(38:55) President Barack Obama: From the time our kids start grade school, we need to equip them with the skills they need to compete in the high-tech economy—in science and technology and engineering and math, where we are most likely to fall behind. We got to redesign our high schools, so that a diploma puts kids on a path to a good job.
Narration: K/R Selection teaches us that creating strong individuals can only be done with time, energy and care. It’s the duty of education to equip students with the sword of knowledge not a banner of passivity. It’s time for schools dedicate themselves to teaching what is true instead of actively teaching passivity.
Sophie Kang: I think educational institutions can do a lot more. I mean, everyone can do a lot more at this point. We’re so far gone.
J. Doe: I think college could be a way to educate people more about how their behavior is affecting the world.
Stephanie Zappa: They should be reading stuff that they wouldn’t ordinarily read. They should be exposed to ideas and systems and institutions that are aligned against them.
Peter Mutch: Let me put it this way, I don’t know that it’s a public school’s responsibility to ensure that every student who goes through the school has a adequate understanding of social justice on a global scale.
Kate O’Neill: I mean they can learn that it at home, but I think school also is a place where you are citizens. Where you should be taught to be citizens within the classroom, not just the passive recipients of knowledge.
Mark Anderson: If we were going to get all hands on deck to do this, I think education is a good place to start that because we’re talking about our nation’s future and our globe’s future when we talk about our children.
Stephanie Zappa: They should have a sense of community. They should have a sense of at least community within their own classrooms and schools and that they’re part of a larger culture. That it’s not all about me, it’s not just all about me getting ahead.
Carmen Johnston: In a lot of ways the natural world is almost invisible to us.
Jamie deWolf: Because it’s not part of the programming.
Peter Mutch: I don’t think that that’s something that necessarily needs to be taught in schools as a class for every student. I don’t think that it’s something that’s incredibly relevant.
Ted Grudin: It is a myth that institutions are separate from nature.
Eric Heltzel: I honestly don’t think there is any distinction between nature and the classroom, if you really think about it.
Ted Grudin: There are bad things that are natural, and there are good things that are artificial, but it’s all part of the same system.
Sophie Kang: When you die, you’re gonna go back to Earth because you’ve always been a part of Earth.
Narration: Manufactured chains trap us to the externalities of one another and this has become a new mode of human interaction, but we’re connected in much a deeper way. Because we are fanned by the same breath of life, birthed by the same earth and bathed by the same sun. Neither the present nor the future can be robbed of the bonds created in the past.
Ted Grudin: So I don’t see a disconnect. What I do see is that people have the conception of a disconnect.
Sophie Kang: Your conscious can be disconnected from nature in that you aren’t consciously thinking about these things.
(42:40) Jeff Duncan-Andrade: (Root Shock) It’s a term from Botany and what it describes is what happens to plants when they are uprooted. The initial shock to the roots that toxifies the plant is the same thing that happens to human beings. When you gentrify a community and you uproot people under the auspices of “revitalizing the community” it literally toxifies their body.
Narration: Severing our minds from what is natural is creating for us a purposeless rotation that poisons our judgment. As we uproot ourselves from the old soils of empathy, community, patience and love, and place them in a shallow and sterile soil, we toxify our morals and souls. This earth is our soil, our home, and we should be wary of allowing an entire global culture to dig up our minds from the deep roots of earth.
Carmen Johnston: I don’t think that people see themselves as part of a global community.
Ted Grudin: The global perspective is a very scary perspective, and that’s usually what’s taught, at least for the environmental topics.
Peter Mutch: There’s not a lot of people who are interested in studying the environment because they see it as something that’s so huge, and so vast, that how can they ever actually influence it?
Sophie Kang: We have whole junkyards floating in the ocean--Just floating, making rotations over and over again.
Peter Mutch: What’s the figure now, it’s like 98, 99% of scientists who study climate change agree that there is definite change and it is definitely attributable to people.
Jamie deWolf: Admitting that you need to change the climate and that you’re fucking over everybody simultaneously, it’s such a big issue that for people to think how their actions will reflect on that larger, is really asking people, especially huge corporate conglomerates, to evaluate what is selfish and what is selfless.
Carmen Johnston: Manufacturers in America outsourcing to places like India where you have young girls making clothes so that we can have cheap T-shirts. But I don’t think that any of us think about, feel connected to that 10-year-old girl that’s sitting at the sewing machine all day, or whatever, making a T-shirt for us. I think it would hurt too much for us to feel connected to her.
Ted Grudin: It’s depressing. I mean, how is one person going to feel empowered in that problem?
Jamie deWolf: It’s very hard, for Americans in particular, to institutionalize an acceptance that this is a fate that all of us are going to share and we need to reverse it rapidly.
Peter Mutch: If it’s something that I honestly just can’t do a whole lot about, I can’t worry about it, because there’s too much evil in the world to think about on a day-to-day basis. It would crush me.
Emily Mather: We do what we want to do and we don’t really think about it. We don’t really think about the repercussions it would have on other people or the immediate environment or anything.
(45:27) Heltzel: I mean I think culturally we’re very reflexive and not reflective. We respond to things that happen to us, and sometimes in very rash ways.
Jeff Duncan-Andrade: I believe the way that change happens is the way that change has always happened, by individuals committing to first changing themselves.
Narration: In botany the term Rhizome refers to an unseen mass of roots that nurtures a single plant. And our students have the same sort of network of roots. But too often students are treated as potted plants in the classroom--their cultural roots boxed in and not allowed to connect to each other or to the content of the classroom. Educators should comb out the roots of local experiences and tailor their curriculum to improve communities so that students can use the content as a tool of change.
Peter Mutch: So I have to just know that those issues are there and know that some part of me is complicit in them and that I’m enabling them, but, and what? Someone else is going to handle that problem.
Bobby John: You’re putting the responsibility on somebody else when this is—it’s your life too. You should care about it.
Sophie Kang: Because at this point, the problem is so far gone that it’s not going to be something that’s doable just by many, many individuals helping. It’s by many, many individuals affecting and influencing these huge institutions and these huge corporations to change the way that they act.
Mark Anderson: We like to kid ourselves, thinking that one classroom can have a major impact but the reality is that to have a major impact, it’s got to be systematic, and that requires collaboration and that requires communication.
Ted Grudin: One thing that could help is acknowledging the diversity of solutions.
Mark Anderson: As opposed to me creating something that’s perfect and something that I can just give to a teacher. Recognizing that that’s not a reality, instead, I have to design for each teacher’s knowledge and expertise as well as the students’ awareness. Try to tap into that and build a system that taps into that.
Narration: Schools should create deep empathetic citizens, and tailor their teachers’ professional development to this goal. But teachers should not wait for their institutions to take the lead. It starts with the individual educators on the ground.
Jeff Duncan-Andrade: Everybody’s not here. You got to first start with people where they’re at, which means you got to get in the dirt.
Ted Grudin: The importance of making changes on your local level and living on a local level and not always being burdened with the global.
Jeff Duncan-Andrade: It’s the people on the ground that actually change things.
Sophie Kang: I think it is difficult to get over that hill of thinking that well, it’s not my fault, so I’m not going to clean it up. It’s like the Tragedy of the Commons all over again.
Bobby John: I’m actually part of the problem, it’s not just these major corporations or businesses or whatever. I think once people start to realize that then they’ll start to come to some consensus that we need to do something about it.
(48:42) Narration: In “The Passion Project” we addressed our students’ intellectual passions, curriculum change, teaching styles, professional development, etc. In this movie we have addressed education through the lenses of ecology, but we have yet to address ecology in education. Lets get rid of the titles for a second. Forget about being an educator, a teacher, an administrator, just remember the fact that we’re human. We’re human in a world today where it is almost impossible for us not to harm each other, or our home. We’re in a classroom with other humans. So where is our human morality? Where is our responsibility in addressing planetary crises like climate change in our classrooms?
Jasmine Garcia: I don’t know what it’s really like to be a human being in my world because I don’t think of it like that. I don’t think of today being a history lesson in 50 years, you know, and I think that’s the way that we should look at it, like everyday life. We should look at it like, well, what are people going to be saying about my generation in 50 years?
Narration: Our future is at risk, but more importantly mothers and brothers, fathers and daughters are suffering now. Many students will tell you that educators are the only moment and the last chance for them to not only hear about what’s going on in the world, but to truly understand it, and to change it. What is your role in this world? What do you want it to be? Education has been a tool of mass production. Will you help mass-produce change?
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