Conscious Choice: Tomorrow's Children

September 2000 | Choice Books

Tomorrow's Children

by Mark Harris

"When I think of the school of the future, I see a place of adventure, magic, and excitement, a place that, generation after generation, adults will remember from their youth with pleasure, and continue to participate in to ensure that all children learn to live rich, caring, and fulfilling lives. An atmosphere of celebration will make coming to this school a privilege rather than a chore. It will be a safe place, physically safe, and emotionally safe, a place to express and share feelings and ideas, to create and to enjoy, a place where the human spirit will be nurtured and grow, where spiritual courage will be modeled and rewarded." — Riane Eisler

A few months ago I called up my English teacher from high school. It had been many years since the days of Mr. Hible’s sixth-period class my junior year at Glen Ellyn’s Glenbard West High School. Mr. Hible was a soft-spoken, thoughtful, and funny man. He was also my favorite teacher. No small compliment coming from someone who later chose college electives based on an instructor’s reputation for not caring if you only showed up in class once a week. Admittedly, after so many years my old teacher didn’t immediately recall who I was. But that’s okay. I certainly remembered him.

An hour in Mr. Hible’s class was an hour in making connections, between language, society, and history, and between our own personal lives and the world at large. Mostly, I remember a teacher who had that intuitive knack for relating to young people. In sixth period we discovered that our opinions counted, and I think most of us left that class feeling just a little stronger about ourselves. For at least that one hour, we became active partners in a learning experience that was as enjoyable as it was relevant.

In a sense, Riane Eisler’s new book, Tomorrow’s Children (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 2000, 362 pages, $25/hardcover), is about infusing that intuitive knack for relating into the entire educational system. As she is in all her books, Eisler is concerned here with the vast potential and possibility of human beings to transform their lives and their culture. As such, Tomorrow’s Children transcends the relative superficiality of much of the contemporary debate over education reform. This is a not a book about whether school vouchers are preferable to increased funding for public education... .

Rather, the noted author of The Chalice and the Blade (Harper & Row, 1987) draws on her earlier scholarship as a cultural anthropologist and historian to call for a thorough restructuring of American education. Accordingly, Tomorrow’s Children offers a thoughtful dissection of our most basic assumptions about education, in terms that go to the root of the process, content, and structure of how we educate our children. Beyond this, it offers a holistic vision of what education can and should be, with a wealth of practical ideas for implementing this vision.

Stanford University professor of education Nel Noddings remarks in her foreword that much of the current discussion about educational reform is limited to how to make the current system more fair, rather than less competitive. "Although it is clearly impossible," says Noddings, "many policy makers seem to want everyone to have a fair chance at beating everyone else in a competition for the good life construed materially." Eisler rejects such a model, with its emphasis on competition, control, and standardization, articulating instead a vision of learning based on what she describes as the partnership model of education.

If you’re wondering what exactly a "partnership school" entails, imagine a classroom where imparting values of mutual responsibility, empathy, and caring are considered as basic to learning as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Or where curriculum, leadership, and decision making are gender balanced rather than male centered; where the teacher is no longer the sole source of information and knowledge, but the experience of both students and teacher are all valued. Imagine a school where the multicultural reality of life is embraced as more than an add-on (e.g., Women’s History Month) to an otherwise elitist or patriarchal system. And, where students may be actively involved in setting policies and designing curriculum, as they do at Seattle’s public Nova school, one of the nation’s first partnership high schools.

A False Picture of Humanness

In my opinion, Eisler is a revolutionary thinker in the best sense of the word, and her concern in Tomorrow’s Children is with the capacity of education to become more a tool of social transformation than a continuing gird of the status quo. Accordingly, she doesn’t mince words in her critique of what is wrong with this status quo.

"Children are being given a false picture of what it means to be human," she declares. "We tell them to be good and kind, nonviolent and giving. But on all sides they see media images and hear and read stories that portray us as bad, cruel, violent, and selfish. In the mass media, the focus of both action entertainment and news is on hurting and killing. Talk shows capitalize on human suffering. Situation comedies make insensitivity, rudeness, and cruelty seem funny. Even children’s cartoons incessantly present violence as not only exciting and funny, but also without real consequences."

Even when public discourse about morality takes place, it often remains angry and vitriolic in tone, she notes, focused on retribution or punishment rather than more redemptive solutions. Undeniably, the education system contributes to this "distorted mirror" of what it means to be human. This doesn’t mean that many teachers, especially in younger grades, don’t try to impart such values as caring, sharing, and honesty. They do. In its broader configurations, however, the structure and curriculum of American education remains rooted in archaic or oppressive values, or what Eisler describes as "the dominator model of social relations."

Fundamentally, these are values and perspectives that define power in terms of control over others. The dominator model highlights "great leaders" in history or glorifies the "heroic" violence and sanctity of war, all the while reinforcing the implicit lesson that such a contentious world is inevitable because, well, it’s just our nature to be selfish and violent. Meanwhile, young people learn about their nation’s role in world events through the self-serving lens of the elitists who historically have shaped foreign policy, while the role of ordinary people in making history is downplayed. As for lessons in civic society, they often reduce notions of democracy to some sort of benignly top-down version of the modern corporation.

Eisler will argue that breaking free of the dominator mind-set begins with learning to make new connections in our thinking, not only in how we understand our own personal lives but the broader society as well. Accordingly, the partnership curriculum as described in Tomorrow’s Children offers a "whole-systems" approach conducive to this kind of learning, encouraging students to explore links between issues they might not otherwise make. One of the most valuable aspects of this fascinating book is that it makes it possible for us to connect the dots — and even to see dots where we are told there are none.

A Vision of New Human Possibilities

I imagine in this age of Better Living Through Ritalin and metal-detector high schools, Eisler’s notion that the schools could actually serve as true "communities of learning" still will be viewed by some self-styled apostles of educational pragmatism (i.e., the cynics) as liberal, out-of-touch do-goodism. But such thinking would be seriously flawed.

First, the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), based in Tucson, Arizona (www.partnershipway.org), has been developing several partnership education programs in collaboration with school systems around the country. Tomorrow’s Children describes many of these programs, and the results deserve the attention of educators. The center’s Partnership Education Consultants program offers assistance to schools and home schoolers to adopt partnership education to their particular needs. And a scattering of universities, such as California State University-Monterey Bay, Prescott College in Arizona, and the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, are also starting to offer degree or continuing education programs in partnership studies.

But Riane Eisler is also nothing if not versed in the harsher realities of the world. She has not forgotten the day when the Gestapo came to her house in Vienna and hauled her father away. She was seven years old. Neither has she forgotten her mother’s heroism in confronting the Nazi abductors, somehow incredibly rescuing her father. Nor the extended family she lost forever to the madness of the Holocaust. Nor the challenges that faced a young girl growing up as a refugee in faraway Cuba. These experiences no doubt inform her lifelong convictions about social justice and human liberation.

Of course, Eisler’s cultural and social vision is informed by more than an honest, empathic sensibility at what she has personally seen and experienced. In The Chalice and the Blade she marshaled a formidable treasure of scholarly evidence to debunk the notion that violence and social oppression are somehow endemic to human nature. With care and precision, she detailed how some early human societies (e.g., Minoan culture of the Neolithic era) were defined by their peacefulness, their sexual equality, their creativity, and their progressive technology.

In this way she opened the door to a new vision of human possibilities, one based on an understanding that if human beings had once lived in more peaceful ways, then perhaps it is in our nature to do so again. In Tomorrow’s Children, she turns the lens of her liberating vision to the ways we educate our children. The results are both thoughtful and provocative. Tomorrow’s Children is a blueprint not only for the new education urgently needed for today’s and tomorrow’s children but for the transformation of consciousness that can take us into a safer, saner, more humane and fulfilling twenty-first century.

Obviously, it is hardly a news flash that our educational system mirrors the competitive jungle of our economy — or that the inequities of society are replicated in the school system. But what I think is worth hearing is that things can change. Tomorrow’s Children represents an important contribution toward a new way of educating children. And, I hope, toward that new day when little girls no longer have to witness their fathers being hauled away, nor flee for their lives because they were born into the "wrong" religion — a day when all of us will have learned to live in reverence to the beautiful, creative tapestry of this life, no matter our race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, or sexual orientation.

Tomorrow’s Children (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 2000, 362 pages, $25/hardcover)

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: