What Is Education For?
Six myths about the foundations of modern education,
and six new principles to replace them
by David Orr
One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27)
Winter 1991, Page 52
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute
We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental
educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a
monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class
of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such
speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.
David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center
in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from
Ocean Arks International’s excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2,
1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or
about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a
result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and
no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will
The Essay on Education In America 3
Education is a hot topic in the news and for most American citizens. They are preoccupied with the level of education their loved one are receiving. With the deficit being the cornerstone of much of government funding, agencies are feeling the cutbacks, and education is no exception. States have made steep cuts to education funding since the start of the recession. In many states, those cuts ...
increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the
atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its
waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in
dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the
beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.
It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the
result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a
similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers
and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the
Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an
adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words:
“It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction
rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather
than conscience.” The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the
natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived
sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not
make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency,
prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our
problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of
education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival –
the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not
education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.
SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS
What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight
in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power;
The Term Paper on Education For The Diginity Of Human Life
Education, if looked at beyond its conventional boundaries, forms the very essence of all our actions. What we do is what we know and have learned, either through instructions or through observation and assimilation. When we are not making an effort to learn, our mind is always processing new information or trying to analyze the similarities as well as the tiny nuances within the context which ...
Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation;
Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says “All my means are sane, my motive and
object mad.” In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to
dominate nature.
Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows
the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has
wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows the
dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and
wholeness. And in Descartes’ epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation
of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education,
foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me
suggest six.
First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable
problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of
knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after
Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial
ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the
biosphere. No one thought to ask “what does this substance do to what?” until the early
1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide.
With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an
expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.
A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet
Earth.. “Managing the planet” has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with
digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life
systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still
largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.
The Homework on High School College People Myth
There are many rumors that get passed around and leave people the wrong impression about college. High school students may get the idea that college is all part of one big party. It can be, but you won't be there for too long. In order to pass your classes you need to study. If you " re partying all the time you can't study. Which leads to another myth, you can ditch class, not listen, and not do ...
What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But
our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a
finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.
A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There
is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words,
and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and
wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some
knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld
has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as
systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost
because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which
are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science
of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.
It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as
well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of
Barry Lopez:
“[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year
by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural
populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this loss of personal and local
knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on
which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think
sinister and unsettling.”
In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us
better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and “In itself it will
never make us ethical [people].” Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is
The Essay on Knowledge vs Education
There is not much difference between knowledge and education as both are correlated to each other. In fact one leads to another. The primary difference between the two is that education is formal process whereas knowledge is informal experience. Education is acquired through the formal institutions like school, colleges and universities, whereas knowledge is gained from the real life experiences. ...
most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we
are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on
the Earth.
A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have
dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces
called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education,
most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The
consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely
produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains
why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment,
soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national
product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to
subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete
education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.
Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for
upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and
completely artificial charade.” When asked to write about his own success, Merton
responded by saying that “if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a
pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do
the same again.” His advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks,
and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does
desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every
shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral
The Term Paper on Higher Education Students University Universities
There have been many developments in higher education since 1992, including the rapid increase in student numbers, the introduction of tuition fees and the choice to study in different ways. These new options have been made available through new courses such as General National Vocational Qualifications (G NVQs) and the expansion of the Internet. This essay will discuss how these changes have come ...
courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these
needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.
Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement:
we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural
arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently
this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism
over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too
high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little,
also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic
morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy
world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a
world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its
worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most
desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words
of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:
“Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not
cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage
gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the
economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is
loving and life-affirming in the human soul.”
WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR
Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let
me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach
students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for
example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach
The Research paper on Ability Tracking Introduction Students Education School
If there Ability Tracking Introduction If there is one general consensus among those who analyze America's system of education, it is that we are lacking somewhere. Whether it's in our inner-city schools, or rural districts, there is a distinct literacy dilemma that has yet to be resolved in our schools. Not only are we gravely behind other nations in our literacy rate and mathematics abilities, ...
a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do
with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of
the curriculum. A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is
not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool.
Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas
and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood. For the most part we labor under a
confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of
facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student’s mind, regardless of how
and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.
Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that
it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear
resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its
byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take
responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The
Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for
which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I
think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far
outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to
say safely and to consistently good purposes.
Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this
knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio,
which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to “disinvest” in the economy of the
region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and
capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American
city with total impunity on behalf of something called the “bottom line.” But the bottom
line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates,
alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught
in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good
communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued
efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.
My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the
importance of “minute particulars” and the power of examples over words. Students hear
about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their
financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of
hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they
are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is
desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity,
care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and
completely in all of their operations.
Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the
content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture
courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only
occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the “real
world.” Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often
reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that
students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I
would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a
campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four
years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in
Wendell Berry’s words, “itinerant professional vandals”? Does this college contribute to
the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the
processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water,
materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms,
feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your
waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this
institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon
dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use
of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and
provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven
into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No
student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and
without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.
Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez
principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can
some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of
a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No
student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic
comprehension of:
• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that “they are only cogs in
an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental
wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it
will ultimately grind them to dust.” Leopold asked: “If education does not teach us these
things, then what is education for?”
