123. School destroys the planet

123. School destroys the planet

Our conventional educational institutions are defunct and bereft of understanding in responding to our present planetary crisis. O’Sullivan p7

School has a major impact on the planet. There are direct effects, through resource usage and waste production. There are indirect effects that play out through policies designed to promote excessive consumption beyond the means of our one planet.

Resource UsageSchools are great consumers of paper. Entire rainforests fall to provide exercise books, textbooks, letters home, the million and one forms teachers have to fill out, Ofsted reports and examinations. The belief that if it is not written down it doesn’t exist, and hasn’t happened, fuels the excessive paper consumption. Writing down, as an alternative to learning, eats up trees at an alarming rate.

Hand in hand with excessive consumption goes waste production, including throw-away kids for our disposable society. Illich argued that: “school gives unlimited opportunity for legitimating waste” (Illich p5) Along with the waste polluting the air and water, we need to add the waste of time, of lives of opportunities to connect to the natural world.

The energy required to run a school, the bell on automatic throughout the holidays, the computers left on, the lights, the heat on when it’s hot, the air conditioning, because windows don’t open, the power required for CCTV and the fingerprint identification. When this occurs at thousands of schools across the land and hundreds of thousands worldwide we are talking about an enormous carbon boot-print.

The energy usage and pollution production of the school run is important here. A survey in 2006 by Traffic Master showed that some journey times during morning rush hour more than doubled during term time. (Manchester evening News 11/12/06 “Congestion chaos caused by school run”) School holidays reduced traffic on the roads by roughly 10%. We need to add in the extra fuel consumption by other cars stuck in the traffic jams. Pickup time from schools, particularly primary schools, creates an additional rush hour and extra congestion, as well as consuming petrol and polluting the air.

Where I live, there is a ‘triangle’, where pollutant levels of particulates frequently exceed recommended levels. In that triangle are four primary schools, where many children are dropped and picked up by car. The increased pollutants in the air are not considered to be a problem for the children whose schools fall in this hotspot, nor is it considered that reducing the car journeys to school may address this.


The school building programme referred to in the previous section is not only hugely expensive it has environmental implications too. Use of environmentally damaging resources, especially for buildings with a short expected lifespan, creates glossy monstrosities that have damaging legacies. The maintenance requirements of modern buildings are high and the materials used are often from non-renewable sources, polluting during production, during disposal, and during use.

The direct damage done by school is only a small part of the picture. The real damage is done by separation from the natural world, (see separation) by a curriculum which fails to address planetary survival, and by indoctrination into a system that has excessive consumption as a highly prized goal. All of these threaten the survival of us all.

Education policy is shaped by globalisation. (O’Sullivan) The jargon goes “Schools must prepare new learners to be competitive in the new global economic community. There are no questions asked on the planetary sustainability of this direction.” (O’Sullivan)
In school, young minds are fed the idea that we have a right or even a duty to consume excessively to keep our economy afloat even if we go into debt to do it. The global economic downturn, caused by financial systems built on sand suddenly caving in, and bringing recession, seems to evoke panic in politicians, urging people to borrow and spend our way out of it rather than seeing this as the death throes of an unsustainable system. The competitive marketplace has been shown by these latest events to be a wholly destructive force, not only for financial systems, but the planet as a whole. It seems to legitimise putting enormous national resources into a corrupt banking system while they are losing sight of this wonderful chance to bury capitalism and replace it with something much more humane and sustainable. When faced with the imminent destruction of the planet there is no comparable mobilisation.
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Questions on the money-management part of PHSE encourage borrowing to get it now rather than saving to get it later even when borrowers pay more, and savers gain more generally.

Young minds are being shaped by the education they receive to look out for number one, to compete for a bigger share of resources and to measure success in terms of evidence of conspicuous consumption. None of this is sustainable. By accepting an industrial and commercial order that has exploitation of the natural world for human consumption at its centre, we are indoctrinating our children into their own demise. (O’Sullivan p45), but that is not on the curriculum.

O’Sullivan tells us that “the fundamental educational path of our times is to make the choice for a sustainable global planetary habitat of interdependent life forms over and against the global competitive marketplace” (O’Sullivan p45) .The silence of educators on environmental matters makes them complicit.

What is the point of learning lots of disconnected facts to get pieces of paper, while adults destroy the world children must inhabit? Gatto tells us that: “School is a distraction, while the world is destroyed” (JTG DUD). He argues that school fuels runaway consumption that threatens the earth, the air, the water of our planet. (JTG DuD)
But school is more than a distraction. It embroils our children in a melee of assumptions about man’s right to exploit the natural resources of the planet. By destroying the ability to question, these assumptions become accepted as true.

The curriculum, from reductionist science to the promotion of the Western world view as objective and true, acts to legitimise planetary destruction. This indoctrination is taken as OK. Any other views are dismissed. It was ironic to find a lorry driver, Stewart Dimmock, in a successful legal fight to prevent Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” being shown in all secondary schools as it was “indoctrination” (Metro 28/9/07 p9 “Gore’s truth misleads, school’s DVD case told” Rosss McGuiness) His claim of indoctrination is farcical. Kids are being indoctrinated in every aspect of the curriculum and the hidden curriculum to devote their lives to the destruction of the planet that sustains us, to live in denial and to believe that the scientists will solve it all. So we need not worry or do anything and just keep consuming. George Monbiot once said that if people are given a choice between planetary survival or a new set of tableware that most people would choose the tableware. (Guardian 2/12/03) What sort of indoctrination makes such choices possible? Such non-choices for a future?

Being able to make realistic choices that might enable us to survive needs people to sort through outdated concepts to see which are relevant and which are not. (TAASA) Schooling locks children into conserving old ideas, concepts, attitudes, skills and perceptions, which are not only no longer relevant but positively harmful.
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Ronald Wright pointed out in 2004 that if civilisation is to survive it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers indicated that in the early 1960s humans were using 70% of nature’s yearly output. By early 1980s it was 100%. In 1999 we were at 125 %.(“A Short history of progress” cited in www.21learn.org/slideshow/packets/2008/january/21-Manchester.pdf)

We can only continue to live this way at all, if we are in denial about the impact our lifestyle and privilege has on our future survival. O’Sullivan tells us that it is Northern hemispheric privilege that is the single most important threat to planetary survival. (O’Sullivan p129) We in the privileged North are in denial that anything is amiss. Our schools do nothing to counter this and make it worse by teaching that reinforces privilege and the right to consume “despite the devastating effects on the planet and other people and species” (O’Sullivan p131)

There is intense opposition to presenting this full reality to anyone. Our educational and other establishments have become subservient to industrial culture. (Universal Story)

In January 2008, a Radio four “Profile” programme (26/1/08) featured the head of the Federal reserve in the USA, who had just announced an unprecedented interest rate cut to stabilise global markets. (Well that worked, didn’t it?) In it, this highly intelligent, Harvard educated economic professor’s acceptance speech said he would do his best for the American economy. This man, brain the size of a planet, can’t think of the best for the planet or see that the American economy is a huge part of the problem when it comes to planetary survival. That knowledge is readily available yet his brain is so full of money and statistics he is unable to see the consequences for us all of “American economy first, f*** the rest of the world” or to see that this will eventually f*** America too.

The educated elite live in denial, because it is the only way they can maintain and justify their privilege. To move to a conscious awareness there has to be a moving away from denial. “This comes when there is a connection made between the global economy’s workings, and the environmental and social devastation that seems to accompany its presence anywhere”. (O’Sullivan p35)


Poorer CountriesThe devastation seems more apparent and more desperate in poorer countries. Places with more fragile ecosystems show us that the whole planet’s ecosystem is, in fact, fragile. It is in these countries that the exported Western education system does the most harm. Where people have lived in stewardship and harmony with their local environment, have gained enormous knowledge of the ways of their forest, their semi-arid land, their peculiar habitats and multi-species communities, all that is threatened by formal schooling that destroys traditional pathways of passing on this knowledge. (Aikman)
123. planet p4Ngugi wa thiong’o shows how capitalism and a school curriculum-based on it is destructive. “Capitalism and the development of science and technology introduced the possibility of conquest of nature: capitalism by uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources ensures a virtual dominance of nature over man by way of drought and desertification”, and now global warming. (Ngugi p66)

By indoctrination into the ways of the West, schools in poorer countries pave the way to their own destruction. Aikman talks of Arakmbut women in Amazonia fighting for the right to not send their children to residential secondary schools run by Dominicans where they are trained to grow non-indigenous plants for cash crops and to exploit and destroy the forest. (Aikman)

So who benefits? McDonald’s, when local people collude in their own demise by not opposing forest clearance to graze cattle for our burgers. The schooled see the ‘benefits‘. The unschooled are dismissed as ignorant and against progress. Big businesses gain when stewardship ties are broken so they can extract and destroy natural resources and habitats to make a quick buck.

Vandana Shiva said that we should not talk of ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ nations but of waste-producing or waste-avoiding societies. The schooled move towards more production of waste, and more justifying that waste. By exporting Western schools and capitalist ideas we make the whole world into a waste-making machine. We in the West are also exporting our waste to poorer countries.

The destruction of fragile habitats, indigenous cultures, and the knowledge we all need to survive, is happening at an ever increasing pace. None of this features in a curriculum except as an occasional add on. Get your GCSE in geography, but don’t question the melting ice caps and mass deforestation. Get your A-level in sociology so long as you don’t criticise capitalism. Get your exams in science, and believe the lies they tell you. Along with it all believe that we are worth what someone is prepared to pay us.


Thomas Berry tells us that “Life requires something beyond mechanism, something beyond commercial worth; life requires inspiration and presence and beauty and caring and community” (Quoted in introduction to O’Sullivan) (Maybe this goes here or at the end of ends and means)

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