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"Recess is Over” signals my interest in examining the problems of education, and not merely the problems in education. Education in most of the developed world during the last two centuries has promoted a willful rejection of the sort of boundaries and limiting factors that other cultures in other times have better acknowledged and better utilized to control population, and material and energy consumption. “Civic education” is a placeholder for what will replace the current educational system. But since educational systems by and large support the prevailing world view, it’s hard to know with certainty what a new educational model would teach until a paradigm replacement occurs. To demonstrate this feature of my thesis I briefly described two central paradigms and the educational models that served them. The first was the God-centered theology of Catholicism in the first millennium CE, and supported by the educational system known as scholasticism. The second was the individual-centered materialism that begins with atomism in physics, and that finds paradigmatic expression in the Enlightenment. The educational system that supports individualism is scientism. Both scholasticism and scientism have metaphysical commitments about what is real in the world, epistemological methodologies for securing truths about the world, and ethical, social and political systems organized around each paradigm’s primary metaphysical unit (what I call the “sovereign ”): God in the first instance, and the individual in the second. My thought experiment for this paper is to imagine what an educational model would look like that saw the ecosystem concept as the primary paradigm replacement for the current individualistic/atomistic worldview that runs through our systems of science, economics, politics, and ethics. What if ecosystems are more than conceptual tools, but rather—like God and individuals in previous paradigms—are real entities? How would an educational system advance this truth and prepare a new educated class for whom ecosystems would be the primary metaphysical unit? How would the ecosystem concept inform science, religion, politics, economics, and ethics? I offer some ideas and suggestions specific to higher education in the second half of the paper.

Stream: Cultural Sustainability

Paper: Recess is Over

Bill Vitek is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. He was the founding Director and co-creator of Clarkson’s Environmental Science & Policy Program. With a B.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Union College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Vitek’s research and writing is focused on the intersection between social practices and the environmental, cultural, and historical contexts in which they occur. He is the author of one book, the co-editor of two books, and the author of essays and articles on professional ethics, community, education and public life. He is currently editing his second book with Wes Jackson, In The Garden of Our Great Unknowing: Prospects for a New Worldview (forthcoming with the University Press of Kentucky). Vitek is a frequent invited lecturer and keynote speaker at conferences and universities, and he has offered ethics workshops to professional and corporate groups. He is writing a book of his own essays titled Philosophy as if the Future Mattered: Musings for a Post-Carbon World.