An Immoral Education

Educating to Vandalize the Planet & Perpetuate Inequity

Schools and their staff tend to wholeheartedly accept the mission of the dominant educational paradigm. They view their role as being on the front lines of a global economic war, delivering society’s message, training the next generation of worker-bees and army ants. Students will benefit by learning how to function optimally in society, and society will benefit by being able to compete with other societies in this “race” to some mythical material “top.”[i]

I shouldn’t be glib about this sad state of affairs, for—as most scholars and pundits will remind us—there is plenty of evidence to corroborate the successes of education as traditionally conceived.

Education levels are correlated with all sorts of valuable indicators. The more educated people are, the longer they tend to live, the more money they make, the higher is their status in society, and the higher is their standard of living.

They are more often employed, find their work more fulfilling, their lives seem less unsure, they have access to more stable relationships, they divorce less, they marry richer, more beautiful, more educated, and they generally have more access to all the planet’s resources that money can buy, either directly or indirectly.

They have far fewer children outside marriage, and they take more of an active personal role in raising their children. They tend to be less emotionally and physically “distressed.” They suffer less aches, pains, and malaise; they experience less depression, anxiety, and anger.

They overdose less on drugs, prescription and otherwise, smoke less cigarettes, are less obese, suffer less heart attacks, and have better health insurance. And, to top it off, their children also become the best educated, deriving all the associated benefits.

In short, the winners of the world tend to be the best educated. And, similarly, on the large scale, education is good for society.

Or, we can say, at least, that education correlates with the qualities of life that society values. What causes what is, of course, harder to determine. Still, countries with strong educational systems have less violence, greater prosperity, more vital economies, and more stable governments. They have the best-fed populations, suffer the lowest infant mortality rates, and boast the greatest average longevity for their citizens.

Again, the major problem here is that all these are measured within a paradigm that is a global-scale pyramid scheme. It has been these very people—the well-paid, long-lived consumers in stable, economically vital countries—that have caused most of the environmental destruction. The best educated consume disproportionally more of the Earth’s resources.

In a very real sense, education helps us become even “better vandals” of the Earth. Most of the industrial pollution, non-biodegradable chemicals and consumer products, green revolution technology of pesticides, fertilizers, and high yield hybrids, and weapons of mass destruction were envisioned and produced by the best educated and benefited the best educated.

In the words of the poet Gary Snyder, they are the products of people who “make unimaginably large sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities… eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world.”

“Education, in other words,” according to professor David Orr, “…can be a dangerous thing.” The problem, he says, is not a problem in education, but of education. That is, the present paradigm has us unwittingly spreading a certain type of education around the world that teaches more people to replicate the destructive behavior of the already educated.

The Earth cannot sustain more similarly educated people. Professor Orr wrote in Earth in Mind, “My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival—the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will save us.”

For their many fundamental differences of opinion, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both believed that a stable democracy required an informed public. Yet, after over two centuries of placing a high value on education and over a century of free and compulsory education, only five percent of Americans under the age of 25 regularly follow public affairs. Indeed, the growing undemocratic and unequal nature of the American society suggests that education is certainly not working as these founding fathers envisioned.

And the high dropout rates, poor test performance in comparison to other countries, low college completion rates, and the loss of U.S. competitive edge seems to indicate that American education is failing even by its own limited standards. Given America’s disproportionate appetite for the world’s resources and its institutional violence in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, American education also seems to be failing by the more exacting standards of human morality.

Commenting on America’s usual educational concerns, David Orr offered a fresh perspective: “In contrast,” he wrote, “… I worry that we will compete all too effectively on an Earth already seriously overstressed…” While pundits and politicians, who have full access to the megaphone of the media, lament our literacy and math scores, the deeper underlying educational values go unnoticed.

What we teach (math, science, competition, and success), how we educate (teaching to the exam, sitting quietly behind desks for hours on end), and who benefits from our educational system reflect the human predicament and the culture of collapse. This is not accident. For, as Jeremy Rifkin observed, “Our ideas about education invariably flow from our perception of reality and our conception of nature—especially our assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey. Those assumptions become institutionalized in our education process. What we really teach, at any given time, is the consciousness of our era.”

And what we have been teaching each other and what we have institutionalized in our schools, churches, and media is the uniqueness and superiority of humans over all other creatures; the single-minded pursuit of wealth, status, and consumption; and the competitive nature of humans and society.

And yet, even with all this supposed dignity of the human, the public education system teaches students to be little more than worker-bees in the beehive, to be productive, single-minded laborers who dutifully play their appropriate role in society. Once educated to take on his role, a person spends much of his life in the service of some minutely specialized job. In order for the society to replicate itself through the generations and to continue benefiting the few, education becomes, as the Christian mystic Thomas Merton understood, the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.”

One becomes educated, observes Thomas Berry (theologian and Earth scholar), to find her fit in the vast human-centric economy, to become the proverbial cog somewhere within this machine, “whether in the acquisition of processing of raw materials, manufacturing, distributing the product in a commercially profitable manner, managing the process or the finances, or finally, spending the net earnings in acquisition and enjoyment of possessions.”

Whether one uses her hands or her mind, an American can easily spend two-thirds of her non-sleep hours involved in some aspect of her employment. Besides the eight-hour workday, many Americans work extra hours and extra jobs and commute to work, prepare their meals for work, buy and clean their work clothes and equipment, take courses to keep up with their field or to prepare for advancement, and otherwise spend their “free time” supporting themselves for their work-hour existence.

This is not to say that a person may not enjoy these pursuits or find fulfillment in them. It does however serve to question whether time otherwise spent may not ultimately be more rewarding to oneself and to others. For the rest of one’s waking hours, the wages earned are spent in the consumption of material and entertainment. The other dimensions essential to a healthy, happy, and fulfilled life are, for many, either neglected or channeled through this narrow funnel of existence. The daily nonwork-related activities—such as time outdoors, active citizenship, relaxation, socializing, pursuit of hobbies and avocations, and psycho-spiritual practices such as meditation, prayer, and unpaid service to others—are left for the annual two-week vacation and one’s last years of retirement, when one finally allows himself to follow his bliss.

This is the sad existential state of this paradigm’s winners. The losers are even worse off, dealing with the physical and psycho-spiritual damage of hunger, disease, and the vulnerabilities of living in unstable societies.

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[i] “Race to the Top” was an a 4.35 billion-dollar contest created by the Department of Education under the Obama administration.

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