Transforming education

Context: Disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities to transform education into a holistic and integrated learning system connected with the natural world.

Pandemic’s lessons for humanity:

• Interconnectedness: People, places, non-human entities, and processes are connected, which have been ignored in many spheres, including food systems and pedagogies.
• Investing in Green Economy: with more renewables, reduced motorized transport, and more work from home is the trend now. 

A different Education:

• Holistic Education: Integrating domains of various disciplines with the natural world.

• Just as there was a movement in history to include the narrative of a subaltern, we need integration with ecological connections.
• Geography must describe the land and the forests, how cities develop, and what these changes do to the coasts and water bodies.
• In Biology and Chemistry, more focus can be given to integrating organisms and cells with the materials, energy, and how information is exchanged.
• Inclusion of anthropogenic changes as a field of inquiry in literature, culture, and history is well documented.
• Thus, the foundation would be the linkages across human and non-human entities.

• Significant Unlearning: along with the new leaning.

• Curriculum developed will have to restructure and rebuild materials used to impart knowledge.

• Small Beginnings:

• The economic historian, Prasannan Parthasarathy, is preparing new materials to teach modern history incorporating ecological changes.
• Novelists and poets are beginning to integrate the Anthropocene in their writing.

Conclusion: 

• Gaia Hypothesis, an ecological theory, proposes that living creatures and the physical world are in a complex interacting system and maintains equilibrium.

• Unchecked ‘growth at any cost’ must be tackled through laying down the foundation of education on linkages with the environment.