Abstract
‘I call for a revolution’ (p. 69), proclaims Rolf Jucker, after offering a sweeping and disillusioning critique of formal education’s systematic inability to respond effectively to the moral mandate of sustainability. Understanding ‘revolution’ as a type of return, you might ask what exactly are we to return to?
In Do we Know What we are Doing, a short but nuanced and ambitious book working across a vast domain of thought, theory and study, Dr Jucker distinguishes his vision for return from ‘inherently false’ global revolutions that require colonialism and ‘totalitarian unifying coercion’ and are constructed of a ‘grand narrative’ offering humanity’s salvation. His revolution is based heavily on Wendell Berry’s utopian sense of generational justice attained through here-and-now ecological attunement and engagement. The ‘good future’ we seek—as we do through sustainability—already exists implicitly in the soil, marsh and mountains; we need only take care of this world in the present moment, according to Berry. Concluding that the United Nation’s (UN) Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) cannot be mainstreamed ‘into a system whose ideology, construction principles, guiding values, and understanding of education are diametrically opposed to sustainability’ (p. 70), Jucker casts away such dreamt up ‘big schemes’, recommending we return to our senses out of need for ‘small steps: face-to-face, hands-on learning as a [“co-creating”] community’ (p. 70). To have reservations that this worldview contains a myopic incapacity for dealing with the realities of the planet’s social–ecological challenges may depend on where you arrive to after assessing the nature of hegemony and personal agency in the twenty-first century.
Jucker covers tremendous ground on his path to ‘small is beautiful’. That he also begins the book claiming that our scientific knowledge of ecological limits must transform social reality if we are to survive as a species, before proceeding to invoke and engage the likes of Kant to Tocqueville, Chomsky to Zizek, Popper to Orr, Polyani to Meadows and Arendt to Hitchens, speaks to the ontological, metaphysical and epistemological tensions and musings of his endeavour. Jucker’s ambitious work dares us to consider the notion that sustainability requires nothing less than a perfect realization, application and integration of the humanities and the sciences.
True to the book’s title, his critique begins by demanding that we educators ‘ask ourselves a lot of often hard questions, about what we really know, about what really works, about our real behavior’ (p. 2). His resounding answer—based on system-level scientific knowledge—is that ‘all indicators (climate change, biodiversity, energy consumption, income inequality, meat consumption, etc.) point to the same conclusion: the paradigm change necessary for a sustainable society on a healthy planet is not happening’ (p. 54). Part of the problem is that education for sustainable development (ESD) framing is related to conventional education, wherein success, according to Jucker, by way of David Orr, ‘means essentially becoming more effective plunderers and exploiters of the biosphere and other people elsewhere on the globe and future generations’ (p. 54). Conventional education, shaped as it is by the Industrial Revolution, has a long, dark legacy of both indoctrinating ‘workers to the requirements of the industrial capitalist system’ (p. 15) and perpetuating a growth ideology that has (and will guarantee future) catastrophic social–ecological impacts. In anticipation of revisiting Jucker’s revolutionary return to the local, we may note his moral assessment of prevailing capitalist–indigenous cultural interactions mediated, in part, through education: ‘indigenous people are always forced to deny and forget their culture, knowledge, and traditions’ (p. 16). Jucker implies that we in the West are also colonized by our own economic ideology that ‘shapes what seems possible to imagine…in education, in the conception of the self and human development’ (p. 51).
If this discourse seems overly familiar, we might ask: why do so many educators today appear to be systematically replicating the industrial–capitalistic discursive paradigm, particularly in its current educational iteration of ‘21st century teaching and learning’? And why is there such passive support for ‘technology and innovation’ in twenty-first century education? Beyond the occasional editorial murmur (during media publication or faculty meeting), we are hard-pressed here in the United States (US) to locate a well-established discourse of resistance to such ideological hegemony.
In Chapter 7.6, ‘Beware of Technology’, Jucker continues to interrogate this hegemony by offering a much-needed and strong corrective to our current modes of technological understanding and engagement: ‘we believe [uncritically] the mantra that technology is neutral and always beneficial’, while its ‘usefulness in education, is generally massively overrated’. He concludes that our ‘over-enthusiasm is downright destructive since it furthers our dependency on unsustainable technological “solutions”’ (p. 59) and it distracts us from the evidence-based notion that ‘un-mediated face-to-face interaction between human beings in the real world is the most promising way to achieve the sustainability principles of self determination, empowerment, and democratic participation, as well as effective learning’ (p. 60). Jucker’s analysis of technology is pivotal to understanding his revolutionary manifesto for small-scale, community-based work. His argument seems to suggest that when we misuse or misunderstand technology, its capacity (under industrialism) to homogenize the world and our social relations flattens our ability to attune to ecological place.
He finishes the chapter by transitioning from theory to providing practical guidelines for technological practice and innovation, intentionally designed and engaged to meet the ‘real needs of our communities…in the context of a sustainable society’ (p. 63). Jucker’s guidelines for a ‘veritable paradigm shift’ for technology consist of both Berry’s nine standards for innovation (summarized as: new tools should be cheaper, at least as small, better, less energy-intensive, solar-based, repairable by ordinary people, available/repairable near home, sourced from a small private shop or store and harmless to anything good that already exists) and Neil Postman’s precautionary principle-based five-question heuristic (for example, ‘Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?’) (p. 64).
To gauge the return (or retreat) of Jucker’s revolution, we might revisit conventional assumptions about the irreplaceable role of international governance in attaining a sustainable civilization. How deeply enmeshed are such governing bodies with unsustainable economic hegemony and what are the corresponding implications? Jucker’s argument dismisses, entirely, the UN’s notion of and policy for ‘sustainable development’ because it attempts to fuse the ‘Western concept of limitless economic growth and “development” with the notion of “sustainability” which…is based on the fact that limitless material growth is a physical impossibility’ (p. 2). While according to conventional norms, ‘development’ requires increasing material consumption for the billions of people living in poverty—though Jucker entertains a concept of poverty defined by relationships rather than possessions—it remains unclear if development and economic growth both essentially require such consumption forever. Given the fundamentally abstract nature of our economic system, could our society develop without limit if the economy was based primarily on services and the type of growth that requires (very) little energy and material? Jucker would likely dismiss this as naïve, at best, and irresponsible, given both the ecological state of the world and the inertia and hegemony of our current economic system’s dependence on material growth.
He extends the same semantic and ideological attack on the term ‘education for sustainable development’, adding, ‘education quickly introduces a dichotomy between educators/teachers versus learners’ (p. 2). Remaining focused on the important failures of ESD, Jucker favours the term ‘learning for sustainability’ (LfS). Through an application of LfS, Jucker applies both research of non-Western societies and current scientific fact towards deconstructing ‘autonomous individualism’, ‘Western-style representative democracies’, ‘the myth of the unbreakable commons dilemma’ and an economic–existential ideology. From this point, he claims, ‘the central success factor for sustainably managing common resources in the long run…lies in small-scale, mutually committed [self-determining] democracy in action’ (p. 29). Continuing the thread of his revolution–argument and as evidenced, again, by history, it is also our ‘well-being’ that is best attained when economic relations serve (or are equivalent to) social relations within small equality-based communities. This offers some perspective for what Jucker believes is required for and by sustainability.
In Chapter 8, Jucker reasserts that the UN DESD is a categorical failure. It appeared bound to fail from the start given that its discourse has ‘been an integral part of the narrative of modernity, couched in terms of “progress” (“life-long learning”), “competition” (“student achievement”) and “growth” (“personal development”)’, claims Jucker, paraphrasing social psychologist Harald Welzer. Educators working on mission, values and strategic planning statements take heed: language is always coded, and loaded with political import. And by disconcerting implication, most of us are already complicit in the reproduction of an anti-sustainability discourse.
Jucker is not immune to his own missteps either. In Chapter 6, he claims that ‘a scientific mindset’ is the most important tool we have to understand our world, ourselves and our relationships. It is a mindset that remains ‘open, all the time, for new understanding and insights, for a deepening and enriching of knowledge’. He continues, ‘it is irreconcilable with religion or other esoteric world-views since they rely on belief rather than knowledge and understanding’ (p. 36). It remains to be seen if we will ever be able to reconcile the dialectical tensions between science and meaning, and for that matter, science and religion. Wendell Berry does not construct his politics of place exclusively through a scientific mindset, but rather through merging his poetic sensibility with scientific understanding to generate exquisite meaning of world. Further, the very notion of sustainability, with its claim of intergenerational rights, is surely a socially constructed belief.
Jucker’s over-literal thinking continues, ‘if you do not want to be fooling yourself about life and death, renouncing religion is the only way to truly become present to reality’ (p. 36). We may locate such problematic denial of the birth–death principle in today’s technology worshiping culture as well, something Jucker would likely agree with. But he does not clearly distinguish in his criticism any potentially important differences between religion and religious dogma, and he does not offer consideration for the critical role religion may have played for the indigenous cultures he cites as evidence of social relation-based economies and equality and community cooperation.
Do We Know What We Are Doing is a forceful and provocative manifesto that makes a revolutionary call to return to the local for ‘small-scale change that cannot be anything else but communal, co-created change in a specific, real place’ (p. 70). Jucker humbly offers three guiding principles and eight initial criteria for action to transform the here and now into a ‘laboratory of the future’. Here, he echoes again Berry’s worldview that practice and intending the good of the world can only be done locally at the (immediate) community scale. Questions about this worldview’s efficacy and limitations in an unfathomably complex and pluralistic world of over seven billion people living within a universe, itself profoundly shaped by (non-anthropogenic) ecological catastrophe, are oddly left unaddressed. Facing the failure of both ESD and the sustainability regime, however, Jucker may offer the most sane and dignified pathway forward. We are left to ponder its validity and ultimate utility under three different scenarios: humanity attains a sustainable civilization without population collapse, achieves post-ecological collapse recovery or faces acceptance (or denial) of our ultimate demise.