Education reimagined.

Imaginarium

Vision, Values and Ethos.

Research form within the mainstream system provides a frame for a lived critique. We have seen how the system operates and the consequences it has for so many children. We understand through research that there is an increasing number of children who ‘do not fit the mould’ and, even those who do, the outcomes are not necessarily conducive for our ecosystem’s or, for that matter, our own wellbeing.

Working within the system is exhausting, for parents, for children and for school staff. The constant bombardment of ‘new’ material, ‘new’ schemes, ‘new’ initiatives that we all have to get our heads around, staff plan for, enact, feedback, evaluate and then justify why a certain proportion have not obtained a certain arbitrary point at an arbitrary time in their lives. The system seems to be stressing everyone to the point of breaking. Teacher retention is low and there has been a 50% increase in ‘home schooling’ in East Sussex during the five years leading up to 2022.

It would appear the case that providing ‘education’ from an institution is just amplifying the effect of our disconnection with our environment, our community. The way it which we currently apply education, through the system of schooling, is abstracting humans from the processes of life, taking us further into our own heads, placing all value upon human existence and the advancement of our own intellect, to the detriment of our environment.

A new vision is therefore to create a space that brings together those who have reached the same questions, wondering what else could be enabled to support young people’s learning journey. The vision is not aimed solely at academic, nor at technical, nor at creative outcomes but for ones that align to community, our ecosystem, our wellbeing.

A new set of values focus upon wellbeing. Again a relatively misunderstood frame and one that focuses upon the individual within mainstream. However, wellbeing itself is a deeply rooted within our understanding of our connected, interdependencies. We, humans, in fact most life organisms, are not singular structures. We are incredibly complex beings. There are over 40 trillion bacteria that make up our microbiome inside our gut, we are more bacteria than we are human. Our wellbeing is dependant upon the health of our microbiome, its diversity, and the, therefore the health of our wider ecosystem, has an impact upon how we maintain that balance within our own microbiome. The bacteria in our microbiomes impact all aspects of our health, both cognitive and physical. Our skin and organ function is determined by the balance of chemicals produced by our bacteria. Our mood changes when those bacteria are imbalanced and disease prevalence increases as we reduce both the variety and quantities of bacteria within our gut microbiomes. Every aspect of every function is, in some way or another, controlled or impacted by the community of bacteria that we have within our bodies.

Loading our bodies with highly processed foods, or food with antibiotics contained within them, or foods that have been sprayed with pesticides, contributes to a dysbiosis, an imbalance, in our gut microbiome and therefore a detriment to our wellbeing. Nutrition is widely misunderstood in western cultures and we have forgotten that everything we need is within our ecosystem. There are around 300 plants that are edible but we eat only a small percentage of them, and with the typical western microbiome containing 120 - 150 species of bacteria, when a healthy biome is around 350 species, it is unsurprising that we have such poor health in western cultures. Health and Education go hand in hand with Wellbeing, they are not separate, they are entangled at their very core. If we do not have an education of our health, and that of our ecosystem and environment, our wellbeing will be eroded, we will get ill, our bodies will not function as they could and that will impact everyone around us.

A new ethos is required, as you might imagine, to nurture that understanding. That we are nature, that we are part of an ecosystem, that we are an ecosystem ourselves and that at the core is, cooperation and symbiotic communities. If we hope to nurture Happy, Healthy, Connected and Creative individuals who care about life, recognise unique attributes, value diversity and embrace collaborative practice for a life long learning journey, we have to reimagine how we connect to each other, supporting and to sharing in this journey, for as long as required. This is a philosophy that fundamentally aligns with a reach out to the community, to share in a journey of living, learning and growing better together.

We are in a profound time, one of multiple crisis and complex problems. We recognise this threat but also the opportunity, to create regenerative systems, to consider how we might organise differently and to demonstrate what is possible if we come together as community, hive minding, collaborating and supporting our communities to adapt and transition to those regenerative systems, practices and processes required for our futures.

Joined up thinking, co-created learning:

Having worked to support mainstream schools to embrace more holistic practices over the past 20 years, it has become ever apparent that there is less and less questioning of how the system works and an increasing amount of energy spent on operating schools to demonstrate that they are meeting the current systems requirements, better results, higher grades, increasing performance.

Considering education through a lens of nature, asking: what is it that we need to understand in order to operate well within our environment, seems to be one of the ultimate forgotten questions. Surely one of the main tenants of education is to support community; therefore to support parents to support children. It is this point that seems so foreign to mainstream. If institutions are not seen as being supportive, that they somehow make it harder for us all to operate, what education is being offered? It is this negitive message that must be addressed.

It becomes further highlighted within this time of crisis, housing, cost of living, energy are all rolled into the same issue that we are now seeing so clearly. The climate and ecological breakdown is, unquestionably a result of human activity and, further still, much of that activity is simply fuelled by the current world focus upon economic growth. With our current overshoot day in July, (the day in which we surpass the consumption of our naturally replenished resources each year), our focus need to turn to de-growth economics, not steady state, actual reduction in the amount we consume, so that our overshoot day is not reached each year and maybe that we actually regenerate more resources than we use.

Let’s directly look at the operation of mainstream schools currently through a community lens. A chronic criticism of mainstream is the ability to provide accessible and affordable childcare. With the escalating cost of living, including the housing market, people are having to work longer hours to continue to have a relative income. When rent prices move from 30 - 40 % of a households income, why is it that our leaders in education are so slow to react? If an income is squeezed by 10%, would it not be useful for our institutions to adapt and try and mitigate against that impact? Should these institutions not work to bring real life experience into consideration? Isn’t that what the system is supposed to do? Support people to be able to operate within our social construct, life?

Viewing schools as simply a place to support children is a narrow view of what these institutions might be able to support. We must be able to support leaders within these institutions to take more notice of the ever changing needs of their communities and their environment.

In this time of multiple crisis’ should we not be looking to leaders who can create positive change within these institutions? If not, should we not be putting pressures on Governing bodies to hold these leaders to account? Let’s consider, from first principles, how did these institutions come into existence and how are they to be realised as a community service? Firstly, schools, certainly state maintained schools, are funded from the public purse. They are built and supported through central government education department funding, yes, there might be cross subsidise from health and department of sport but, the funding spend is from central government. These are therefore public assets, they are not privately owned. This point is one that we should hold in our minds when decisions are made about their operations, ultimately, are they serving the public?

There are several mechanisms at play here and although I am not going to tease them all out, there are some non statutory considerations that might make some huge changes to how these institutions are perceived. This point was highlighted during the Covid 19 lock downs where distinct questions were asked of these institutions based upon there social geo-economic locations. Schools from less affluent areas were asked questions as to how they might support their communities to access food and safe spaces, whilst those schools in more affluent areas were asked about how they were continuing to provide consistent ‘education’ for their pupils.

If we deconstruct these statements, they fundamentally align to the same question, how are schools supporting the development of their communities. Those schools being asked how they can support the access of food and safe spaces is, an identified need and, will have a particular stigma attached to it. Considerations of how communities are coping to look after their children, if they are not able to provide food, will undoubtedly come to the forefront of conversation. If we take our worldly view’s associated from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can begin to understand why this becomes an automatic assumption. Maslow positioned the hierarchy as linear, that one needs to meet basic needs before one can transcend. Incidentally, this is also applied to the geo political stage, where countries needs are viewed through this lens, that in some way they must be developed so that they can climb the hierarchy. As we know from Neef, this argument is flawed not only because Maslow based his hierarchy upon a small sample of American, White, Rich, Famous, Males, but that it is possible for, for example, our psychological needs to be met even if our basic needs are not, they are not linear they are entwined. It is not plausible to state that one can only aspire to ‘higher’ needs when ones ‘lower’ needs are met, all of these needs are apparent all of the time, they are in a state of flow. It is possible to reach a state of ‘enlightenment’ of ‘self actualisation’ or of ‘transcendence’ if we are hungry and do not have a dwelling, for example.

Therefore, in the same breath, families not being able to access food, because they are unable to afford it, does not presume that the family is unable to meet the other various needs of their children. What it does mean is that our current system has made a basic human right, the access to food, more difficult to access for certain socio economic demographics.

Rephrasing the term to align with a the local community, those providing education, from our institutions, should be empowered to address the needs of their individual communities and work to meet those, not an arbitary standard set for the nation to aspire to. One of the main issue to tackle here, is reducing inequalities in education, SDG 10. Within state practice, inequality is widening because we do not allow everyone to access the same. With private schooling, it is obvious to see the access barriers and they are often played off against one another. Out of school services are private, they are mostly outsourced and unregulated. There is, as we also understand from research, a private system operating within the state provision. School food is also outsourced, mostly to full profit providers. It is therefore very blinkered to take a polarised position of ‘private’ education when children can either be afforded the opportunity to attend ‘enrichment’ out of school provisions or, they can not.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.