CONNECTING THE DOTS
The way we educate children lies at the heart of our culture, our economy, our ecology – our schools both mirror our society and reliably reproduce it into the future. Schools as we know them today are generating a world with vast extremes of wealth and poverty, a world with a devastating impact on natural ecosystems, a world in which family breakdown and individual psychological distress are epidemic. Yet very few people question whether these same schools are the ideal vehicle for solving the problems that we face. Some of the videos below show us what we can learn from other cultures’ ways of learning about and understanding the world; others show us the ways our current school system is failing to support the creativity and diversity we will need to face the challenges of the 21st century. We encourage you to watch the videos together and connect the dots for yourself: how can we re-imagine learning and culture in a way that supports individual creativity, cultural diversity, economic justice, and a sustainable relationship to the environment?
Sir Ken Robinson asks: ”Do schools kill creativity?”
One of the most popular TED talks of all time, this 18-minute speech uses humor and insight into the myriad varieties of human intelligence to challenge the structure of schooling as we know it and the damage it does to our children and their innate brilliance.
A Thousand Suns
A production of the Global Oneness Project, this beautiful 27 minute film tells the story of the Gamo Highlands of the African Rift Valley and the unique worldview held by the people of the region. This isolated area has remained remarkably intact both biologically and culturally. It is one of the most densely populated rural regions of Africa yet its people have been farming sustainably for 10,000 years. Shot in Ethiopia, New York and Kenya, the film explores the modern world’s untenable sense of separation from and superiority over nature and how the interconnected worldview of the Gamo people is fundamental in achieving long-term sustainability, both in the region and beyond.
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
In this fascinating talk, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that Western culture has become strongly biased over the last 500 years toward the left-brain tendency to mechanical, manipulative, abstract, narrowly focused thinking and has lost the necessary balance with the right-brain capacity for intuition, compassion, and a broadly focused, holistic, contextualized understanding of a living world. Think about how this is reflected in our education system, where curricula are standardized into quantifiable fragments, children are measured and ranked numerically, learning is de-contextualized and abstracted from life. In imposing this system on other cultures, are we imposing our own loss of balance?
Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution
A follow-up to his previous talk, this speech calls for a revolution in the ways we think about human intelligence and in what we must do to foster its growth.
Edward Carr: Delivering Development
In this interview, Carr challenges current thinking about “development,” and tells how his work in Africa led him to realize that, “My understanding of what poverty meant was garbage…. We are fundamentally misunderstanding what’s happening for most people living in rural areas in the developing world.”
Wade Davis: The ethnosphere and why it matters for our survival
Davis makes a plea for human diversity and explains why it may be as important for survival of life on earth as biological diversity – although it is being destroyed at many times the rate.
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh
Part 1 of Helena Norberg-Hodge and John Page’s classic film about the impacts of development and globalization on the ancient sustainable culture of Ladakh.
See the rest of the film on YouTube, or buy the DVD on our resources page.