public education – The LADA Diva

In February of 2016 I wrote a short comment on an article for the Environmental Politics class I was taking at Lane Community College. I have a couple hours before I head out to the gym with my friend, and then trivia at BeerGarden. I thought for my post today I would revise my original comment and add in some new perspectives I have concerning the role of education for making a sustainable society.

The article was titled ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying Math,’ written by Bill McKibbon, and it talks about the numbers that have become generally accepted as the limits imposed upon the use of fossilized fuels to prevent climate control failure, and why the fossil-fuel companies are allowed to get away with ignoring these numbers. Planet Earth has been scientifically assigned the official position of not being capable of temperatures rising more than two degrees Celsius without imminent catastrophe. We have already raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has already caused far more damage than most scientists originally expected.

Scientists estimate humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below the two degrees limit. The amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies is 2,795 gigatons, and it is this fuel which we, as a society, are currently planning to burn—a number fives times higher than 565.

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free because, until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. Our current economic system is controlled by the industries who directly profit from the special pollution break, supported by our politicians and government, which allows them the success of staying alive past the point of no return. The fight for our future survival will depend upon our collective ability as citizens to force the fossil-fuel industry to stop their destruction of our future as a species. In the economists’ parlance, we’ll make them internalize those externalities.

A strong point of the article was the explanation that big fossil-fuel companies’ willingness to fight for the prevention of regulations controlling the release of carbon-dioxide is because the reserves still technically in the ground are already economically aboveground—those reserves are the primary assets figured into share prices, the principle upon which companies are borrowing money against, and are the holdings that give the companies their value. But, given the afore-mentioned math, it becomes painfully clear that the planet has an enemy, a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth, that will indeed help to usher in a rapid, transformative change, because building a movement requires a good enemy.

I believe Public Education can be used as a strategy by which to usher in our transformation as a society. By teaching our children, and ourselves in the process, how to recognize the forces influencing our private and public spheres, we can learn how to regain control over our lives, and how to live in new ways that help to mitigate the damage already done. It is a time for emphasizing collaboration over competition, resolution over conflict, community over isolation, sustainability over disposability, and tolerance over fear.

Social Movements are how things in society get changed for the better. We have a long history of such movements proving the point. Learning how to create, build support for, and sustain a social movement for change is challenging in the extreme. So much so, in fact, that many movements fail as a result of a lack of awareness for what needed to be done next in order to succeed. Many people lose faith when they perceive the movement as having failed to create the change they worked so hard for. Social change is a process governed by a more glacial pace of time then most people usually encounter in their daily lives.

I want to teach children how to critically analyze Social Movements as a way to choose the cause they are willing to fight for, and then show them the direct and nonviolent strategies and tactics that are needed to succeed, as well as helping them to recognize what success looks like, and how to maintain their momentum and motivation for the long haul. We must become comfortable with the understanding that ‘success’ will not be seen in our lifetimes. But it is for those future lifetimes that we must begin to make sacrifices today. The younger an individual can begin to learn how to fight for survival, and how to WIN those fights, is a necessary component of an education for sustainability. And I do believe that the ultimate purpose of Public Education should be the continuation of the Public.

I believe it is appropriate, and necessary, for public education to have a desirable political socializing effect upon children, whereupon they learn how to become active citizens who not only know how to live well in the world and create changes for social and ecological justice, but who will think critically in dealing with unpredictable problems, as well as competently knowing how to communicate and share their thinking processes with others in a collective atmosphere.

Whew. I’m done for today. I have more thoughts on these ideas, but this is only the beginning. Hell. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what I believe, why I believe it, and what the hell I am doing about it (insomuch as I can). I’m going to work on tomorrow’s post until I’m finished with my bitter and then I’m headed home to catch my ride for tonight’s entertainment.

I hope all y’all have a wonderful evening as well during this year’s turkey week!

Day 7

I feel no doubt. I am not sad. The guilt is minimal and underwhelming. The anger no longer bubbles to the surface with ease. I regret not seeing my friends, and the awkward position my actions may have put them in.

But, I do not regret walking out of my job one week ago. It was the right choice. It was healthy, self-serving, liberating, and the most ethical choice I could make at the time. I conducted myself with dignity and integrity. Even though I knew my actions would cause harm I was never, at any moment, intent on hurting anyone. I don’t know if that makes a difference for anyone else, but I feel comfortable with my belief that it makes all the difference for me.

This blog has become my full-time job in the past seven days. I wake up in the morning, putz around the house or watch a movie, and then I go out into the world to sit among the public and write the post to be published for that day. I’m actually quite sick of this routine already. My posts this week have become erratic and rather pedantic for my taste. Each post has been a reaction to my action of walking away from the pool. I either sit at Townshend’s, Falling Sky, or The Wandering Goat typing my post for the day and publishing it immediately. This technique was helpful at first. It allowed me to spend the daylight hours of my first week being unemployed feeling as if I were accomplishing something significant. But, let’s be honest, that’s bullsh*t.

Being able to purge my thoughts and feelings into a post written and edited thirty seconds before publication was constructive because it helped to organize my thoughts into a narrative. I now have an idea of how my story should be told. I realized with my post last night that I want to put more thought and time into telling my story. I want to have more reflection upon all the interconnected elements of my experience as I write about them. I want to decrease the amount of reactive emotion being incorporated in my writing, and instead learn to focus my storytelling on the issues of disability discrimination, gender, race, sexual harassment, hostile work environments, obsolete administrative structures, effective communication, retaliation, rampant rumormongering, and the harmful damage caused by the process of labeling others as ‘different.’ These are the issues that I struggled to learn how to recognize within my experiences at the pool, but they are not the only issues I am concerned with in our society.

A decade of living with diabetes, instead of building a career in education, has given me the unprecedented ability to step back from everything I know about our society, and truly begin to understand what it is I want to educate our young about how to survive within our society. Survival for the human species, and planet Earth, will depend upon a shift in global attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. If we continue to live the way we are currently, then we will kill all life as we know to exist. I want to teach kids how to change their world by modeling for them how I change my world everyday. They will need to deeply understand the concepts of community resilience, local government, sustainability, reduction of consumption, a renewable energy-based economy, collaberation and cooperation, as well as conflict resolution skills, which are all woefully neglected within the pedagogy and currriculum of our nation’s public education system. I want to use public education as a vehicle for helping students to create a global community built upon the values of self-sacrifice, stewardship, and civic duty.

These ideas are too big for me to write about while drinking a pint, or three, of beer at the deli. So, this is my last post to be written in public and published immediately. I had an image in my mind of writing everyday and telling my story in pieces, but the strain of keeping my thoughts flowing in a linear stream to make each post directly connect to the next is not working for me. Instead, my story is simply going to come out in random chunks. Each day will still be met with a published post, but each post will no longer be an attempt to tell my narrative in a linear fashion. I will be jumping from chapter to chapter of my life, telling the stories I have accumulated over the years of experience I have lived through.

My plan (for now) is to label each relevant story under the category of either Education, Diabetes, or Pool. That way, those interested in reading my stories can choose which narrative to follow. I think this may work. I have high hopes. *shrug*

Otherwise, my daily posts are going to be random stories from over the years that may actually have nothing to do with my disease, my time at the pool, or my convictions about public education (I have climbing stories up the wazoo!). The only thing connecting all the various narratives will be the simple fact they all happened to me at some point in my life. That is, after all, what this blog is ultimately about: me.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blatherings. I appreciate the support and love your action of reading provides me!

The LADA Diva

Tag: public education

Intro to Public Education

PauseBreatheReflect