permaculture

["Paul and Sandra" <crows@tkc.att.ne.jp>]

(Written from Tokyo by a American from the Puget Lowlands)

 

I have been drifting in occupation, from landscaper to teacher.  I have been eagerly applying my natural history habits to my new personal wilderness, the modern educational system.  I have some random thoughts and I would like to get some feedback.

 

The twin crucibles that forge social and consequently biological habit appear to be the family (not necessarily nuclear) and the school.  The process of education continues, and self-reevaluation is continuous, particularly under crisis.  But humans tend to seek environments which support their habitual lifestyle.  If you find nourishment through consumption you are not going to hang around a bunch of anti-consumerist grubby handed do it yer selfers.

 

Modern school seems to play heavily into a persons relationship to authority, information and sources of knowlege, the three seem quite interlinked.  I am using all this vague and eco-psyco language consciously, because I think that the relationships formed in school are sychronistic with the relationships persued within our culture.  Modern education is like a mass ritual which enforces a daily pattern upon millions of emerging minds.  It creates a context where the values of our way of life are transfered not only though teaching by primarily through experiential pattern recognition.

 

A midwest corrections commissioner once told me via national radio that those incarcerated learn primarily that incarceration and all the attendant abuses of liberty are valid tools of social power.  What are the tools of social and personal power that are learned not through the curriculum, but through the actual social power structures of a typical grade school?

 

In America there are many movements toward influencing the fundemental power relationships that make schools what they are.  Emergent curriculum, Whole Language Education, and other child centered approaches are all playing with core patterns.  In the international scene the followers of Frienet are experimenting with education as the starting point of social/political liberation.  Charter schools, Voucher systems, home schooling and the frightening concept of 'distance education' are all hewing pieces from the staid (though not always sober) establishment of the American public school system.  Simultaneously politicians are pointing to norm-referenced standardized testing as a yardstick in the international educational competition (huh?).

 

What does permaculture look like in education?  Has anyone seen models?  Has anyone seen site analysis?  Has anyone seen designs?  I have seen a few examples of salad dressing and installed one ongoing projects myself.  Are their outreach programs for schools?  What about accessing teacher trainings?  What about permaculture club along side the Junior Statesmen of America.  What an amazing microcosm for urban permaculture, a much needed expansion of a movement which tends to neglect the broad belly of the beast if favor of a personal rural get away.  Direct seeding is frequently more efficient then transplanting.  What pedagogy does permaculture education for adults reflect?  Is this a mature reflection of the permacultural idealism? 

 

Has permaculture become a comfortable retreat into moral superiority for those who have difficulty with addressing the transitional nature of change?  What does this reflect in terms of the patterns in permaculture education?

 

I sincerely don't know the answer to these questions.  I was just brainstorming, trying to find the tender tissue that signal opportunities for growth.  I want to start a dialog on these issues.  I have worked in landscapes for 10 years, I am an academically trained natural historian and I have devoured the works of Alexander, Fukuoka, Mollison, Gursheney, Rodale, Coleman, Yeomans, and many others both applied and theoretical.  Our of respect for the franchise nature of 'Permaculture', I have never called myself a 'Permaculture Designer' though I have been teaching what I have learned for years, and struggling to incorporate what I know into my own life pattern.  I wonder if our little clan of weed wizards has been too busy feeling special, and not busy enough interacting with the fundemental social patterns that daily rebuild our societal norms.  Perhaps in terms of what I have seen of the permaculture educational philosophy and sense of individual acheivement we are well within those norms.

 

Regards,

Paul Cereghino

vagrant in the largest metroplex on earth

crows@tkc.att.ne.jp

Tokyo, Japan