David Orr's article "What Is Education For?" on education for sustainability

David Orr, a Yank celebrity educator specializing in sustainability delivered the following talk as a opening address for a grad ceremony at Arkansas College in 1990:
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC27/Orr.htm

He starts by pointing out that our environment is all but cattle-trucked & the folk to blame are by-and-large well educated. His essay argues that there must be something wrong with our ideas of education to land us in this solid mess.
Fair enough.
Orr sets out a few punters he reckons shaped modern Western thinking; Frank Bacon, Galileo & Descartes. Thier ideas are all about humans dominating nature & that attitude is at the foundation of our governments, businesses & knowledge. That attitude got us to the moon but landed us in a growing pile of shit downstairs on Earth.
Orr structures his arguments for the failure of education by listing six myths & expanding them. Numbering things off like that makes him sound like the man that knows - set up those ten pins & then bowl them over. Good strategy for a celeb talk.

1. ignorance is a solvable problem
2. with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth
3. knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness
4. we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled
5. the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success
6. our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement

The gist of these points is that our education does not convey a wholistic sense of knowledge & the specificity that gives us technology, vocation & a shot at wealth leads us to lose touch with the health of the Earth.

Orr makes another goddam list of six principles that may redeem education.

1. all education is environmental education
2. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person
3. knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world
4. we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities
5. the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words
6. the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses

The argument here is that environmental sustainability must be embedded in education from the get-go by emphasising a wholistic understanding of the relationships between environment, civilization, & morality. Furthermore all educators & educational centres should be role-models of the above.

Tough call
Sounds like us educators need to be old & wise in a whole hell of a hurry.
Sounds like we collectively need to know more about most things before we can become specialists.
Sounds like education ought to take more time & cost us less.
I'd like to think that I currently embed points 2,3,5 & 6 in my practice as an educator. I'm here because I'd like to improve on point 1. Point 4 ought to be implicit if all the other conditions are being met. Understanding how knowledge affects real people in the community would be a mission to measure; an awareness about the ethics of a relationship between self & community might be more realistic.

'UUUUUUUUUCK!
He finishes off with, count-'em-up, four proposals for the good graduates of Arkansas:

1. I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators
2. examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste
3. reexamaine how your endowment works
4. set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students

A bit like take yourselves into the hall of mirrors & have a long hard look at yourselves. Of course you'll see that David W. Orr is by all counts a winner.