Basic Concerns, Assumptions, and Concepts

Our educational approach has, to date, looked at children as if their brains are empty - to be filled with knowledge and to prepare them for a job. We are beginning to know, however, that there is a better way - for education and for the future. The world that we -as parents- have created is not capable of responding to the basic needs of billions, even in simple terms like water, food, shelter, health care, energy and jobs. Many agree that it is urgent to bring the population explosion to a halt, and there is consensus that anyone who lives on Earth has the right to humane living conditions. Through the eyes of a child, the "right" path for the future looks substantially different from the world (and the educational system) that we, as adults, have wrought. Can fairy tales help such a child build a new reality? Ask a child.

Education can be about "reaching out", not "teaching", "exposing" not "imposing". This is easier said than done, but if we expect our children to grow beyond us, to enjoy life with soul, and to share responsibility for that new world which we are jointly capable of shaping, then we have to put systems in place to achieve these expectations.

Learning must be fun and challenging in order to be effective. Learning is not just about academic achievement, it's also about providing skills for life: how to communicate effectively, how to build something with bare hands, and how to express latent artistic talent. Learning should also focus on how to give shape and form to ones future and community. Every child is a unique, talented, creative individual who needs to be nurtured and allowed to grow in a caring and cooperative environment.

John Dewey's philosophy of education - instrumentalism (also called pragmatism) - focused on learning-by-doing rather than rote learning and dogmatic instruction, which was the current practice of his day. Learning by doing, we believe is, key to many of education's current successes and plays a vital role in the ZERI educational initiative and future.

Fritjof Capra is a modern day educational pioneer in systems thinking who has influenced the ZERI concept from the beginning. He has been instrumental in developing a school network in Northern California based on Ecoliteracy. His work has recently found a following in Brazil and Australia as well. “Being ecologically literate means understanding the basic patterns and processes by which nature sustains life and using these core concepts of ecology to create sustainable human communities. Applying ecological knowledge requires thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context. Ecological literacy means seeing the world as an interconnected whole.

Using systems theory, we see that all living systems share a set of common properties and principles of organization. Thus we discover similarities between phenomena at different levels of scale: the individual child, the classroom, the school, the district, and the surrounding human communities and ecosystems. With its intellectual grounding in systems thinking, Ecoliteracy offers a powerful framework for a systemic approach to school reform.” (Fritjof Capra - website of the Centre for Ecoliteracy).

At the same time, much has been recently learned regarding the importance of the relatively new dimension of education called Emotional Intelligence. Daniel Goleman has been instrumental in this work, building on the pioneering schooling of Karen McGown’s Nueva School in California. Researchers and educators alike are seeing the relationship between academic scores and the child's ability to deal with their emotions, especially in the context of today's complex society. Signs of the deficiencies in this dimension can be seen in the ever increasing attacks on teachers, murder of schoolmates, and teenage suicide. The trends are universal and have affected population groups around the world. Emotional Intelligence must, therefore, play a crucial role in the educational systems of the future.

Academic performance, arts, eco- emotional literacy and capacity to implement, expand our vision of the task of schools themselves, making them more explicitly society's agent for insuring that children learn the bases for life. This larger design requires, apart from any specifics of curriculum, using opportunities in and out of the classroom to help students turn moments of personal crisis into lessons, and as such empower the children to shape their own and their community's future. It is not academic or emotional intelligence, arts and spirituality or systems, it is all part of a whole, parts of which we have not yet discovered.

The opportunity is now here, for all of us:
*To transform academic learning in all areas, based on the tools previously discussed.
*To enable our children to develop emotional literacy for themselves.
*To help our children dream, vision, think, and act in systems.

This will be the first generation in which children envision their future clearly - not the worn out, derivative future that is given to them, but a future that they will create in response to the needs of all living species, and in co-evolution with nature.