Crisis Education

As we ready for the new academic year, Gaskell’s portrayal of working class factory girls evokes something of the uninhibited joy of school kids homebound everywhere.

‘Groups of merry and somewhat loud-talking girls…came by with a buoyant step. They were most of them factory girls…The only thing to strike a passer-by was an acuteness and intelligence of countenance, which has often been noticed in a manufacturing population.” (Elizabeth Gaskell; Mary Barton)

But read critically we know that to only romanticise the Industrial Revolution, hinders the reality of the responsibility of industrialised anglicised nations for the climate crisis, the exploitation of the global south and poor and the seismic inequality within our own populace. How often do we frame education in the context of our world’s most pressing issues?

Do we, for example, interleave the teaching of Enslavement, Empire and the Industrial Revolution as Naomi Klein does as a “story that begins with people stolen from Africa and land stolen from indigenous peoples…so dizzying profitable that they generated the excess capital…to launch the fossil fuel-led industrial Revolution?”

What efforts have we taken to reassure our communities when a succession of crises - Grenfell, Brexit and the liberal train wreck of Trumpish-Boris politics exposes the flagrant disregard for poor and especially black and brown bodies in favour of fasci-nationalism and corporate greed? Not always even marginally well when I recall a school leader rejecting a call for an assembly addressing even the most benign call for peace and love.

Then there’s the climate crisis.

Where God nourishes, we destroy .

Where God provides, we withhold.

“And you devour the inheritance (of others) with devouring greed” (Qur’an 89:19)

To believe in Allah is to believe in all of His creation and the life cycles that connect us.

That climate change makes everything else obsolete includes the current education system. In climate protests world over, the young question the relevance of exams if the earth is going to combust with everything in it. Never mind the fact that millions of people have enough problems just finding food and shelter.

The Right continue to pursue narrow curricula for a depleted job market based on the exploitive models of resource depletion and unaccounted growth. While the upper and aspiring middle classes push for curriculum enrichment, traditional subjects and the most coveted university places - for a few.

On the Left we can learn from people centred pedagogies. What would communities look like if in reflecting Rabindranath Tagore’s Abode of Plenty; the village was enlisted to teach practical skills alongside the arts and literature? What would our students have to say to the world if following the Freinart Schools of the 60’s, schools could operate their own printing presses?

The next generation are not waiting around, nor can they afford to. The first climate education bill was drafted earlier this year by young activists from the Teach the Future movement. Still, some are turning away from the restrictions of current structures. I recall a student who at one time wanted to pursue politics go on to join a climate squatters movement. He outgrew us.

At the heart of Paulo Freire’s Education of the Oppressed is the belief that learning is liberation. If educators had the freedom to create collaborative pedagogical models, curricula would better engage students and be as relevant as their lives on social media. Perhaps then we could better equip students to support their communities and create more just futures for everyone.

N Abida Ali