preparation, is not about children today but about what they need to become tomorrow in order to fit in the market; get a job, produce, make money, and consume, so that the economy can keep growing (Orr, 2004). Innovation, understood as the creation of (monetary) value, is nowadays a central driver of education (Fullan & Langworthy, 2013). It is assumed that planetary collapse is yet another technoscientific challenge for young innovative minds. Yet, the planet can barely keep up with the pace of innovation (and obsolescence).
On the other hand, there are those who romance about bringing children “back to nature” through forest pedagogies and outdoor learning. Compelling research on nature’s benefits for children development and health have bolstered this movement (Louv, 2005; Szczytko et al., 2020; Cox et al., 2017). These pedagogies generally portray the child as the central active participant in the forest, a rich learning environment waiting to be “discovered” and known. Yet, as Purdy (2015) says “if Nature were a place, we could not find it. If Nature were a state of mind, we could not attain it. We are something else, and so is the world” (p. 16). As stated before, the possibility of returning to a rebalanced and homeostatic earth is gone, and therefore education should avoid reinforcing once again the nature-culture divide and turning a blind eye on the long history of environmental injustice and degradation (Taylor, 2013; Malone, 2018; Ratto, 2016).Education should assume human complicity, learn from the past, and work towards intentional rather than accidental interactions.
If returning to the wild is not possible and building techno-utopian futures equally problematic, what is the role of education in the Anthropocene? In “Staying with the Trouble” feminist scholar Haraway (2016) calls to acknowledge that we inhabit hybrid, contaminated, techno-ecological “natureculture” worlds and work within and through them in creatively building conditions for ongoingness with other equally troubled earthly beings. Through this lens it becomes critical for education to ask: How can we think about learning and creativity outside of the assumptions of unfettered growth, innovation, and consumption? What does it mean to create and learn in hybrid naturecultures and alongside the life forwarding processes of the earth? What possibilities unfold when creativity and learning are expanded to include other earthly beings?
In the Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing (2015) traces stories of matsutake, a coveted wild mushroom, that grows mostly in foraged and severely damaged forests. These narratives are examples of what she calls, “collaborative survival” or the possibility of multispecies coexistence and persistence even at the ruins of our capitalistic worlds. In my research, I engage with fungi as a creative partner not in the search of new more sustainable technologies nor in the chase of past pure ecologies, but as an exploratory exercise of collaborative survival, searching for a path forward through symbiosis, ongoingness, and mutual “response-ability” (Haraway, 2016). The aim is to continue to weave the world together with other beings but through (hopefully more) deliberate rather than accidental interactions. An exploration of learning and creativity beyond humans is also a humbling exercise of recovering the sense of awe, respect, and reciprocity for a damaged but resilient planet that is intrinsically purposeful, intelligent, and creative. With this attitude in mind, learning to design alongside the patterns and dynamics of nature can enlarge the repertoire of opportunities we offer children to address pressing socio-ecological challenges through ecologically minded making and design practices.
Suggested citation (APA)
Correa, I. (2020). What is the role of education in the Anthropocene? MariaIsabelCorrea (Blog). Retrieved from https://www.mariaisabelcorrea.com/blog-1/2021/9/22/what-is-the-role-of-education-in-the-anthropocene