I was backstage, fidgeting with my five small note cards, thinking over the key points I wanted to emphasize in my talk. I peeked through the curtain and saw 1,600 high school teachers and state and federal education officials sitting in the audience—and not just any teachers, Advanced Placement teachers, the best high school teachers in America and the ones responsible for preparing the brightest students for college.
It was the annual conference of the College Board, the organization that oversees SAT testing—the standardized test that millions of American high school students must take if their plans include higher education.
Gaston Caperton, the former governor of West Virginia and current president of the College Board, had asked me to deliver the keynote address to the gathering. His only instruction: “Shake them up! Take them into the future. Challenge them to rethink the mission of American education in a globalizing world.”
Easily said. But I wasn’t sure how the teachers would react if I told them what I really thought needed to be done. To tell the truth, the educational system in America and around the world is a relic of a bygone era. The curriculum is out of date and out of touch with the realities of the current economic and environmental crises. The very methodological and pedagogical assumptions that have guided education for the better part of 150 years—since the beginning of compulsory public education—are a big part of the reason the human race is heading to the edge of the abyss.
Would the teachers waiting patiently in their seats, no doubt expecting an uplifting speech on the value of a sound education, be prepared to hear that much of what we teach and how we teach is dysfunctional and toxic to the future development of the human race?
I walked out onto the floor, took a deep breath, and began with a lament on the state of the world—a sentiment which I hoped would be a liberating reflection by the end of the talk. I scanned the audience, paying close attention to facial expressions and body language as I laid out the breadth of the crisis facing us. I could feel a quietness in the auditorium and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. As I began to deconstruct the traditional education system, I detected a slight murmur throughout the room. But it was when I turned to the new, distributed and collaborative teaching methods and learning models that there was a decisive shift in the mood of the audience. Hundreds of teachers became animated and began to nod their approval. As I wrapped up, I realized that a great many of the teachers were well ahead of me, already asking the tough questions in their own classrooms about the future of education and experimenting with new teaching methods and pedagogy to prepare the next generation for living in a distributed and collaborative society.
They stood up and clapped at the end, but as they did, I noticed many were turning to each other and applauding. For many of them, it was a moment of self-affirmation—a feeling that they were on the right track and that their own efforts to rethink American education were well-founded.
We’re beginning to hear a new conversation in the educational community. As the Third Industrial Revolution vision takes root in the public imagination and the first tentative steps toward a five-pillar infrastructure materialize, educators, as well as employers and politicians, are starting to ask what changes we’ll need to make to prepare future generations for a new economic and political era. Understandably, the first concern is the instrumental realm. There is already significant discussion around the new professional and technical skills that students will have to learn to become productive workers in the Third Industrial Revolution economy.
Universities and high schools will need to begin training the workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution. Curriculum will need to focus increasingly on advanced information, nano- and biotechnologies, Earth sciences, ecology, and systems theory as well vocational skills, including manufacturing and marketing renewable energy technologies, transforming buildings into mini power plants, installing hydrogen and other storage technologies, laying out intelligent utility networks, manufacturing plug-in and hydrogen fuel cell transport, setting up green logistics networks, and the like.
Aware of the need to prepare students with the professional, technical, and vocational skills they will need to live and work in a sustainable Third Industrial Revolution economy, our global team is working with universities and school systems to transform them into TIR learning environments. In the Rome master plan, for example, we are partnering with Livio de Santoli, the dean of the School of Architecture at La Sapienza University, and his team to reconfigure its campus buildings into a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure by introducing renewable energies, hydrogen storage technologies, and smart utility networks. The goal is to connect La Sapienza University with other universities, high schools, and primary schools in a TIR grid that will spread out across Rome. This pioneer web can be linked with commercial and residential energy cooperatives in the years ahead, metamorphosing into a fully operable infrastructure.
An equally ambitious effort is underway in school districts across California. High schools and elementary schools are forming partnerships with banks and other commercial enterprises to install solar carports in their campus parking lots. Under the agreements, commercial partners finance the installations and sell the electricity back to the school for a twenty-year period at an agreed-upon price below the cost of securing conventional electricity from the central power grid. The commercial partners, in turn, take advantage of federal and state tax incentives to make a profit on the transaction.
Seventy-five high schools and elementary schools are already generating green energy and administrators predict that the solar carport idea will catch on across the country in the next few years. The administration gives two reasons for the popularity of solar campuses.
First, in a tight economy with diminished school budgets, green electricity provides a significant energy savings. In the Milpitas Unified School District near San Jose, solar panels generate 75 percent of the school district’s electricity needs during the regular school year and 100 percent of its electricity needs during the summer school session. The savings on electricity bills can range from $12 million to $40 million over the life span of the solar panels. School-based photovoltaic systems in the San Francisco Bay Area increased by fivefold between 2008 and 2009 and, by 2010, were providing enough power to meet the electricity needs of 3,500 homes.1
Second, installing solar infrastructures on campuses allow students to become familiar with the new TIR technology, creating a hands-on learning environment for acquiring the skills they will need in the emerging green economy. “School children are growing up with [green electricity] so that it becomes ingrained in their perception of how a society functions,” observes Brad Parker, a solar carport consultant to the San Luis Coastal Unified School District in central California.2
Just as schools in the past decade were equipped with personal computers and Internet connections so that students could create their own information and share it with others in virtual space, the current generation of students will need to be equipped with TIR technologies so they can harvest their own renewable energy and share it in open-source energy spaces.
TIR technologies will need to be accompanied by a TIR curriculum. Educators are beginning to introduce smart grid curriculum into elementary and high school classrooms and vocational schools and colleges. With half of America’s utility workers slated for retirement in the next five to ten years, the US federal government has allocated $100 million in stimulus funds to promote smart grid curricula in high schools and colleges. In announcing the grants, secretary of energy Steven Chu noted that “building and operating smart grid infrastructure will put tens of thousands of Americans to work.”3 The Department of Energy estimates that the federal grants will train more than thirty thousand workers for the new jobs awaiting them in the TIR era.
Exciting students about electricity and the power grid is priority number one. Lisa Magnuson, the director of marketing for Silver Spring Networks, a company that makes hardware and software to smarten up the nation’s power grid, says that America needs to draw on the creativity of a younger generation that has grown up on the Internet. In pilot curricula being tested in school systems in Ohio and California, students are being asked to write essays on topics like, “How will the smart grid change your life or your future career?” Getting the kids to think about producing energy and sharing clean electricity on an Intergrid, the way they now create and share information on the Internet, will open the floodgates to new TIR “killer apps” as they come of age. “We want to make utilities cool again,” says Magnuson.
At the university level, state-of-the-art research laboratories are just now being built to provide the next generation of inventors, entrepreneurs, and technicians with the tools they need to create the breakthrough technologies of the TIR era. Ohio State University is now equipped with one of only a handful of high-voltage laboratories in the United States. Researchers and students are using the facility to create virtual platforms that simulate features and functions of the smart grid.
In our San Antonio master plan, we proposed the establishment of a TIR science and technology park adjoining the new Texas A&M University campus to allow for a cross-fertilization of research talent between the various university departments and the companies engaged in TIR technologies and applications. Similar university/private sector partnerships have long existed for Second Industrial Revolution technologies and businesses.
ALTHOUGH PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL SKILLS are critical to transitioning into a Third Industrial Revolution, educators shouldn’t put the cart before the horse by emphasizing them at the expense of the deeper changes that must take place. If we change only the skill sets of students but not their consciousness, we will have done little to alter the notion that being productive is the overriding mission of education. What we will end up with is a workforce whose approach to economic activity is still mired in the utilitarian ethos of the earlier two Industrial Revolutions. Students steeped in biosphere consciousness, however, will regard TIR professional skills not merely as vocational tools to become more productive workers but, rather, as ecological aids in stewarding our common biosphere.
The notion that the primary mission of education is to turn out productive workers is grounded on a particular notion of human nature that was spawned in the Enlightenment at the very beginning of the industrial era. The very word industrial comes from industrious, and refers to a state of mind that accompanied the modern market economy and became essential to its successful deployment. In the late medieval era, economic activity was organized around the idea of maintaining a relatively constant way of life. Young men went through rigorous apprenticeships in their respective crafts before being formally recognized as masters of their trade. While vocational expertise was highly regarded and closely guarded, as mentioned in the previous chapter, economic activity was limited to reproducing a given way of life. To ensure this, prices were fixed and output was limited. The idea of progress did not yet exist in the public consciousness.
The term industrious traces its roots back to the cleric John Calvin and the early Protestant reformers who argued that each individual continually strives to improve his or her lot as a sign of personal election and salvation in the next world with Christ. In the early market era, the idea of improving one’s lot metamorphosed from a theological prescription to an economic expectation, and a man of “good character” came to be known, judged, and respected for his industriousness. Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith came to see human nature as acquisitive, utilitarian, and self-interested, and viewed being industrious as an innate capacity that fostered material progress. By the time the First Industrial Revolution was gearing up in the late nineteenth century, employers began to measure a man’s industriousness in terms of his productivity, and being productive became the defining characteristic of human behavior itself.
The public school movement in Europe and America was largely designed to foster the productive potential inherent in each human being and create a productive work force to advance the Industrial Revolution. Hundreds of millions of youngsters, stretching over eight generations of history, have been schooled on the Enlightenment assumptions about humanity’s core nature.
Our ideas about education invariably flow from our perception of reality and our conception of nature—especially our assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey. Those assumptions become institutionalized in our education process. What we really teach, at any given time, is the consciousness of an era.
Human consciousness, however, changes over history. The way an urban professional thinks today is very different than the way a medieval rural serf thought in the fifteenth century or a forager-hunter twenty thousand years ago. Great changes in human consciousness occur when new, more complex energy regimes arise, making possible more interdependent and complex social arrangements. As mentioned in chapter 2, coordinating those civilizations requires new, more sophisticated communications systems. When energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, human consciousness is altered.
All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in a mythological consciousness. The hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to the world’s great religions and theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered First Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago, and led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the twentieth century, electronic communication became the command-and-control mechanism to manage a Second Industrial Revolution based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.
Today, distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution and paving the way for biosphere consciousness. We come to see our species, in all of its diversity, as a single family, and all the other species of life on Earth as our extended evolutionary family, living interdependently in a common biosphere.
In the new globally connected Third Industrial Revolution era, the primary mission of education is to prepare students to think and act as part of a shared biosphere.
Our emerging sense of biosphere consciousness coincides with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neurocognitive science, and child development that reveal that people are biologically predisposed to be empathic—that our core nature is not rational, detached, acquisitive, aggressive, and narcissistic, as many Enlightenment philosophers suggested, but rather, affectionate, highly social, cooperative, and interdependent. Homo sapiens is giving way to Homo empathicus. Social historians tell us that empathy is the social glue that allows increasingly individualized and diverse populations to forge bonds of familiarity across broader domains so that society can cohere as a whole. To empathize is to civilize.
Empathy has evolved over history. In forager-hunter societies, empathy rarely went beyond tribal blood ties. In the hydraulic agricultural age, empathy extended past blood ties to associational ties based on religious identification. Jews began to empathize with fellow Jews as if in an extended family, Christians began empathizing with fellow Christians, Muslims with Muslims, and so on. In the industrial age, with the emergence of the modern nation-state, empathy extended once again, this time to people of like-minded national identities. Americans began to empathize with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese. Today, at the outset of the Third Industrial Revolution, empathy is beginning to stretch beyond national boundaries to biosphere boundaries. We are coming to see the biosphere as our indivisible community, and empathizing with our fellow human beings and other creatures as our extended evolutionary family.
The realization that we are an empathic species, that empathy has evolved over history, and that we are as interconnected in the biosphere as we are in the blogosphere, has great significance for rethinking the mission of education. New teaching models designed to transform education from a competitive contest to a collaborative and empathic learning experience are emerging as schools and colleges try to reach a generation that has grown up on the Internet and is used to interacting in open social networks where information is shared rather than hoarded. The traditional assumption that “knowledge is power” to be used for personal gain is being subsumed by the notion that knowledge is an expression of the shared responsibilities for the collective well-being of humanity and the planet as a whole.
In schools all over the world, teachers are instructing students, from the earliest ages, that they are an intimate part of the workings of the biosphere and that every activity they engage in—the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the car their family drives, the electricity they use—leaves an ecological footprint that affects the well-being of other human beings and other creatures on Earth. For example, if they eat a hamburger from a fast-food restaurant, it might have come from a steer that grazed on pasture-land cut out from a Central American rainforest. The felled trees mean less forest cover and a loss of species that live in the forest canopy. Fewer trees also means less forests available to serve as sinks to absorb industrial CO2 released into the atmosphere from the burning of coal in centralized power plants. The resulting rise in the Earth’s temperature from too much CO2 in the atmosphere affects the hydrological cycle, leading to more floods and droughts around the world, a diminution in crop yields and a drop in income for poor farmers and their families. A loss in income means greater hunger and malnutrition for at-risk populations—all of which is traceable back to the burger in the bun.
An older generation of skeptics might find the idea of biosphere consciousness a bit over the top, even as their children and grandchildren seem to be quite comfortable identifying with the biosphere as their larger community.
E. O. Wilson, the famed Harvard biologist, says that an intimate relationship with the biosphere is not a utopian fantasy but, rather, an ancient sensibility that is built into our biology but has sadly been lost over eons of human history. Wilson believes that human beings have an innate drive to affiliate with nature—what he calls “biophilia.”4 For example, he cites studies across many diverse cultures that reveal a human propensity for open vistas, lush grasslands, and rolling fields punctuated by small clusters of trees and ponds. Wilson believes that this primal identification with our earliest phase as a species continues to exist deep inside our biological being as a kind of genetic recollection of our biophilic connection. In recent studies of hospital patients, researchers found that when provided a window view of trees, open green landscapes, and ponds, patients more quickly regained their health than those without such exposure, suggesting the restorative value of nature.5
Biophilia extends beyond landscapes to our affiliation with our evolutionary relatives. When we observe and interact with other animals, we are continually aware of our similarities. Like ourselves, our fellow creatures have a drive to exist. Each is a unique being. Every creature has its own unrepeatable life journey, each day of which is full of opportunities and risks. We all share vulnerabilities—being alive, whether as a fox navigating the forest or as a human being navigating an urban environment, is fraught with peril. We particularly affiliate with our fellow mammals, who look so much like us and are so much like us. They are sentient creatures who nurture their young, exhibit emotions, learn from one another, and create rudimentary cultures that are passed on between generations. They create social bonds via play and grooming, and communicate their individual feelings to one another in elaborate social rituals just like us.
Wilson suggests that we emotionally identify with our fellow creatures to the point of experiencing their being as if it were our own. In short, we empathize. Who hasn’t had an empathic experience at some point in their life with a fellow creature—whether a companion animal or a chance exposure to a wild creature? When we come across young horses playing and frolicking in open pastures, full of the joy of being alive, or an injured squirrel, writhing in pain and terrified, we feel a deep outpouring of empathy—it is our way of acknowledging the mystery of life that binds us together in fellowship on this Earth. To empathize is to affirm another’s struggle to be and flourish. We recognize the intrinsic value of their life as if it were our own. By empathizing we express our kinship with our fellow creatures.
While all of us at one time or another have experienced a biophilia connection, in our urbanized, high-tech society, our exposure to nature and our fellow creatures has steadily diminished. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings lives in artificial environments, virtually cut off from the rest of nature. Wilson and an increasing number of biologists and ecologists worry that the loss of the biophilia connection poses a very real threat to our physical, emotional, and mental well-being, and ultimately stymies our cognitive development as a species.
One thing is for sure, though—if we are not able to recapture our innate biophilia, we will never reach biosphere consciousness. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are really only tools that can enable us to reintegrate into the natural world. They allow us to reorganize our lives in a way that once again acknowledges the interdependencies of the common biosphere we share with our fellow creatures. But unless the Third Industrial Revolution is accompanied by a change in the way we view and experience the world—biosphere consciousness—it will die prematurely.
How then do we breathe biosphere consciousness into our lives so that we can reestablish our relationship with nature, restore the Earth, and save our species?
Owen Barfield, the late British philosopher, speaks to the present moment facing our species. He observes that humanity has lived through two great periods in its relationship with nature.
For more than 90 percent of our existence on Earth we lived as foragers and hunters. Our ancient ancestors experienced nature directly and intimately. There were few boundaries between the self and the other. Life was lived in a dreamlike state in which living beings and other phenomena interacted, recombined, and exchanged places in bewildering mayhem—what anthropologists call an undifferentiated fog.
Day-to-day life was finely tuned to the periodicities of nature and the changing seasons, as is still the case for every other creature on Earth. “Mother Earth” was less a metaphor than a real primordial being to whom forager-hunters were deeply beholden for their survival. Thus, she was treated with a sense of awe and both loved and feared by humans, befitting their utter dependence on her goodwill.
The great transformation from foraging and hunting to agriculture radically changed human beings’ relationship to nature—from one of complete reliance on its goodwill and bounty to increasing control and management of it as a resource. With the domestication of plants and animals, human beings began to detach themselves from the natural world, creating a fictional barrier between human and animal behavior. By the late medieval era, to be civilized was to have rid oneself of a “brutish” animal nature. Successive generations became increasingly self-aware and independent, but at the expense of losing the earlier, intimate participation they enjoyed with nature.
Barfield wrote that the human race is on the cusp of a third period in its relationship to nature—one in which human beings reengage with the natural world, not out of a sense of dependency and fear, as was the case with our species’ earliest relationship, but by a deliberate choice to become an intimate part of a broader universal community of life.6 This is biosphere consciousness. What Barfield leaves unexplored, however, is the underlying historical process by which an increasingly self-aware and individualized species is able to turn the corner and rediscover its interdependent relationship to nature in a volitional way. That understanding is key to rethinking the way we educate present and future generations to foster biosphere consciousness.
Each more complex energy/communications revolution gives rise to a more elaborate differentiation of tasks, which in turn spurs individuation and greater self-awareness. The undifferentiated “we” that characterizes a simple forager-hunter existence, gives way to butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, each with an awakening sense of his or her own individuality, made possible by the unique task he or she performs in society. Even today, family names harken back to craft skills passed down over the generations: Smith, Tanner, Weaver, Cook, Trainer, and so on.
The growing self-awareness of the human race is the psychological mechanism that allows empathy to grow and flourish. As we become increasingly aware of our own individuality, we come to realize that our life is unique, unrepeatable and fragile. It is that existential sense of our one and only life that allows us to empathize with others’ unique journeys and to express our solidarity. We do this by engaging in acts of compassion whose purpose is to aid another in the struggle to optimize his or her life. To empathize is to celebrate another’s existence.
If our core nature is empathic and we have an innate drive to affiliate with nature, how do we awaken and mature the biophilia connection? Wilson says that “the psychologists have got to be brought in on the act.”7 They need to help us resuscitate the primal biophilia drive that has for so long been buried in our collective subconsciousness. Others agree.
Theodore Roszak, who coined the term ecopsychology, was rather disparaging of the psychiatric profession in his 1992 book, The Voice of the Earth. Roszak noted that the American Psychiatric Association lists more than 300 mental diseases in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual, without so much of a mention of the possibility that human beings might suffer mentally from a loss of attachment to nature. He writes, “Psycho-therapists have exhaustively analyzed every form of dysfunctional family and social relations, but dysfunctional environmental relations does not exist even as a concept.”8 Roszak makes the very telling point that the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual “defines separation anxiety disorder as excessive anxiety concerning separation from home and from those to whom the individual is attached. But no separation is more pervasive in this age of anxiety than our disconnection from the natural world.” Roszak challenged the psychiatric profession, saying it’s time “for an environmentally based definition of mental health.”9
Around the time Roszak was writing about the mental distress that might be caused from isolation from nature, other voices from the field of philosophy began to join in the discussion. The term ecological self was coined by the deep ecologist and philosopher Arne Næss. The deep ecologists realized that as long as people viewed nature in instrumental terms, they would continue to regard other species merely as resources that fulfilled utilitarian desires. Objectifying our fellow creatures would forever prohibit the human psyche from identifying with them as unique beings not unlike ourselves and therefore imbued with intrinsic value and worthy of being treated as ends, not means. The deep ecologists were particularly hard on many conventional environmentalists for championing a conservation ethic based on stewarding natural resources strictly for human enjoyment.
Næss and other deep ecologists, whom I have personally known and come to admire, nonetheless fall short when it comes to the way they perceive their relationship to individual animals. While they express a personal regard for other creatures, their relationship is often more cognitive than affective. Joanna Macy, another pioneer in ecophilosophy, argues that by rediscovering our emotional connection to other creatures, we expand our sense of self from the personal to the ecological. It is by the act of empathy with the particular plight of individual creatures that we are able to transcend our mental isolation and become reattached to our animal roots. We come to emotionally identify with other creatures as if they were us, and begin to regard them as part of our extended evolutionary family. By our empathic extension we become an extended self.
This emotional identification extends not only to other lifeforms but also to ecosystems and the biosphere itself.10 Environmental activist John Seed perhaps best described the reawakening of a biophilia connection. Pondering the fate of the rainforest, he says, “I try to remember that it’s not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather, I am part of the rainforest protecting itself. I am part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.”11 The idea of a self-conscious, extended ecological self actively choosing to reengage in the myriad interdependent relationships that make up the living biosphere is exactly what Barfield had in mind when he talked about the third stage of human development.
Preparing our children to think as extended ecological selves—to have biosphere consciousness—will be the critical test of our age and might well determine whether we will be able to create a new, sustainable relationship with the Earth in time to slow climate change and prevent our own extinction.
Aware of the perilous times ahead, educators are beginning to ask the question of whether simply becoming economically productive ought to be the primary mission of education. Shouldn’t we place at least as much attention on developing our youngsters’ innate empathic drives and biophilia connections so that we can ready them to think and act as part of a universal family that includes not only all of our fellow human beings but our fellow creatures as well?
A new generation of educators is beginning to deconstruct the classroom learning processes that accompanied the First and Second Industrial Revolutions and reconstitute the educational experience along lines designed to encourage an extended, ecological self, imbued with biosphere consciousness. The dominant, top-down approach to teaching, the aim of which is to create a competitive, autonomous being, is beginning to give way to a distributed and collaborative educational experience with an eye to instilling a sense of the social nature of knowledge. Intelligence, in the new way of thinking, is not something one inherits or a resource one accumulates but, rather, a shared experience distributed among people.
The new approach to learning mirrors the way a younger generation learns and shares information, ideas, and experiences on the Internet in open-source learning spaces and social media sites. Distributed and collaborative learning also prepares the workforce of the twenty-first century for a Third Industrial Revolution economy that operates on the same set of principles.
More important, by learning to think and act in a distributed and collaborative fashion, students come to see themselves as empathic beings, enmeshed in webs of shared relationships, in ever more inclusive communities, that eventually extend to the entirety of the biosphere.
The distributed and collaborative perspective starts with the assumption that learning is always a deeply social experience. We learn by participation. While our conventional education encourages the notion that learning is a private experience, in reality, “thinking occurs as much among as within individuals.”12 Although we all enjoy moments of private reflection, even then, the substance of our thoughts is ultimately connected, in one way or another, to our former shared experiences with others, from which we internalize shared meanings. The new education reformers emphasize breaking down the walls and engaging diverse others in more distributed and collaborative learning communities, both in virtual and real space.
The proliferation of social networks and collaborative forms of participation on the Internet are taking education beyond the confines of the classroom to a global learning environment in cyberspace. Students are connecting with distant peers in virtual classrooms through Yahoo! and Skype technology. When students from very different cultures participate in joint academic assignments and class projects in real time in virtual space, learning is transformed into a lateral experience that stretches around the world.
Students at Brooklyn High School of Telecommunications and Lee School in Winterthur, Switzerland, were involved in a joint virtual-classroom project during the Iraq war, exploring how their different cultures viewed the war in the Middle East and other global conflicts and peace initiatives. The students exchanged points of view, questioned one another, and collaborated on virtual class assignments via online chat rooms, videoconferences, and bulletin boards.
In one exchange, a Swiss student expressed the belief that most Americans supported the war, which elicited fast responses from two American students, the first of whom had an uncle serving in the armed forces in Iraq, and another, whose parents were of Palestinian descent. During the online virtual classroom discussions, students were often just as curious about conflicts closer to home. One of the American students asked a Swiss student if young people in his city can buy knives and guns as easily as in New York City.13
The extension of the classroom exposes young people to their cohorts in widely different cultures, allowing empathic sensibility to expand and deepen. Education becomes a truly planetary experience, hastening the shift to biosphere consciousness.
The global extension of learning environments in cyberspace is being matched by the local extension of learning environments in school neighborhoods. The traditional barrier separating the classroom and community is beginning to give way as learning becomes a distributed exercise involving both formal and informal modes of education in broader, more diverse social spaces in the civil society.
In the past twenty-five years, American secondary schools and colleges have introduced service-learning programs into the curriculum—a deeply empathic collaborative teaching model that has altered the educational experience for millions of young people. As part of the requirements for graduation, students are expected to volunteer in neighborhood nonprofit organizations and in community initiatives designed to help those in need and improve the well-being of their communities. According to the US Department of Education, four out of every five millennials have been involved in community service while in high school.14
The Memory Bridge Initiative in Chicago trains students from some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city’s south side to serve as aids to Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes. What makes the Chicago program so unique is that many of the students come from broken homes and have grown up in a world of abject poverty, where drug addiction, rampant criminality, and violence is a way of life and hardened behavior is a survival strategy. Assisting with helpless seniors, who struggle to perform the simplest tasks, awakens an empathic connection within the students, allowing them to come out of themselves and nurture long-repressed drives for communion.15
Performing service in food kitchens, health clinics, environmental projects, tutoring programs, counseling centers, and hundreds of other neighborhood nonprofit activities has transformed the learning experience. The exposure to diverse people from various walks of life has spurred an empathic surge among many of the nation’s young people. Studies indicate that many students experience a deep maturing of empathic sensibility by being thrust into unfamiliar environments where they are called on to reach out and assist others. These experiences are often life-changing, affecting their sense of what gives their life meaning. School systems in other countries are beginning to implement their own service-learning curricula.
Some school systems and universities are elevating service learning by embedding it into the rest of the academic curriculum. Subject areas come alive by direct involvement. Students learn about sociology, political science, psychology, biology, mathematics, music, the arts, literature, and the like both in the classroom and in direct participation with others through service in the community.
For example, the students working with senior citizens might bring their service-learning experience to bear in social studies classes in discussions around federal and state budget priorities and the question of a younger generation’s obligation to care for the elderly in an increasingly aging society. How much financial sacrifice should youth be expected to make to the elderly in their waning years, especially if it means fore-closing opportunities for optimizing their own future lives? Classroom discussion becomes far more relevant, immediate, and expansive when students’ own experiences with others in the larger community provide perspective.
Distributed and collaborative education flows from the idea that when people reason together, their combined experience is more likely to achieve the desired results than when people reason alone.
The first academic to stumble across the great value of lateral learning was L. J. Abercrombie at the University Hospital, University of London. In research conducted in the 1950s, Abercrombie noted the rather curious fact that when medical students accompanied a doctor on his rounds of hospital patients together as a group, and collaborated in their assessment of the condition of the patient, they came to a more accurate diagnosis than if they each accompanied the doctor alone. The group interaction allowed the medical students the opportunity to challenge each other’s hypotheses, offer individual insights and build on each other’s observations, finally leading to a group consensus of the likely state of the patient under review.
We are so accustomed to conventional learning environments that we rarely step back and ask critical questions about the nature of the learning process. We simply take for granted that the way we are being taught is the fundamental way knowledge is passed on. What we are really learning, however, is a way of structuring our reality and organizing our relationships to the world around us. Kenneth Bruffee, professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, reviews the key operating assumptions of the contemporary learning process, describing the significant role they play in creating the modern frame of mind.
Bruffee begins with the teacher, whose responsibility is to transfer knowledge into the minds of the students. He does this by creating an authoritative relationship with each student. That is, he calls on individuals and asks each to recite or provide an answer to a directed question. Each student is expected to perform strictly for the teacher, by recitation or by written exam. The relationship is always top-down and one-to-one. Students are discouraged from interacting with each other, whether by posing questions to one another, or assisting each other. Such behavior would breach the authority of the teacher and create an alternative pattern of authority that would be lateral and interactive. Thinking together would be considered cheating. Each student, in turn, is individually evaluated and graded.
Students are made to believe that knowledge is an objective phenomenon that exists in the form of bits of information and facts, and that the teacher’s role is to implant those bits of impartial knowledge into each head. Students quickly come to understand that there are right and wrong answers to every question by the approving or disapproving response of the teacher. They are often discouraged, even penalized, for offering their own subjective thoughts on the subject matter before the class and severely reprimanded for questioning the views of the teacher. Bruffee summarizes the educational experience this way: “A student’s responsibility according to these foundational classroom conventions is to ‘absorb’ what the professor in one way or another imparts. The professor’s responsibility is to impart knowledge to students and evaluate their retention of it.”16
Lateral learning starts from a completely different assumption about the nature of learning. Knowledge is not regarded as objective, autonomous phenomena but, rather, the explanations we make about the common experiences that we share with each other. To seek the truth is to understand how everything relates and we discover those relationships by our deep participation with others. The more diverse our experiences and interrelationships, the closer we come to understanding reality itself and how each of us fits into the bigger picture of existence.
Knowledge, according to Bruffee and other educational reformers, is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a learning community.17 If knowledge is something that exists between people and comes out of their shared experiences, then the way our educational process is set up is inimical to deep learning. Our schooling is often little more than a stimulus-response process, a robotic affair in which students are programmed to respond to the instructions fed into them—much like the standard operating procedures of scientific management that created the workers of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.
Peer-to-peer learning shifts the focus from the lone self to the interdependent group. Learning ceases to be an isolated experience between an authority figure and student and is transformed into a community experience.18
Students are dividing up into small working groups and tasked with specific assignments. Once the teacher sets out the assignment, she removes herself, allowing students to organize their own knowledge community. Students are expected to exchange ideas, question one another, critique each other’s analysis, build off each other’s contributions, and negotiate a consensus.19
Often, the group will be further divided, and each individual tasked with becoming an expert on one of the subtopics relevant to the assignment. Each expert is expected to share his or her knowledge with the group and become a guide to the discussion when it touches on his or her area of expertise. In this way students teach each other and learn how to lead without commandeering the conversation. Students become adept at social facilitation and dispute resolution.20
The groups then come back together in a plenary session to share their findings. The teacher’s role is to act as facilitator of the conversation. While she is expected to share the knowledge of the academic discipline of which she is a part, including an appraisal of the differences of opinion that exist within the discipline as well as the agreements or differences that exist between the discipline and other knowledge communities, these are meant to be contributions to the conversation. Bruffee cautions that “professors must resist reverting to the hierarchical authority of traditional classrooms, in which students believe that when teachers begin talking they are going to tell them what the answer really is.”21
In lateral learning, the role of students is transformed from passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in their own education. The goal is to encourage students to think rather than perform. The collaborative nature of the learning process reinforces the notion that gaining knowledge is never a solitary act but a community affair.
Lateral learning redirects the fulcrum of power and authority in the classroom from hierarchical, centralized, and top-down to reciprocal, democratic, and networked. Students learn that they are each responsible for one another’s education. Being responsible means being attuned to each other’s thoughts, open to different perspectives and points of view, able to listen to criticism, eager to come to one another’s assistance, and willingness to take responsibility for the learning community as a whole. These are the very same qualities so essential to the maturation of empathy.
Lateral learning fosters empathic sensibility by encouraging students to walk in another’s shoes and experience that person’s feelings and thoughts as if it were their own. The test to tell when a community of scholars has really come together and gelled is when each of the members of the cohort group deeply resonates with the struggle of his or her peers to flourish, and experiences the group as an extension of his or her being.
Needless to say, the new learning favors interdisciplinary teaching and multicultural studies. Academia is experiencing a transformation from autonomous disciplines with well-defined academic borders, to collaborative networks whose participants come from various fields, but share knowledge in a distributed manner. The more traditional reductionist approach to the study of phenomena is beginning to give way to the systemic pursuit of big-picture questions about the nature of reality and the meaning of existence—which requires a more interdisciplinary perspective.
Cross-disciplinary academic associations, journals, and curricula have proliferated in recent years, reflecting the burgeoning interest in the interconnectedness of knowledge. A younger generation of academics is beginning to cross over traditional academic categories to create a more integrated approach to research. Several hundred interdisciplinary fields like behavioral economics, ecopsychology, social history, ecophilosophy, biomedical ethics, social entrepreneurship, and holistic health are shaking up the academy and portend a paradigm shift in the educational process.
Meanwhile, the globalization of education has brought together people from diverse cultures, each having his or her own anthropological point of reference, offering up a plethora of fresh, new ways of studying phenomena that are shaped by a different cultural history and narrative.
By approaching a study area from a number of academic disciplines and cultural perspectives, students learn to be more open-minded. The early evaluations of distributed and collaborative educational reform programs are encouraging. Schools report a marked reduction in aggression, violence, and other antisocial behavior, a decrease in disciplinary actions, greater cooperation among students, more pro-social behavior, more focused attention in the classroom, a greater desire to learn, and improvement in critical thinking skills.
Collaborative learning helps students extend their sense of self to diverse others and fosters deep participation in more interdependent communities. It enlarges the empathic boundary. Yet, if we are to prepare our children for life in a biosphere era, our educational system will need to advance distributed learning beyond the human domain to include our fellow creatures and the broad swath of nature. Schools and universities have only just begun to explore pedagogy and learning practices that would help extend the self to include the ecological self.
Sadly, today children in the United States between the ages of eight and eighteen spend six and a half hours per day interacting with electronic media—television, computers, video games, and the like. In just the short period between 1997 and 2003, there was a 50 percent drop in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time outdoors engaged in hiking, walking, gardening, and beach play. Less than 8 percent of young people now spend time in these traditional outdoors activities.22
Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods, says that we are raising a generation of children who suffer from what he calls “nature-deficit disorder”—kids who have virtually no exposure to or interaction with natural wilderness. They are no longer playing outdoors where they might come in contact, even on the most superficial level, with other creatures, whether in local vacant lots, nearby parks, creeks, ponds, meadows, or woods. He recounts the remark from a young fourth-grade student who said, “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”23
Children today are taught by parents to distrust the outdoors as a dangerous place where bad people lurk, rabid or otherwise diseased wild animals wander, and disabling accidents of all kinds await them around every turn. Add to this all of the local codes and ordinances that prohibit unsupervised play outdoors for fear of lawsuits and we get a pretty bleak picture of nature. No wonder parents discourage unstructured, outdoor play.
Researchers are beginning to catalogue a range of health issues associated with nature-deficit disorder, including higher incidences of depression and other mental illness as well as physical illnesses caused by sedentary behavior. Some researchers are even beginning to look at the possible link between some forms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and nature-deficit disorder.24
Robert Michael Pyle, a writer and lepidopterist, goes a step further, suggesting that our children’s increasing isolation from nature is leading to “the extinction of experience,” by which he means a steady erosion of contact of any kind with the natural world and, with it, a complete alienation from nature, including our own. The loss of experience with the rest of the life force of the planet has a subconscious impact on the human psyche. We become increasingly disaffected from the rest of nature and uncaring about the plight of the Earth. We also become more isolated and lonely, and come to feel like aliens on our own planet. Simulated experiences, regardless of how “real life” they seem, can never replace the affiliations we once felt for all the living beings to whom we are related. Pyle writes:
Simply stated, the loss of neighborhood species endangers our experience of nature. . . . [D]irect personal contact with living things affects us in vital ways that vicarious experiences can never replace. I believe that one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is the state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live. We lack a widespread sense of intimacy with the living world. . . . The extinction of experience . . . implies a cycle of disaffection that can have disastrous consequences.25
A growing number of educators are engaged in the process of revolutionizing curricula and pedagogy to reestablish a biophilia connection in the educational process. E. O. Wilson argues that the natural world is the most information-rich environment that exists on Earth.26 Thomas Berry, the Catholic priest and historian, concurs and asks us to imagine how the human race could ever have developed metaphors so critical for creating human narratives and consciousness were our species to have been domiciled from its earliest origins on the moon where there are no other life forms. We would have, therefore, no ability to imagine the life of the other as if it were applicable, in some way, to our own experience—which is the very basis of metaphoric thinking and cognitive development.
Anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence, who coined the term cognitive biophilia, observes that the natural world has long been the primary source on which human beings have called to create symbols and images for human cognitive development.27 New research findings suggest that greater experiential exposure to nature has a significant impact on a child’s cognitive development during middle childhood and adolescence.
Sociologist Stephen Kellert brings up the rarely considered point that interaction with nature is essential to critical thinking. The child’s developing mind is continuously observing natural phenomena and attempting to understand how it affects the world he is growing up in. Why does rain fall down from the sky, and the sun rise every day? Why do plants bloom at certain times of the year and cats chase mice and eat them? What are shadows? Where does the wind come from? Why do I sweat when it’s hot? When we talk about the creation of consciousness, what we are really alluding to is how a child makes connections between phenomena and establishes predictable relationships, all of which help him place himself in the world. Limited exposure to nature diminishes the possibilities of understanding what we mean by existence. Kellert concludes that “few areas of life provide young people with as much opportunity as the natural world for critical thinking, creative inquiry, problem solving, and intellectual development.”28 Nature is the source of awe and wonder without which human imagination could not exist, and without human imagination, consciousness would atrophy.
I find it interesting that one of the most often used words among American youth is awesome. Virtually every other sentence is punctuated with this refrain. Is it possible that its overuse might be a projection of a vast deficit brought on by growing up in a world devoid of the wonders of nature and where reality is technologically simulated in pixels on tiny computer screens? In miniaturizing all of existence to fit a three-inch BlackBerry screen, do we risk the inflation of ego and the loss of a sense of awe? If a generation’s gaze is continually looking down on a flat, two-dimensional screen rather than up toward the stars, how likely is it that it will be awed by existence rather than bored by technological overstimulation?
Rachel Carson mused on this subject when the television screen was beginning to draw millions of children in from the backyard in the early evening. For 175,000 years, children would scan the stars in the night sky wondering about the deep mysteries of an infinite universe. Now that reality was suddenly narrowed by sitting in front of a lighted box, peering at tiny figures darting across the screen.
Carson wrote:
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. . . . What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder, this recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence? Is the exploration of the natural world just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood or is there something deeper? I am sure there is something deeper, something lasting and significant. . . . Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.29
What the new biophilia educators are saying is that in the rush to embrace artificial reality, we may be losing touch with our intimate connection to nature, with troubling consequences for the future evolution of human consciousness.
Studies of school yards in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Sweden add credence to Carson’s concerns. Researchers noted a marked difference in how children played in manufactured play areas versus green areas. In the artificial settings children organized themselves in social hierarchies based on physical attributes. In green playgrounds, by contrast, the social organization was more egalitarian and children were far more likely to engage in fantasy and make-believe and express wonder. Their social standing depended less on physical attributes and more on creativity. Researchers at the Human Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois say that an evaluation of many such studies makes it clear that “green space supports healthy child development.”30
Yet despite numerous studies that have found that play outside in natural settings stimulates wonder, imagination, and creativity, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation reports that nearly one-third of US elementary schools don’t schedule recess on a regular basis and 25 percent of children do not take part in any physical activity during free time. Only seven states require elementary schools to have a qualified physical education teacher on staff.31
This might be changing. Educators are growing increasingly alarmed by the loss of attention span and the rise in ADHD diagnoses and suspect that part of the reason might be the physiological loss of connection with the natural rhythms and cycles of nature to which our species has been biologically conditioned over eons of evolutionary history, and the substitution of increasingly artificial rhythms over the past century and, especially, the last two decades. Young people growing up in a world highly mediated by electronic stimulation of all kinds and constantly bombarded by a stream of information are losing the ability to focus, according to countless studies conducted in recent years. In classrooms, where multitasking has become the norm and distractions are the rule, the ability to reflect, organize one’s thoughts, and pursue an idea to its conclusion becomes ever more elusive. Many kids are overloaded and burned out by the time they reach middle school.
ADHD has become widespread in the very communities and countries where the new information and communications technologies are the most pervasive. And everywhere schools are reporting a drop in classroom performance because of what educators call “attention fatigue.” Up to now, the only palliative offered has been medication. Today millions of youngsters in the United States and other high-tech countries are on Ritalin and other pharmaceutical drugs in an effort to hold the crisis at bay. But it’s not abating. It’s only growing in magnitude.
How can we expect present and future generations to attend to the long-term stewardship of the biosphere, which requires focused attention and patience stretched out over lifetimes of commitment, when they are so easily distracted from moment to moment by a blur of signals, images, and data screaming out for their immediate attention. The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table.
How do we stretch our sense of time to include an awareness of our ancient past and anticipation of a far-off future? Some educators say that the answer is to immerse students, at least for extended periods of time, in natural environments and the rhythms of the natural world with its recurring seasonal cycles. Environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, at the University of Michigan, conducted a nine-year study of young people who participated in Outward Bound–type wilderness programs. After two weeks of immersion in the wild, participants reported a greater sense of personal peace and calm and an ability to think more clearly.
A similar study by Terry A. Hartig, a psychology professor at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden, tested a random group of individuals, asking them to carry out a forty-minute sequence of tasks designed to exhaust their “directed attention capacity.” He then instructed participants to spend forty minutes either “walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music.” He found that “after this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proofreading task. They also reported more positive emotions and less anger.”32 Other studies of children suffering from ADHD show that the greater their exposure to outdoor activity in green spaces or even exposure to greenery through windows, the better able they were to focus their attention.33
So what are educators doing to reintegrate students into nature, recapture the biophilia connection, and improve their empathic sensibility and critical thinking abilities? Richard Louv reports on the remarkable approach to schooling in the Finland education system. According to a 2003 review by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Finland ranked first in literacy and in the top five in math and science among thirty-one OECD nations. (The United States ranked far behind in the middle of the OECD nations). Finland accomplished this feat in a most unorthodox fashion. First, students don’t go to school until they’re seven years old. Second, the Finish school system puts a significant emphasis on balancing directed attention in the classroom with open play in the school yard. Every forty-five minutes, the students take to the school yard for a fifteen-minute play break. Third, the Finish classroom extends out into the community. Classes are conducted in various natural settings in the surrounding environment. Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health says that the country’s educational philosophy is centered around the belief that “the core of learning is not in the information . . . being predigested from the outside, but in the interaction between a child and the environment.”34
A number of school experiments are underway in the United States to prepare students for biosphere consciousness. Environmentally based education, experiential education, and place-based and community-oriented schooling are among the many educational reform movements currently underway. A report compiled by the State Education and Environmental Roundtable of the performance of forty biosphere-directed schools, showed dramatic improvement across the academic fields in standardized test scores.35
Schools in Europe and America are also greening schoolyards. One-third of Great Britain’s thirty thousand schoolyards have been transformed into green spaces in its “learning through landscapes” program.36 Similar programs are underway in Sweden, Canada, and the United States.
School systems are also beginning to establish formal partnerships with local arboretums, zoos, park systems, wildlife rehabilitation centers, animal sanctuaries, humane societies, environmental organizations, and university research centers to create classrooms in the community where students can learn their subject matter by hands-on involvement and active service with their fellow creatures.
What all these educational efforts have in common is a new lateral approach to learning that focuses on extending the self by immersing students in the many ecological communities of which they are a part and that make up the biosphere.
Educators realize that creating biosphere consciousness is no easy task, especially since over half of the world’s human population now lives in dense urban or suburban environments that were designed to be isolated and walled-off from nature. Rewilding urban landscapes—bringing nature back into our lives—has become a central theme among urban land planners and architects.
We forget that even the most sterile urban environments abound with wildlife—birds, insects, rodents, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, even deer, fox, coyotes, and abundant flora. Instead of fencing wildlife out, or killing them off, urban planners and an increasing number of civic organizations are finding new, creative ways to revitalize urban biospheres by reestablishing ecological niches scattered across metropolitan regions. The debate over rewilding urban and suburban spaces is often contentious. As existing wildlife habitats shrink in the face of suburban development, more wildlife is migrating into urban areas to eke out a survival. This sudden crossing of the line between “wild” and “civilized” is a welcome tonic for some and a frightening omen for other urban and suburban dwellers.37
Wildlife incursion in residential neighborhoods and commercial areas frequently engenders lawsuits over wildlife-related injuries and prompt calls for efforts like culling local deer populations.38 Many urban jurisdictions are beginning to wrestle with the problem by accommodating both urban life and wildlife.
A growing empathic regard for other creatures has sparked a rethinking of what we mean by “urban life.” Landscape urbanism and green urbanism are among the new efforts to rethink urban planning. Localities are creating woodlands, wetlands, urban canyons, and other wildlife habitats in an effort to integrate wildlife into the life of the cities and suburbs. The new emphasis is on leaving untouched previously open spaces, natural habitats, and migratory routes, and building around them to create an integrated environment in which humans can coexist with their fellow creatures.
The United States and Europe have very different urban and rural land patterns, and very different approaches to revitalizing their swath of the biosphere. We recognized this early on when we prepared our first master plans for the cities of San Antonio and Rome. American urban cores have extended out, with suburban enclaves meeting rural areas at their edges. In Europe, urban areas are denser and often limited by the medieval walls that once surrounded them. The countryside tends to come right up to the city gates. These very different realities call for new approaches to envisioning and remaking urban regions as biospheres. Ben Breedlove, an American urban designer, is cautiously optimistic about creating environments where people and wildlife can coexist. Breedlove notes that “The largest unmanaged ecosystem in America is suburbia,” which is a counterintuitive notion that strikes a chord.39
In Europe, metropolitan areas are far advanced of the United States and other parts of the world in re-wilding urban regions and establishing an urban biosphere consciousness. Many European cities have devoted half their space or more to open green areas, forests, and agriculture. They have also made sure to maintain or reclaim creeks, small clumps of forests, and meadows inside or close to the urban cores. For example, one quarter of Zurich, Switzerland, remains forested.
Fortunately, in many European cities, the forestlands of former royal estates were kept off limits from developers and were either preserved for wildlife or transformed into public parks where local populations can commingle with wildlife. Timothy Beatley, author of Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities, observes that many European communities eschew “the historic opposition of things urban and natural” and prefer to live in urban areas that “are fundamentally embedded in natural environments.”40
In 1890, the US Census Bureau announced the official closing off of the American frontier. Today a new generation of educators and urban designers is asking us to tear down some of the fences and take up a new relationship with the wild—this time in a caring manner—so that we can step back into nature and learn to live in a more sustainable, ecologically sensitive way. E. O. Wilson urges educators to bring out students’ natural inclination to explore new frontiers by shifting curiosity from the barren reaches of outer space to our still largely “unexplored planet.” He believes that “the creative potential is not going to be met by sending a handful of people to Mars. It’s going to be fulfilled by the exploration of this planet, by the constant celebration and deepening of knowledge of life around each one of us, on both the scientific and popular levels.”41
Re-wilding urban areas provides students with the opportunity to experience nature up close, rekindle the biophilia connection, understand their relationship to their evolutionary kin, and develop biosphere consciousness. That’s why in our TIR master plans we have reconceptualized metropolitan areas like Rome as urban biospheres. If biosphere consciousness is the ultimate aim of education, then every urban environment needs to be embedded into the biosphere so that the students’ classroom becomes the biosphere itself—the place where students participate in and learn about their relationship to and responsibility for our planet.
By transforming education into an empathic experience and a distributed and collaborative learning process that extends to the whole of the biosphere, we nurture the critical thinking skills and consciousness that will accompany a Third Industrial Revolution paradigm that operates by the same logic.
Skeptics will likely recoil in disbelief at the idea of revolutionizing the educational system of the world to create biosphere consciousness, and scoff at the idea that we can prepare a Third Industrial Revolution work-force in less than half a century. They need to be reminded that the Enlightenment ideas about human consciousness, and human nature, and the kind of educational system that needed to be put in place to accompany the First Industrial Revolution was institutionalized in roughly the same amount of time in Europe and America. Why should we expect anything less?