Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint For Partnership Education In The 21st Century - Softcover

Eisler, Riane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813365694 ISBN 13: 9780813365695

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

In the wake of the tragedy of the shootings in Littleton at Columbine High School and other killings of children by children, there is increasing recognition of the urgent need for a deep systemic reassessment of what we are teaching our children. Based on the multidisciplinary research conducted by Riane Eisler over three decades, Tomorrow's Children presents a new integrated model for education: the partnership model. This model is an outgrowth of the cultural transformation theory developed by Dr. Eisler in her classic work The Chalice and the Blade. In that book, Eisler identifies a continuum of patterns for structuring relations. At one end of the continuum is the partnership model, which embodies equity, environmental sustainability, multiculturalism, and gender-fairness. At the opposite end of the continuum is the dominator model, which has marred much of our civilization. This model emphasizes control, authoritarianism, violence, gender discrimination, and environmental destruction. Eisler also shows that we today stand at a crossroads, where a shift to the partnership end of the continuum is essential for human welfare, and possibly survival. A new kind of education system is required to effectuate this shift. Tomorrow's Children applies the partnership model to education from kindergarten to twelfth grade and beyond, providing practical guidance for educators, parents, and students. Rather than one more add-on to existing methods and curricula, it provides a systemic approach that offers a more accurate and hopeful picture of what being human means. The curriculum loom and learning tapestry Eisler presents in Tomorrow's Children integrate three primary components of teaching and learning: what Eisler calls partnership process, partnership structure, and partnership content. The book melds Eisler's research and the work of many progressive educators into a cohesive and compelling blueprint for the kind of proactive education children need to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As Nel Noddings, a noted professor of education from Stanford University, writes, "the adoption of a partnership model in both schools and the larger society is essential for human life to flourish."

About this title

About the Author

Riane Eisler is best known as the author of the international bestseller The Chalice and the Blade (Harper & Row, 1987). Her other works include Sacred Pleasure (HarperCollins, 1995), The Partnership Way (Holistic Education Press, 1998), and her fictionalized memoir of growing up in Havana, Cuba, as a refugee from the Nazis, The Gate (iuniverse.com). Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies, keynotes conferences around the world, and lives with her husband in the Monterey Peninsula.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Tomorrow's Children

A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st CenturyBy Riane Tennenhaus Eisler

Westview Press

Copyright © 2001 Riane Tennenhaus Eisler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780813365695

Chapter One

Reconstructing Education

Basic Building Blocks

When I was little, I loved to play with building blocks. I lovedthe freedom of, block by block, constructing rooms, houses, towers, andcastles?worlds where I could let my imagination roam.

    I would like the reader of this book to also use the ideas in it as buildingblocks that can imaginatively be put together in a variety of contexts,grade levels, or classes into a new way of structuring education from earlychildhood onward.

    Each chapter is a building block by itself. Each chapter contains miniaturebuilding blocks for bringing the partnership model into different aspectsof education.

    I want to begin by briefly outlining the basic differences between whatI have called the partnership and dominator models, how I came to seethem, and why I so passionately want to bring the partnership model intoeducation.

    The journey of exploration that led to my discovery of the configurationsI named the partnership and dominator models is rooted in mychildhood. I needed answers to questions many of us have asked: questionsabout human society and human possibilities.

    These questions had a particular immediacy for me as a refugee childfrom Nazi Austria. I saw my father brutalized by Gestapo men anddragged away. I also saw my mother stand up to these men, demandingthat they let my father go, risking her life, shouting that what they weredoing was wrong. And I saw that, miraculously, my father was returned tous, and we were able to escape my native Vienna.

    In my child's mind, I tried to make sense of all this. As time went on, Ibegan to ask questions. Why are people cruel? Why do they hurt and killone another? If this is really just human nature, as we are often told, whyisn't everyone like that? Why are some people caring and peaceful? Whatpushes us in one direction or the other? And what can we do to affect this?

    My formal research began many years later, after a stint as a social scientistat the Rand Corporation's Systems Development Division, afterlaw school, after marriage and two children, and after the omnivorousconsumption of information from a huge range of fields?from sociology,anthropology, history, psychology, and systems science to archeology,mythology, literature, evolutionary studies, and the arts.

A Journey of Discovery

Gradually, as if watching the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together, Ibegan to glimpse patterns, connections. I was by now drawing from avery large database. I was looking at the whole of human history, includingprehistory. I was looking at both the so-called public sphere of economicsand politics and the private sphere of intimate parent-child andgender relations. I was deliberately including data about both halves ofhumanity: both women and men.

    What I found is that underneath the many differences in societiesthroughout human history?differences in geographical locations, timeperiods, religions, economics, politics, levels of technological development?aretwo basic possibilities for structuring our relations with oneanother and our natural environment. There were no terms available fordescribing this discovery, so I had to coin new ones. Yet I did not want touse terms that were arcane; I wanted terms that would immediately conveysome sense of the two contrasting social configurations I was seeing.

    The four core elements of one of these configurations are an authoritariantop-down social and family structure, rigid male-dominance, ahigh level of fear and built-in violence and abuse (from child and wifebeating to chronic warfare), and a system of beliefs, stories, and valuesthat make this kind of structure seem normal and right. Since rankings ofdomination?man over woman, race over race, religion over religion, nationover nation, man over nature?define this way of structuring relations,I called it the dominator model.

    At the other end of the spectrum were societies orienting to a very differentconfiguration. The four core elements of this configuration are amore democratic and egalitarian family and social structure, gender equity,a low level of institutionalized violence and abuse (as there is noneed for fear and force to maintain rigid rankings of domination), and asystem of beliefs, stories, and values that supports and validates this kindof structure as normal and right. After much pondering, I chose the termpartnership model to describe this template for structuring relations.

    My first book deriving from this research was The Chalice and the Blade:Our History, Our Future. It traced the cultural evolution of Western societiesfrom prehistory to the present in terms of the underlying tensionbetween these two basic alternatives for organizing how we think andlive. It also outlined the new macrohistorical analysis I call cultural transformationtheory, which proposes that shifts from one model to the otherare possible in times of extreme social and technological disequilibrium;that there is strong evidence of such a shift during our prehistory; andthat in our time of massive technological and social dislocation anotherfundamental shift is possible?to a world orienting more to partnershipthan domination.

    My findings show that we have the power to create for ourselves the realitywe yearn for. Indeed, sensing the partnership possibilities for our livesand our children's future, many of us are today questioning assumptionsthat were once considered unquestionable. We are rejecting the inevitabilityof war, injustice, and the course that decimates, pollutes, and destroysour natural habitat in the name of the once-hallowed "conquest of nature."We are learning that the war of the sexes is also not inevitable, that womenand men can live and love in partnership. We are searching for a moralityand spirituality that no longer direct us to an afterlife for better things orinstill in us fear of angry deities, but recognize the divine in that whichmakes us fully human: our great capacity, to love and to create.

    Because many of us are today searching for paths that can take us andtoday's and tomorrow's children into a future guided by partnershiprather than domination, I was invited to many places to speak about mywork. I lectured at universities, wrote for many publications, and wasasked to do educational consulting for schools.

    More and more, I began to think of systemic educational change.When I had taught university classes, I had experimented with what Inow saw were partnership methods. I had also given a great deal ofthought to how the structure of schools does not encourage partnershipin their top-down administrative hierarchies, and that many gradingmethods encourage the formation of dominator mindsets. Most jarring,however, were the conclusions I reached about what the curriculum content,much of the old educational canon, was actually instilling in theminds of students as knowledge and truth.

    I began to think of writing this book. I have been writing it for fiveyears. I write it with a tremendous sense of urgency, because in our timeof mounting environmental, economic, and political crises, all the world'schildren are at risk. At the same time, I see in our children the hope forthe future.

Nurturing Children's Humanity

At the core of every child is an intact human. Children have an enormouscapacity for love, joy, creativity, and caring. Children have a voracious curiosity,a hunger for understanding and meaning. Children also have anacute inborn sense of fairness and unfairness. Above all, children yearnfor love and validation and, given half a chance, are able to give thembountifully in return.

    In today's world of lightning-speed technological, economic, and socialflux, the development of these capacities is more crucial than ever before.Children need to understand and appreciate our natural habitat, ourMother Earth. They need to develop their innate capacity for love andfriendship, for caring and caretaking, for creativity, for sensitivity to theirown real needs and those of others.

    In a time when the mass media are children's first teachers about thelarger world, when children in the United States spend more time watchingtelevision than in any other activity, children also need to understandthat much of what they see in television shows, films, and video games iscounterfeit. They need to understand that violence only begets violenceand solves nothing, that obtaining material goods, while necessary for living,is not a worthy end in itself no matter how many commercial messagesto the contrary. They need to know that suffering is real, that hurtingpeople has terrible, often life-long, consequences no matter howmany cartoons and video games make mayhem and brutality seem normal,exciting, and even funny. They need to learn to distinguish betweenbeing hyped up and feeling real joy, between frantic fun and real pleasure,between healthy questioning and indifference or cynicism.

    If today's children are to find faith that is grounded in reality, theyneed a new vision of human nature and our place in the unfolding dramaof life on this Earth. If they are to retain their essential humanity, theyneed to hold fast to their dreams, rather than give in to the cynicism andme-firstism that is today often considered "cool." They need all this forthemselves, but they also need it for their children, lest they raise anothergeneration X, a generation struggling in this uncertain time to find identityand purpose and all too often becoming lost.

    One of the greatest and most urgent challenges facing today's childrenrelates to how they will nurture and educate tomorrow's children.Therein lies the real hope for our world.

    I passionately believe that if we give a substantial number of today'schildren the nurturance and education that enable them to live and workin the equitable, nonviolent, gender-fair, environmentally conscious, caring,and creative ways that characterize partnership rather than dominatorrelations, they will be able to make enough changes in beliefs and institutionsto support this way of relating in all spheres of life. They willalso be able to give their children the nurturance and education that makethe difference between realizing, or stunting, our great human potentials.

    Early childhood care and education are critical, as psychologists havelong known. But now this information comes to us with lightning-boltforce from neuroscience. When a baby is born, the brain continues todevelop and grow. In the process, it produces trillions of synapses or connectionsbetween neurons. But then the brain strengthens those connectionsor synapses that are used, and eliminates those that are seldom ornever used. We now know that the emotional and cognitive patterns establishedthrough this process are radically different depending on howsupportive and nurturing or deprived and abusive the child's human andphysical environment is. This environment largely determines such criticalmatters as whether or not we are venturesome and creative, whetherwe can work with peers or only take orders from above, and whether ornot we are able to resolve conflicts nonviolently?matters of key importancefor how we meet life's challenges, as well as for the postindustrialinformation economy.

    The kind of childcare?material, emotional, and mental?a child receives,particularly during the first three years of life, will lay neural pathwaysthat will largely determine both our mental capacities and our habitualemotional repertoire. Positive childhood caretaking that reliessubstantially on praise, loving touch, affection, and avoidance of violenceor threats releases the chemicals dopamine and serotonin into particularareas of the brain, promoting emotional stability and mental health. (Anexcellent resource for parents and teachers is Rob Reiner's video I AmYour Child: The First Years Last Forever.)

    By contrast, if children are subjected to negative, uncaring, fear-,shame-, and threat-based treatment or other aversive experiences such asviolence or sexual violation, they develop responses appropriate for thiskind of dominator environment. They become tyrannical, abusive andaggressive or withdrawn and chronically depressed, defensive, hypervigilant,and numb to their own pain as well as to that of others. Often thesechildren lack the capacity for aggressive impulse control and long-termplanning. Neuroscientists have found that regions of the brain's cortexand its limbic system (responsible for emotions, including attachment)are 20 to 30 percent smaller in abused children than in normal children,and that many children exposed to chronic and unpredictable stress sufferdeficits in their ability to learn.

    In short, caring and nurturing childcare has a direct influence not onlyon children's emotional development but also on their mental development,on their capacity to learn both in school and throughout their lives.

    Most parents love their children. But what makes the difference is theexpression of that love through loving touch, holding, talking, smiling,singing, and warmly responding to the child's needs and cries by providingcomfort, food, warmth, and a sense of safety and self-worth. Thiskind of childcare can be learned, as can an understanding of the stages ofchild development, of what babies and children are capable or incapableof comprehending and doing, and of the harm sometimes done to childrenthrough "traditional" punishment-based childrearing.

    Hence the pivotal importance of teaching partnership childcare andparenting based on praise, loving touch, rewards, and lack of threat. Foroptimal results, in addition to parenting classes for adults, the teaching ofthis kind of parenting and childcare should start early in our schools, as itwould in a partnership curriculum. This will ensure that people learnabout it while they are still young and more receptive.

    But it is all of education, not only early childhood education and educationfor parenting, that has to be reexamined and refrained so as to providechildren, teenagers, and, later, adults the mental and emotionalwherewithal to live good lives and create a good society. If we change oureducational system today, we will help tomorrow's children flourish. If weprepare today's children to meet the unprecedented challenges they face,if we help them begin to lay the foundations for a partnership rather thana dominator world, then tomorrow's children will have the potential tocreate a new era of human evolution.

The Partnership and Dominator Possibilities

Our biological repertoire offers many possibilities: violence and nonviolence,indifference and empathy, caring and cruelty, creativity and destructiveness.Which of these possibilities we actualize largely depends onsocial contexts and cues?on what we experience and what we learn tobelieve is normal, necessary, or appropriate.

    Through partnership education, young people can experience partnershiprelations with their teachers and their peers. They can find in theirteachers what Alice Miller called "helping witnesses" when in need.They can learn to have greater self-awareness and greater awareness ofothers and our natural habitat. They can be encouraged to ask questionsabout the narratives they are taught, to seek meaning and purpose in life,and to make healthy and informed life choices.

    At the core of partnership education is learning, both intellectuallyand experientially, that the partnership and dominator models are twounderlying alternatives for human relations. Relations based on fear, violence,and domination are a possibility. However, what distinguishes usas a species is not our cruelty and violence but our enormous capacity forcaring and creativity. Constructing relations and institutions that moreclosely approximate the partnership model helps us actualize these capacities.

    Partnership education helps students look beyond conventional socialcategories, such as capitalism versus communism, right versus left, religiousversus secular, and even industrial versus preindustrial or postindustrial.They can instead begin to focus on relationships?and on the underlyingquestion of what kinds of beliefs and social structures support orinhibit relations of violence or nonviolence, democracy or authoritarianism,justice or injustice, caring or cruelty, environmental sustainability orcollapse (see Figure 1.1).

    Through partnership education, young people can learn to use what Ihave called the partnership-dominator continuum as an analytical lens tolook at our present and past (see Figure 1.2). They will see that the degreeto which a society, organization, or family orients to one or the otherof these alternatives profoundly affects our lives, for better or for worse.They will be better able to decide what in our culture and society wewant to leave behind and what we need to strengthen. And they will understandthat, even though no society will be a utopia where there isnever any violence or injustice, these do not have to be idealized or builtinto the social and cultural fabric.

    Obviously there has already been considerable movement toward thepartnership model. If there had not been, we could not be discussing fundamentaleducational changes today without risking severe consequences,even death?as was the case for such free thought and speech not so longago during the European Middle Ages, and is still the case in some worldregions today. However, powerful dominator elements remain in our society.And some of these dominator elements are reflected in, and perpetuatedby, our education.

    Although we do not usually think of education in this way, what hasbeen passed from generation to generation as knowledge and truth derivesfrom earlier times. This is important, since otherwise we would, asthe expression goes, constantly have to reinvent the wheel, and much thatis valuable would be lost. But it also poses problems.

    To begin with, during much of recorded Western history prior to thelast several hundred years, most institutions, including schools, were designedto support authoritarian, inequitable, rigidly male-dominant, andchronically violent social structures. That is, they were designed to supportthe core configuration of the dominator model. Although this kindof education was appropriate for autocratic kingdoms, empires, and feudalfiefdoms that were constantly at war, it is not appropriate for a democraticand more peaceful society. Nonetheless, much in the present curriculastill reflects this legacy.

    Many of our teaching methods also stem from much more authoritarian,inequitable, male-dominated, and violent times. Like childrearingmethods based on mottoes such as "spare the rod and spoil the child,"these teaching methods were designed to prepare people to accept theirplace in rigid hierarchies of domination and unquestioningly obey ordersfrom above, whether from their teachers in school, supervisors at work,or rulers in government. These educational methods often model uncaring,even violent, behaviors, teaching children that violence and abuse bythose who hold power is normal and right. They heavily rely on negativemotivations, such as fear, guilt, and shame. They force children to focusprimarily on unempathic competition (as is still done by grading on thecurve) rather than empathic cooperation (as in team projects). And in significantways, they suppress inquisitiveness.

    Again, all this was appropriate for the autocratic monarchies, empires,and feudal fiefdoms that preceded more democratic societies. It was appropriatefor industrial assembly lines structured to conform to the dominatormodel, where workers were forced to be mere cogs in the industrialmachine and to strictly follow orders without question. But it isdecidedly not appropriate for a democratic society.

Continues...

Excerpted from Tomorrow's Childrenby Riane Tennenhaus Eisler Copyright © 2001 by Riane Tennenhaus Eisler. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813365694
• ISBN 13: 9780813365695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392