Dreams, Ditches, and Unravelling Yarn

Over this past summer, I read President Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, and along with some other books I read, a few specific passages prompted me to rethink the education I had had so far, my academic and educational settings, and my ability to receive such education in the first place. I cannot remember or directly quote the exact passages, and perhaps what I remember is slightly altered due to how I interpreted it, but there are two main things I remember. Obama worked as a social worker and community developer in a neighbourhood in Chicago for some time, and he comments on the schools and school systems he observed. The first thing he observes is that schools function as prisons for children, keeping them off the streets and away from criminal or dangerous activities, rather than spaces of fostering growth and curiosity in learning. The second, as I remember, is that the institution of a school is meant to be where children can learn about their cultural history, to learn how they as members of their community fit into their society. In an impoverished and predominantly black neighbourhood, children are taught a curriculum that reveals a violent and oppressive history working against their cultural community. Coupling that education with the deteriorating condition of their immediate neighbourhood and surroundings, there doesn’t seem to be message of welcoming and encouragement coming from society to these children. This paper will examine the aspect of environmental education that deals with the direct environment in which children learn, and how that is essential to take into consideration as part of their education itself.

I want to discuss some of the ideas about environmental education put forth by the authors of Urban Wildscapes and David Sobel in Childhood and Nature. An urban wildscape is defined as “urban spaces where natural as opposed to human agency appears to be shaping the land, especially where there is spontaneous growth of venation through natural succession;…can exist at different scales, from cracks in the pavement, to much more extensive urban landscapes, including woodland, unused allotments, river corridors, and derelict or brownfield sites.” Sobel discusses the notion of children playing in “ditches” and how that long-term childhood activity of interacting with a slice of nature leads to an awareness of the surrounding environment when entering adulthood. He then addresses the fact that “more than half of the world’s children live in urban settings,” and it is difficult for these children to have safe access to natural settings. Of course, this goes back to what urban wildscapes are; even a crack in the pavement can be a home to flowers or weeds or grass, which could serve as a “ditch” for children. But then the issue of safety arises. If an urban neighbourhood is not safe, has a lot of gang violence or drug use or crime, then the environment that children will experience will be less about solace and comfort found in blooming flowers amidst the asphalt, and more about the social and psychological effects that come from living in this atmosphere. On the other hand, I’m sure this can be said about any environment. Any living place will prompt different relationships between children and their environments. The extent to which that relationship is involved in nature depends on the area. These two readings, Urban Wildscapes and the David Sobel’s writing, discuss the physical land, infrastructure, and surroundings in an urban environment that can promote environmental education for a child, but at times it feels to be too much like the kind of commentary made by artistically-minded adults, pulling from childhood memories, and expressing the idea that this leads to powerful awareness of our environmental impact. This must be a select few, though, I imagine, because it might be unrealistic to expect from all children this approach to embracing the multi-elemental nature of their surroundings. Of course, it isn’t children who are expressing these thoughts, but rather, adults who have already had childhoods. It doesn’t seem natural that children are born with the intention to manipulate their material environment to form some sort of commentary on the state of humanity, by creating areas of play out of spaces deemed socially dangerous or by creating art. Yes, young children are curious and do ask questions, but not to a nihilistic extent. It seems like a lot of this is working backwards, taking as a resource the broken, no-longer-functional infrastructure of a systemic, economic society, and with it, just creating an exhibition of itself by presenting it as no longer functioning as it was intended. 

I suppose the most powerful education would be the kind that fosters behaviours that occur even before there is an adulthood of analysis and evaluation of childhood experiences. If you don’t have the opportunity, as a child, to immerse yourself in a ditch, how can you develop into an adult that nostalgically reminisces and reflects on their character and behavioral development, from which they are able to determine what is more environmentally friendly and what isn’t? Perhaps this question of adults versus children and the expectations we can have from them exists in all areas of education, not only environmental. 

The second idea that Obama had about schools in Chicago relates to some articles that I studied last semester in my economics class about inequality, especially in American cities. One topic dealt with violence in urban neighbourhoods and how it affects children and school attendance and the articles we studied were about a very violent neighbourhood in Chicago. Susan Saulny writes about one school in particular where one boy, “a football player on the honor roll, was the third to die violently this academic year — and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or sever beatings on their way to and from school…. Attacks have typically happened beyond a two-hour window from the start and end of school…and blocks away from school grounds….As crime is down in general and the Chicago schools themselves are among the safest places for students to be — none of the recent killings has taken place on school grounds — children continue to be killed in their neighborhoods…. One [killing] was a 7-year-old waiting at a hamburger stand with her father.” Another article, by Alex Kotlowitz, writes about the price paid by children who live in areas of public violence in Chicago: “Do the calculations and you realize that in the past 15 years, 8,083 people have been killed, most of them in a concentrated part of the city. There’s one particularly startling revelation that gets little notice: in 2011, more than four-fifths of all murders happened in a public place, a park, an alleyway, on the street, in a restaurant or at a gas station….[For children living in these violent areas and who have witnessed this violence] it can lead to outbursts of rage, an inability to sleep, flashbacks, a profound sense of being alone, a growing distrust of everyone around you, a heightened state of vigilance, a debilitating sense of guilt.”

Firstly, notice the language of Kotlowitz’s writing: “public place, a park, an alleyway, on the street.” It is the same language used by the authors of Urban Wildscapes and David Sobel's ditches, when talking about places in urban areas where children can dwell and experience the environment around them. These are the spaces in children’s neighbourhoods surrounding their homes and surrounding their schools. These are the spaces in which children cannot actually spend time alone with the bricks or the dirt of the bugs, because of the life-threatening circumstances. And not only do they then not have access to their neighbourhood “ditches,” but the fear, distraction, and trauma of violence is taking away from their ability to benefit from education within the schoolhouse and classroom. This violence creates a barrier to the education of these children and may keep them from being “environmentally active citizens,” as authors Saylan and Blumstein write. “To foster environmentally active citizens, schools can encourage appreciation of nature through a variety of outdoor experiences. Importantly, these encounters need not be isolated from the rest of the curricula.” But how can children learn about ‘the environment’ if they themselves to not have safe access to their own home environment? Or, is it that this education should deal directly with their own environment? That could be most effective, in teaching children how to emotionally and socially handle the immediate world they experience, rather than overwhelming them with a global environment which they can’t access because of their neighbourhood.

Saylan and Blumstein continue: “Morality and public education mentioned in the same sentence is often a source of controversy, because many people strongly believe that moral education comes exclusively from the home or from religion… Teaching moral and ethical systems may be outside the purview of environmental education, but environmental educators and policy makers must make sure that morality is included in standard curricula.” The degree to which a culture is aware or conscious of their impact on the environment may be included in their moral or ethical code. When it comes to a country like America, where State and Church are separate and the population is made up of several cultures, religious, moralities, etc., school bodies will be made up of children coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. Because their moral codes can’t be used in the classroom as a medium through which to teach environmentally-conscious behaviour, it is not possible for the government, whether Federal or State, to impose a curriculum that directly targets conduct and behaviour of children, as if trying to correct the culture.

That’s where family life comes into play. In a singular household, more or less, members of the family all come from a similar religious or cultural background. A child’s education begins in the family, in the home, on a very intimate, almost inherent level. Family life is the beginning of, well, everything for us. It is the setting in which we begin learning about ourselves, our place in the world, etc. The home is an environment of learning, and functions as a mold for directing our habits, practices, and behaviour. These habits, practices, and behaviours include those which may or may not be environmentally friendly. By environmentally friendly practices, I mean in this case, practices that are anti-polluting, recycling, reusing, and reducing waste produced by a household. To explore this, I want to talk about my family, but I also want to make clear that the story of my family and my community is not in any way meant to be representative of the populations and communities I wrote about earlier.

I’ve gotten mixed messages from my mother for most of my life. She would tell me of her childhood and early adulthood growing up in Poland and the scarcity of food and other materials, especially pod czas komuny, during communism. When she came to America and worked as a housekeeper and babysitter for various families, she would often knit sweaters. One time she was  unstitching and unravelling a sweater so that she could use the yarn to knit a new one, and the woman for whom she worked asked my mom why she was unravelling the sweater instead of throwing it out and buying a new one. 

My mother was surprised that people could be so wasteful with their materials and spend money on things they already had. And yet so often, more so now than before, she will tell me to stop wearing old clothes (which are still in pretty decent condition) and buy new ones, even though I am not truly in need of new clothes. Or when we were at my grandparents’s home, my mother scolded her mother for reusing a paper tablecloth which she’d brought from America over ten years ago. It didn’t bother my babcia that there was a stain on one end of the tablecloth; she just took scissors and cut it off. Why was it that reusing something, rather than discarding it and purchasing a new one, was now to be frowned upon? Well, a lot has changed in my mother’s life from the time she was a housekeeper in Texas to now. There is a dignity and pride that comes with the ability to purchase products, which means the opposite can be true as well, that having to reuse old possessions is shameful or embarrassing.

Because of my mom’s childhood family life and the economic situation that surrounded her when she was growing up, she developed what could be argued as environmentally friendly habits. However, when she started to live a different life that gave her more purchasing power, as a consumer in an economy, she would see that in order to appear financially successful, she needs to purchase and exhibit new things. This shows that the reasons for environmentally friendly habits within a family household may not be a direct reflection of wanting to reduce pollution and use of the planet’s resources, but simply that financially it makes more sense to reuse things.

Family life translates to neighbourhood and community life as well; all the things that surround you in your space when you are growing up. The socio-economic situation of these surroundings determines, in part, the kinds of habits people in the community will have. To take this back to Obama’s descriptions of the neighbourhood in Chicago, the poor and difficult living conditions reflect both society’s lack of interest or concern, but also the resulting lack of interest in the community members themselves. If people see that others aren’t caring for their space by providing stable and inviting infrastructure, clean streets, welcoming park spaces, then the people themselves will lose interest. This attitude of being disheartened can display itself in littering with trash, needles, gang violence, and other things that make a neighbourhood atmosphere feel unsafe. Because the education we receive from family, community, and neighbourhood life is a kind that affects us so inherently and profoundly, it is difficult to overrule that with education offered within a school. A classroom is such a temporary home, that it may be unrealistic to expect all students to internalize their in-class education the same way they do the lifestyle habits that come from their surrounding environment.

It is a challenge to somehow get a grasp on the national and global institution of school and through it enter the behaviour that is shaped by the private, intimate, and personal setting of family life. Obama writes, “The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.” Perhaps most so in urban neighbourhoods, but people are absolutely part of their environment and are the most active component of it. If children were taught about their immediate homes and communities, then they would find reason to connect and engage with the education in the classroom, and then use it to directly interact or cope with their neighbourhood environment.

Sources:

Urban Wildscapes. Anna Jorgenson and Richard Keenan
Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators. David Sobel
The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fit It). Charles Saylan and Daniel T. Blumstein
“Focus in Chicago: Students at Risk of Violence.” Susan Saulny
“The Price of Public Violence.” Kotlowitz.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Barrack Obama.