{"id":6953,"date":"2017-05-04T06:05:38","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T06:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6953"},"modified":"2017-05-04T06:05:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T06:05:38","slug":"learning-and-education-after-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/05\/04\/learning-and-education-after-sustainability\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning and education after sustainability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A rare event these days; I've had a new paper published \u2013 on Taylor &amp; Francis Online in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/toc\/rgld20\/7\/1\">special issue<\/a> of the journal <em>Global Discourse, <\/em>edited by John Foster. \u00a0It's in response to a paper by Steve Gough in the special issue which is, itself, a review of John Foster's book <em>After sustainability: denial, hope, retrieval<\/em>. \u00a0All rather involved, but it worked as a process and it made me think about sustainability. \u00a0Of course, to make complete sense of what I write, you'll have to read Steve's paper, and John's book, and ...<\/p>\n<p>This\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/tandfonline.com\/eprint\/Gp2yaNViTNyDpGYzZJsv\/full\">link<\/a> will take you to the\u00a0article. \u00a0To whet your appetite, this is how it ends:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>My final point is to note that I read [Gough's]\u00a0paper with the Abstract in mind because the last part of this holds out a particular promise for the paper.\u00a0 It says:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>The paper \u2026 identifies education as a common denominator; itself both a long term characteristic of evolved social behaviour and a short term social preoccupation.\u00a0 It suggests that, when both these aspects are considered simultaneously, education has considerable unexplored potential for the reflective, iterative management of interactions between humans and the rest of nature, under uncertainty.\u201c<\/em><\/p>\n<p>At the end of the paper I asked myself whether it had done justice to that idea, and to that potential.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t think it quite does as much as it might have.\u00a0 I thought about this as I read the last part of the paper, starting from \u201cModern Institutionalism \u2026\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 I think that the way that Gough deals with Hodgson\u2019s work (particularly through the 2007 quote) is valuable here.\u00a0 It seems to me that the \u201cpeople\u201d that Hodgson was writing about must include the young, but I wonder if young people are sufficiently of a special case to warrant a separate comment.\u00a0 They are, after all, subject to two forms of influence that most other people are not, both of which involve a moral guardianship: the home and family, and the school.\u00a0 Both these institutions are intent on inculcating good habits, often under the general heading of educating, and sometimes are in sharp opposition to each other.\u00a0 Think, for example, of Jamie Oliver\u2019s school food trials and the Yorkshire mothers who thrust burgers through school railings to ensure that their children got, what was in their view, proper food.\u00a0 Inevitably, they got little thanks for taking an active interest in their children\u2019s welfare.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, the most important of Gough\u2019s points might just be this:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Education seems attractive as a solution because it offers the hope that people might come to make better choices for themselves, rather than be in any way compelled.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Oh, if only all environmental educators saw things so clearly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A rare event these days; I've had a new paper published \u2013 on Taylor &amp; Francis Online in a special issue of the journal Global Discourse, edited by John Foster. \u00a0It's in response to a paper by Steve Gough in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}