Stop to learn from the flowers: why we need slow pedagogies in a time of neoliberal education

Schools – and I’m talking about K-12 and higher education – are organized to teach productivity skills and others that are valuable to employers and corporations. There’s a misunderstanding in our society about what education is for, one that education scholars have been calling out for several decades. We hear that schools need to prepare kids to compete in the ‘global labour market’, to get them ‘job ready’, and to develop the (hard and soft) skills for a 21^st century worker. But why?

Currently, children are raised in a web of consumerism, where buying new things routinely (and too often) is normalized. Think about how normal it is to buy a new backpack and set of school supplies every year, regardless of the state of last year’s. Or how school lunches are expected to be packed: either hyper-processed and packaged food or whole foods neatly packed in brand new bento boxes or reusable silicone zip-bags (that are rebought each year to fit a new ‘sustainable’ aesthetic). Consumerism has been targeting children for decades, and this targeting has become more sophisticated with their earlier and earlier exposure to algorithm-driven social media feeds.

The harms of advertising to children to groom them into loyal consumers of multinational corporations is well documented. While normalizing on-demand consumption, it’s easy to leave no room for thinking about the harms embedded in those supply chains to people and landscapes. We impart a sense of urgency, of ever-accelerating speed and growth—everything must be faster, better, bigger. We are expected to constantly improve—optimize our fitness, track our sleep, quantify our time and relationships.

This “productivism” is embedded in our economic ideology too. Economic growth has been pushed as a societal goal in and of itself for decades, with GDP becoming a measure of “progress”, despite the fact that it was never meant to do this, and that after a certain point (which many wealthy countries have long since passed), it doesn’t improve wellbeing, health or happiness.

Our education systems prioritize teaching us, in explicit and subtle ways, to link our value to what and how much we can produce (think about how grades tie our value to how well we perform on certain tasks – speaking as a recovering straight-A student, it’s not healthy!). Why are we teaching our kids that their worth is tied to how much they produce and how well they sell themselves? We should be teaching them to be active citizens who revitalize our public spaces and strengthen our communities, who build their own capacities for change, and who are able to learn about the world with a critical lens.

They become actors who internalize capitalist ideas of productivity, individualism, private property, and a human-nature dichotomy, equating economic growth ideology with human progress – not to mention class, racial and gender inequalities. We’ve become so scared of anything “public” or having anything “in common” with others (unless it’s following the same channels, shopping for the same brands or consuming the same media).

Education scholars are calling for education to be more than it has been: to be more active in preparing young people for an era of uncertainty, ecological collapse, and social polarization. There are bigger questions for youth to grapple with than choosing a career (which, for a lot of teenagers, seems pretty frivolous amid a looming recession, increasing climate disruption and AI overhauling so many industries). We’re preparing them for a future that no longer exists in many meaningful ways. I would argue that we need to be cultivating deep connections over wide connections (which social media has given us) in students, to counter the growing sense of global chaos.

While global connections remain important, deep human connection has steadily eroded—from the rise of neoliberalism in the 70s to globalization in the 90s, and now, the shallow engagement of social media and surveillance capitalism. Youth are feeling nihilistic and hollowed out by a culture of addiction; they need human-scale connection. Most don’t have this outside of school with peers - and even then, their behaviour is highly regulated, and they don’t interact with other people of different age groups. Children and youth (and adults!) need human-scale connection to people and place – a slow contemplation – to understand the world, their place in it and their capacity to transform cultural norms and harmful systems.

Place-based education is one approach that has had some success in this regard. While it is a field of education that is full of variation – necessarily, because it’s rooted in place and therefore looks different in different places – it contextualizes what and how students are learning in the place where they actually live: their school, their neighbourhood, their municipality, their bioregion. Learning starts from lived experience and is shaped by the culture and history of place, through community learning that students can experience with their own senses, embedded in what is familiar to them.

Place-based education can also develop practical skills needed to improve individual and community wellbeing through sufficiency-oriented practices that counter the soul-eroding influence of a hyper-consumerist, disposable culture. These are the hard and soft skills actually needed for a degrowth transition (by design or by disaster), and for the 21^st century generally. Ecological literacy, cooperation and deliberation (i.e. practicing democracy at a human-scale), combating misinformation and using what we already have in new ways, are some of these skills.

More critical versions of place-based education are inspired by Paulo Freire’s approach that starts with the students themselves and their own legitimate knowledge. How are students experiencing their neighbourhood? What do they know and what do they not know about it based on their lived experiences? What do they know and what do they not know about the material objects in their lives? By starting with the assumption that children and youth have valid and important knowledge about their community, we can empower them to generate knowledge among themselves, in conversation with adults and other community members.

We have to stop actively teaching and passively normalizing productivism, consumerism and individualism both through education and through all those casual ways we teach children to view the world in this narrow and destructive way. Instead, we need to value being intentional, thinking through the roots and consequences of our decisions, recognizing the sheer amount of life in other people, animals and plants around us, and inhabiting place.

What is education for? That’s a question that education scholar David Orr asked in the 90s. The responses to this question have, of course, shifted since the 90’s (hell, since the early 2020’s). I would argue that now, with so much uncertainty, grief and anxiety about the future, and while witnessing public belief in business-as-usual state and corporate governance unravel, education is a site where we can learn together how to recreate community with our fellow humans (including reconciliation and decolonization with local Indigenous Peoples) and with the ecosystems that we inhabit. Connections based on camaraderie, neighbourliness and knowledge of place have been evaporating and replaced with shallow duplicates. As adrienne maree brown says in her fabulous book, Emergent Strategy, maybe we should be paying attention to building critical connections, not critical (and often superficial) masses, to get us through this.

Photo credit: Shinya Tsuno