We refer to kids of all ages as our future citizens. Their education as child citizens is structured toward that goal; curricula is established to promote the continuation and improvement of our society. We expect this structure to create thoughtful, informed and responsible adult citizens. We assume, often passively, the continuation of our society through our progeny.
There is a certain perceived status quo into which children get launched as adults. This would be the American status quo of potential opportunity, generally abundant food and shelter, education, and convenience provided by the power of cheap electricity and oil.
Our technologies provide for us at work, in communication and for ease of life. We expect our well-rounded kids to be equipped to handle themselves as mature and responsible adults in this setting. Significantly, though, Citizen in the Future has a much heavier connotation now than during past generations.
Spaceship Earth is being squeezed to its diminished self by over populated societies that continue to overuse finite resources. Benign negligence to this reality is swiftly catching societies, including ours, off guard. The era of industrialization and human dominance over the natural world has produced a strong immunity for accurate and reasonable foresight.
The coming half century will bring a reckoning and wake-up call for all of us, especially in developed societies. The concept of finiteness will hit us like an incredulous slap to the forehead. The doubting and disbelieving, the unwitting ignorance and inconvenient truth of it all will still be dragging us kicking and screaming into mid century.
Decision makers and problem solvers two decades hence must have a pocketful of insights. They must be steeped in issues of endangered and invasive species, life cycles, the preservation of ecological webs, natural resource finiteness, and lifestyle habits of sustainability and resiliency.
Our citizens in the future will need to be open to new paradigms. These lifestyle paradigms will include less convenience. They include less than customary comforts, less to waste and fewer possessions.
Earth Education for citizens of the future will provide the means to understanding and problem-solving these ever more complicated issues. It will be imperative they have a true sense of World Citizen.
Earth awareness must be based in experience. It must be real. It can be made real in the traditional classroom. It must, however, include the natural classroom, where organisms and weather and human impact interact with one another. Today’s ten-year-olds must touch Earth. They must have first hand experiential contact with nature.
Children need to be alert and observant; senses in high gear. They need to pay attention. There is currently too much passive awareness among their parents and teachers, especially with issues of global health. Child citizens need to boost active awareness skills and acquire ownership of issues in the form of global stewardship.
Experience need not be exotic. It is allowing kids to get dirty, get wet, get bruised, get scared and get the connections of field or woods or city park. It is encouraging them to run and chase along paths; to hide or spy on each other; to climb and spring trees and to scale sandstone outcroppings; to fall in a pond and to make forts so cozy they forget to go home for dinner.
These are the children who become comfortable and intimate with the natural world. Constructive or free play will help mold their ownership of the state of the environment.
Of course, the overall object is not to overwhelm students by grinding away on Climate Change, Peak Oil Production, Fresh Water Depletion and Population Overshoot. The object is to construct and provide experience in the natural world’s ecology. Kids must feel they have joined the ecology web themselves. They need to feel like lifetime members in an ecological niche.
These nature-web children will be Earth's interpreters, advocates, defenders, problem solvers and saviors. In the years leading to 2030 and beyond, they will get it. They will be prepared to initiate and implement the tough decisions and sacrifices that we will all experience in the coming Transition. They will get it.
The upshot?
Children need to understand, on the tactile level, the pulse of the natural world. They need to understand, on a scientific level, the interrelationships and balances Earth requires. They need to understand, on a philosophical level, the concept of Spaceship Earth and moral commitments to it. The citizen of 2030 needs to walk this path in 2014.
Societies in the developed world regularly turn away from their obligations of uncomfortable global issues. It is too easy to continue the gifted ways of life that natural resources have given us. It is time, now, to own up to the fact that the growing lack of these resources and some destructive by-products will require societal change.
James Kunstler refers to the not-to-distant future as the Long Emergency. There will certainly be a Transition. Our culture will require quite a power-down in energy usage and a substantial change in lifestyles. We all need to be conscious of our future. Especially educators.
The role of teachers in this mix is integral. Current 4th graders will need to be cultural leaders in 2030. Teachers must be contemporary guides. They are in the driver’s seat that steers future savviness. They must know how to steer.
But why would teachers be any more willing than others to delve into all this? We won’t. It’s daunting material. There are hundreds of other dynamics going on in the classroom. The cry is always, “Not something more...!” Yet, unfortunately...
Finally, though serious in scope, our global future needs to be addressed with hope and optimism. Serious, yes. Uncomfortable, yes. Doomsday, no.
Teachers will need to first approach the issue as a stimulation of foresight; as an initiation of the discussion; as an opportunity to acquire resources. How teachers create lesson plans is not directly pertinent at this point. How teachers inform themselves of our future, is.
