In my twenties I worked as a gardener for five years. It was joyous but hard work. In 1987 I became a primary school teacher in Bristol. Working in early years settings convinced me that gardening, food production and cooking could act as a basis for pretty much all learning in the primary curriculum, as the children were utterly enthused and absorbed when they were practically engaged in these life affirming pursuits, and learned effortlessly, their creativity and curiosity constantly stimulated and nourished by the natural world around them. What’s more, gardening made them happy and they loved learning outdoors. Dismayed with the educational policies of the eighties and nineties, like so many others who loved teaching but disliked schools, I left teaching and pursued different paths.
It is hugely exciting now to see that ideas about food, the environment and learning are permeating the educational landscape with renewed energy and vigour. Within our own Creative Partnerships programme we observe an increasing number of projects focussing on growing food. This week it was a great privilege to meet up with my friend Paul Clarke to discuss his new book Growing Sustainable Communities – Our Great Work, which will be published later this year. I’ve been sharing ideas with Paul for the last year or so and it has been a fascinating ongoing discussion, as there are so many resonances between his ideas for developing sustainable learning communities and the work we are doing in Curious Minds to recognise the value of schools as hubs for community capacity building through creativity and culture.
Paul is as passionate as it gets about the need to address the crisis that is staring us in the face. Put simply, we cannot go on ignoring the fact that we are destroying our planet and in the process are holding onto a model of education that is contributing to unsustainability. Paul suggests we need to develop radical solutions to address our foolish addiction to progress through consumerism, and our short-sighted adherence to the idea that inexorable growth is the solution. The answer, he says, is to rethink our relationship with the environment and to totally rethink our concept of schools.
What I love about this work is its radicalism. Paul doesn’t hold back from suggesting a total redesign of the ways in which schools work, and his vision for schools as the core of community renaissance programmes that emphasise the need for all learning to be grounded in a full appreciation of environmental action which starts with the growing of food, is compelling. The book is full of detailed and careful thinking about both why we have to act and how we might move forwards. The inspirational community gardening and learning initiative – Incredible Edible – based where Paul lives in Todmorden (and which is spreading across the country and the globe), is referenced as an effective model for community capacity building that is demonstrating the power of these ideas when they are realised in action.
Paul’s ideas make absolute sense to me and I look forward to exploring further how we can work together to test them in practice with our school partners and in other settings. My own view is that we should take a hard look at the sort of growth we should aspire to as a society. Study after study would seem to reveal that the relentless pursuit of material growth produces no overall improvements in people’s happiness or well being; in fact the opposite seems true. So let’s aim for a growth in social justice, growth in mental wellbeing, growth in community cohesion and growth in imagination and spirit as a set of aims.
I’m confident enough about the power of these ideas to make a prediction that in twenty years time it will be inconceivable for a school, wherever it is located, to be built without the inclusion of a food production and energy generation system that is fully integrated into both the fabric of the building and the fabric of the curriculum. We’ll look back at these risk averse times, where children spend ridiculous amounts of time shut up inside schools, missing out on the limitless opportunities presented by learning in the outdoors, as being truly absurd. We’ll eventually come to our senses and realise that an education that is not grounded in a full understanding of our environment and how we can build a sustainable future together is no education at all.
Paul’s blog is well worth keeping an eye on. Find him at http://www.sustainableretreat.blogspot.com/
……and if you’d like to read a draft of Growing Sustainable Communities – Our Great Work, send Paul an e-mail and he’ll e mail you a pdf copy.
Have a look at Incredible Edible too – join the movement! http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/
Thanks Paul – my optimism is rekindled.
Chris May