Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

1NC

1NC – Deschooling K

The affirmative’s attempt to reform the school system reinforces a schooled society that feeds children into capitalism’s industrial machine.

Note* there are few links to specific things not highlighted – Educational technologists and R&D, the Free-school movement, teachers unions, behaviourists.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

I believe that the contemporary crisis of education demands that we review the very idea of publicly prescribed learning, rather than the methods used in its enforcement. The dropout rate--especially of junior-high-school students and elementary-school teachers-- points to a grass-roots demand for a completely fresh look. The "classroom practitioner" who considers himself a liberal teacher is increasingly attacked from all sides. The freeschool movement, confusing discipline with indoctrination, has painted him into the role of a destructive authoritarian. The educational technologist consistently demonstrates the teacher's inferiority at measuring and modifying behavior. And the school administration for which he works forces him to bow to both Summerhill and Skinner, making it obvious that compulsory learning cannot be a liberal enterprise. No wonder that the desertion rate of teachers is overtaking that of their students.

America's commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese. Conventional schools obviously cannot do it. The free-school movement entices unconventional educators, but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling. And the promises of educational technologists, that their research and development--if adequately funded--can offer some kind of final solution to the resistance of youth to compulsory learning, sound as confident and prove as fatuous as the analogous promises made by the military technologists.

The criticism directed at the American school system by the behaviorists and that coming from the new breed of radical educators seem radically opposed. The behaviorists apply educational research to the "induction of autotelic instruction through individualized learning packages." Their style clashes with the nondirective cooption of youth into liberated communes established under the supervision of adults. Yet, in historical perspective, these two are just contemporary manifestations of the seemingly contradictory yet really complementary goals of the public school system. From the beginning of this century, the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the "good society," conceived of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure. Under the impact of intense urbanization, children became a natural resource to be molded by the schools and fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in the growth of the U.S. public school.* Vocational guidance and the junior high school were two important results of this kind of thinking. [*See Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Cuaderno No. 50. Centro Intercultural de Documentacin, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971.]

It appears, therefore, that the attempt to produce specified behavioral changes which can be measured and for which the processor can be held accountable is just one side of a coin, whose other side is the pacification of the new generation within specially engineered enclaves which will seduce them into the dream world of their elders. These pacified in society are well described by Dewey, who wants us to "make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate it with the spirit of art, history and science." In this historical perspective, it would be a grave mistake to interpret the current threecornered controversy between the school establishment, the educational technologists and the free schools as the prelude to a revolution in education. This controversy reflects rather a stage of an attempt to escalate an old dream into fact, and to finally make all valuable learning the result of professional teaching. Most educational alternatives proposed converge toward goals which are immanent in the production of the cooperative man whose individual needs are met by means of his specialization in the American system: They are oriented toward the improvement of what--for lack of a better phrase--I call the schooled society. Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear, into a society which needs disciplined specialization as much from its producers as from its consumers and also their full commitment to the ideology which puts economic growth first. Dissent veils the contradictions inherent in the very idea of school. The established teachers unions, the technological wizards, and the educational liberation movement reinforce the commitment of the entire society to the fundamental axioms of a schooled world, somewhat in the manner in which many peace and protest movements reinforce the commitments of their members--be they black, female, young, or poor--to seek justice through the growth of the gross national income.

Schooled society reproduces dominant neoliberal values that cause social inequality, dehumanization, and the ecological destruction of Earth.

Jandrić 14 – Petar Jandrić, Professor at University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, Former Senior Lecturer at The Polytechnic of Zagreb, Ph.D. in Information Science from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, MSc in Education from The University of Edinburgh, 2014 “Deschooling Virtuality,” Open Review of Educational Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, pg. 84-98, December 2^nd, Available Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23265507.2014.965193?scroll=top&needAccess=true, Accessed 6-2-17)

Implicitly or explicitly, educators have always recognized their position in and against dominant social forces commonly described as Gramsci's (1992Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) superstructures: political power relationships, institutions, culture and the state. At the one hand, education is supposed to liberate people from ignorance and poverty; at the other hand, educational ‘liberation’ is brought by middle-class teachers who, often unwillingly and/or unconsciously, inculcate dominant value systems and reproduce traditional social inequalities. This power dynamic creates a vicious circle on all levels of educational praxis, including but not limited to the nature of teacher employment. Working within the current educational systems, educators are intrinsic parts of educational Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser, 2008Althusser, L. (2008). On ideology. London: Verso. [Google Scholar]) which contribute to increasing social inequality. (To make things worse, they are also blamed more than ever for any perceived shortcomings in ‘the system’.) Those who resign might feel better with themselves, but the next person in line will step into their places and perpetuate the system. Adapted from collective work of the small group of British scholars called London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013 fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), the concept in and against superstructures succinctly summarizes Illich's argument against schooling. However, while the majority of radical educators seek solution in opposition from this unfavourable position (Mitchell et al., 1979Mitchell, J., Mackenzie, D., Holloway, J., Cockburn, C., Polanshek, K., Murray, N., McInnes, N., & McDonald, J. (1979). In and against the state. Retrieved 18 March 2013 fromhttp://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979 ), Illich asserts that all such attempts are deemed a failure and looks for radically different approaches.

Illich's argument departs from his wide critique of institutionalization of the contemporary society. ‘Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized society is dialectically intertwined with institutionalized education. ‘The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new’ (Illich, 1971Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. [Google Scholar], p. 3). Institutionalized educational systems are necessarily dehumanized. Hence, institutionalized society reduces people to producers and consumers. In the context of learning it could be argued that this is not always bad, as a form of the relationship between producers and consumers naturally underpins learning (beyond schooling). What makes institutionalized educational systems dehumanized, however, are the static models of ‘delivering’ education and often perverse ways they feed into capital. Following the line of argument very similar to Frankfurt School critiques of technologies exposed in Herbert Marcuse's One-dimensional man (1964Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]) and Martin Heidegger's ‘Only a God can save us' interview (1981Heidegger, M. (1981). “Only a God can save us": The Spiegel interview. In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger: The man and the thinker (pp. 45–67). Chicago, IL: Precedent Press. [Google Scholar]), Illich shows that stability of institutionalized society is based on constant economic growth. Deeply rooted in the spirit of 1960s and 1970s, he finally concludes that such a model inevitably leads towards ecological destruction of our planet.

The alternative is the deinstitutionalization of education and creation of sustainability learning networks to deschool society. This is crucial to formulate sustainability learning and critical, border pedagogy to unbind educational policy and thought from neoliberal perspectives.

Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Former Professor a the University of Exeter, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.D. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12^th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17)

3. A Creative Rupture

For many decades the curriculum trajectory of formal education institutions at all levels in the ‘developed world’ has increased the salience of vocation and professional learning through the structuring learning that directly serves the needs of the economy and, in turn, promotes excessive material consumption. As Illich wrote ([12], p. 46), “in a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index”. This, together with his stress on deinstitutionalisation and deprofessionalisation of learning resonates with the need for a sustainability learning to politically abrade the cultural authority of neoliberal perspectives on education and learning. The capitalisation metaphor—human capital, financial capital, social capital economic capital, cultural capital, natural capital—dominates many discourses including those that shape with operations of formal education and the public pedagogy of a number of sustainability organisations, such as Forum for the Future, and although arguably the capital metaphor may in some instances be a useful heuristic device, Darlene Clover [14] and Chet Bowers [15,16,17] remind us that metaphors, particularly root metaphors, shape not only how we perceive and live but also the ways in which we may critique and penetrate the political implications and educational infractions of this conceptual framework. A shopping mall is both a constellation of capitals, good or bad, and a pedagogical opportunity that could conceivably nurture a transformation of meaning schemes and perspectives if set within learning processes and spaces of creative re-imagination, resistance and rupture. Similarly, in the sphere of training and vocational education the terms ‘work ready’ ‘employable’, ‘employer led’ and ‘relevant’ too easily trip off the tongue because mainstream policy makers and educators have internalised the complacent rhetoric of the end of history with “the only show in town” being private enterprise and economic growth. There is an alternative. There has to be one.

Given this, it is important that sustainability educators and practitioners recognise that formal education has historically been not so much a transformative experience but a socially reproductive one that rarely transforms base metal into gold doing little to turn an unsustainable into a sustainable world. Educators need to confront the routine behaviours, expectations, thinking and metaphors that has conceivably made our era an age of stupid. In this context, Franny Armstrong’s apocalyptic docudrama, The Age of Stupid (UK, 2009), is an important pedagogic space inviting a meditation on human nature and its financial, production and social relations. It is also an object lesson and potentially prefiguring an engaged and active political, media based, public pedagogy challenging fatalistic passivity and the infantisation of opinion. As Felix Guattari writes ([18], pp. 41-42).

The increasing deterioration of human relations with the socius, the psyche and ‘nature’, is due not only to environmental and objective pollution but is also the result of a certain incomprehension and fatalistic passivity towards these issues as a whole, among both individuals and governments. (...) It is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on the psyche, the socius and the environment. Refusal to face up to the erosion of these three areas, as the media would have us do, verges on the strategic infantilization of opinion and a destructive neutralization of democracy. We need to ‘kick the habit’ of seductive discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to be able apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of view of the three ecologies.

With a move towards deinstitutionalising formal learning and the rearticulation of public pedagogies through the cultural spaces and opportunities of co-operation, co-production, social and eco-entrepreneurship, lifelong learning practices need not be exclusively tied to the dictates of global capitalism that otherwise infuse our everyday lives and lifeworlds. There are new, clear and evident conditions of an alternative possibility for the experience of contemporary cultural capitalism is itself contradictory. Large multinational conglomerates and retail chains present themselves as ecologically responsible inviting consumers to buy into fundamental iniquities through the false promise that our purchases will benefit those who suffer as a result of those very relations of production that have made the commodity possible. Five pence of every purchase goes to save a rainforest, feed a starving child, help a peasant farmer or save a tiger ... A consequence, Zizek writes ([19], p. 98) is that seemingly:

One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and Excluded.

Hardt and Negri [20] suggests, in their analysis of the new Empire, the current world order is one where compromise and accommodation falls far short of the radical, structural and philosophic requirement to resist its cultural seductiveness. Resistance requires an imagination and a will to be against. A tall order maybe, but Empire’s considerable impact suggests there is an intellectual appetite for political change that sustainability educators and practitioners and educators need to address. Again, with Mike Hulme’s [21] approach to understanding the nature of climate change as so brilliantly laid out in Why We Disagree About Climate Change, sustainability practitioners and educators have prime opportunities to square the circle, to reconcile sustainability with development, to both unbind politics and become a subject of and for politics. As the philosopher Alain Badiou ([22], p. 24) writes:

The essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists.

Climate change is not a problem waiting for a solution. The environment is not just waiting for a new and more appropriate form of fungible capitalisation but learners are waiting for possibilities of a new learning that only broad based and grounded sustainability networks can provide. These networks must be “readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching” ([12], p. 79). To effect this, a radical departure in current educational thinking and practice needs to be intimately and reflexively connected in a recursive succession of moments that bring forth a triadic process of reflective intuition encompassing mind, matter and mediation [23,24]. For Bergson, the moment of creativity emerges from a process of rupture, of discontinuity that transcends the quantitative discontinuities produced by dividing the world into separate and discrete segments, disciplines and professions but which are nonetheless infused with a plurality of continuities and rhythmic durations. These ruptures will gain strength from a rearticulation and re-apprehension of metaphor based on intuitive reflections of lived experience that imbue action with meaning and meaning with action. For Badiou [22], in our world where dialogue is reduced to a plurality of opinions and where democratic individuals seem largely indifferent to injustice and vast material inequalities, only through an “event”, a radical break or rupture with the status quo, can individuals regain their subjectivity and fashion a praxis that offers a genuine alternative. Networks of learning that can engage a multiplicity of participants, individuals, groups, organisations and sectors that may, or may not at first glance, share a great deal of common ground are nonetheless constitutive parts of a world of social learning enabling processes, spaces and practices of lifelong learning for sustainability to emerge. Thus instead of resembling sites of social and cultural reproduction, such a lifelong learning, and its constituent networks, must become an ecotone which is understood and lived both metaphorically and literally. To put it another way, a lifelong learning perceived and practiced as an ecotone is a transition area where different communities of practice, and interest, may come together thereby generating a richness in thought, action, knowledge, skills, understanding, creativity and philosophy not found within any one section, group, institution or community or in the wider educational environment. This transitional space offers the potentiality and possibility of rupture and a new ground for sustainability learning that is in essence politically democratic and just. It is the cultural space for a critical, border pedagogy. For Illich ([12], p. 78) learning is a human activity which least needs manipulation by others. The most important learning is immeasurable re-creation and a good education system therefore should have three main purposes, ...it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.

This new form of education and learning, he writes ([12], p. 80), should not start with the question “‘What should someone learn?’ but with the question, What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?” He outlines his proposal for a qualitative and quantitive transformation—a deschooling of society that challenges the hegemony of professional education and the ideology of credentialism tied completely to the economistic worldview. He prefers the term “opportunity web” to “network” for the latter is too often enlisted “to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment” ([12], p. 79). He explains further ([12], p. 80),

Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others’ consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.