Just before the start of a workshop on radical transformation by the echo collective. The workshop took place in an anarchist community center in the middle of a financial metropolis—a place of lived anti-capitalist utopia. Image source: authors.
"You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain degree of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on old formulas, the courage to invent the future" said Thomas Sankara in 1985. The path toward a degrowth society is such a fundamental change. It therefore requires all the courage for nonconformity and turning away from old formulas that we can muster, including in education.
However, at present education mostly lacks such courage, remains superficial and even reproduces oppressive and violent systems. Of course, formal educational institutions were designed to create tomorrow’s wage labor force and stabilize the current capitalist system. Parts of Western ecological movements remain committed to teaching solutions that don’t challenge our capitalist system. But we even observe that large parts of the degrowth movement are not sufficiently challenging how they think about and, in particular, how they practice, education. Therefore, this blog article proposes five ingredients that education should include to contribute to societal transformation at the scale that the degrowth community envisions. It is an invitation for readers to reflect on current and future degrowth education.
Before we present the five ingredients, we have some reflections on what transformative (un-)learning means to us: it is a learning process that truly contributes to a fundamental socio-ecological transformation. To do so it must be radical, addressing structural causes of harm and departing from prevailing ways of thinking. Transformative learning supports the dismantling of oppressive systems such as colonialism and patriarchy, promotes the good life for all everywhere, and enables a life in harmony with the planet. To address root causes, it is essential to question and change what are known as societal mental infrastructures. Mental infrastructures refer to our collective, normalized patterns of thinking and acting — deeply rooted norms, values, beliefs, and assumptions that nowadays are fundamentally shaped by the capitalist logic, and the associated devaluation and exploitation of certain groups of people and non-humans. Transformative education needs to center on recognizing, unlearning these deeply rooted, capitalist-shaped mental infrastructures. This lays the foundation for profound structural and material changes, as well as utopian ways of living together. We propose the following five key ingredients (the order does not imply any hierarchy).
Educational theories can help us understand how fundamental changes in our thinking and behavior might occur. Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning, for example, identifies a “disorienting dilemma” as the trigger for a transformative learning process: a key experience that challenges existing core beliefs and assumptions and evokes deep feelings of discomfort, disorientation, uncertainty, or fear. This emotional reaction prompts the learner to seek new perspectives and patterns of thought, often in dialogue with others. This should happen in a space where learners feel safe enough to feel these emotions. Some fundamental core beliefs that our societies need to shake up and unlearn are the separation between humans and “nature”, the importance of private property or logic, and the seeming inevitability of hierarchies.
As a system based on ever-expanding capital accumulation, capitalism inherently produces exploitative power structures, which in turn shape our mental infrastructures. Therefore, we believe that transformative learning must also be politically emancipatory. Key inspirations for politically emancipatory education include Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and hooks’ Teaching to Transgress.
According to thinkers such as Freire or Gramci, politically emancipatory education empowers learners to develop a so-called “critical consciousness”: the ability to analyze the world critically, recognize power structures and systems of domination (e.g., racism, (neo)colonialism, sexism, classism, ableism), and understand how individuals and institutions are embedded within them.
Paulo Freire emphasized that emancipation should occur within the learning process. Power dynamics between learners and educators should be dismantled, with educators becoming learning companions or co-learners. The degrowth movement still has substantial work to do in making sure it sufficiently challenges material and immaterial power structures (for example, this article describes how degrowth conferences need to become more accessible and inclusive, e.g. by providing visa support or child care. We could also ask why care work, such as cleaning toilets, is not collectively organized at such conferences?).
Which authors do we read? What images do we see? Which perspectives dominate educational work, and which are never heard or seen? Power and neocolonial structures are reflected in educational content and methods and in what we recognize as ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’. For instance, Indigenous authors are severely underrepresented in dominant education. We need a diversity of perspectives and methods, as well as a redefinition of what constitutes “knowledge” and “truth.”
In today’s society, Western rational-analytical thinking and empirical scientific methods are declared as desirable, universal, and objective. Meanwhile, traditional, Indigenous, and experiential knowledges are often degraded as superstition or translated to Western worldviews in oversimplified ways. This all reinforces the dominance of Western thought and suppresses alternative perspectives.
We need to challenge predominant educational methods. Embodied learning, engaging all the senses and especially emotions, currently plays at best a minor role in education, including in degrowth spaces (positive examples we have experienced in our Western-European contexts were theatre-based workshops, grief circles or GTDF-inspired workshops involving forest-walks). Yet this is essential for developing a comprehensive critical consciousness, experiencing the world holistically, cultivating empathy for all beings, and redefining relationships between people, and between humans and the more-than-human world.
Education should offer spaces in which we can reimagine how we want and ought to live.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote Fredric Jameson. Given our uncertainty about how a life in a degrowth society could look like, utopias can serve as compasses, offering alternatives to what is perceived as unavoidable. They can therefore be decisive motivators for political action and emancipation. There are various ways how to train our individual and collective ability to radically re-imagine realities, for example through visioning meditations or “what if” experiments.
In addition, so-called real utopias can serve as vital learning spaces. These are emancipatory practices and experimental spaces that are created, lived, or revived in today’s world, but are often much older than capitalism itself. Examples include citizen assemblies, solidarity-based agriculture, and commoning private property, as well as holistic worldviews, Indigenous knowledges and concepts such as Buen Vivir from South America or Ubuntu from Southern Africa (many such examples are compiled in Pluriverse – A Post-Development Dictionary). Real utopias make values and worldviews beyond cultural hegemony materially, and emotionally perceptible.
Our imaginations should dare to envision futures beyond existing realities. Yet, we can also be inspired from present and past social movements about what a path to utopia might look like—for example, the Black Panther movement, the Zapatistas in Mexico, or Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). These movements can expand our imagination of what transformation beyond capitalist paths might concretely look like and encourage us to believe that radical change is possible.
The Black Panther movement, the Zapatistas, and the Landless Workers’ Movement were or are all organized in groups. Organized groups provide a platform to exchange ideas, experiences, skills, and perspectives. They foster mutual support and solidarity and counteract patterns of individualism. They can encourage and empower people to engage in change and give them a sense of being part of a larger movement. Through organizing in groups, people can amplify their voices, explore and develop counter-narratives and alternative perspectives. They can transform dominant mental infrastructures into material change. Groups can also allow us to explore emancipatory, low-hierarchy ways of living. We also believe that in an increasingly collapsing world, we need to create collective spaces for grief which subsequently allow us to find new sources of hope (as also argued by Servant-Miklos in Pedagogies of Collapse).
“One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.” — bell hooks.
We believe these five ingredients are essential for a transformative education that exposes and challenges our mental infrastructures. At the same time, we do not present this as a complete or static framework. On the contrary, we observe that these ingredients raise many further questions: how can we transform or hospice our formal, hierarchical and capitalist education system and move towards more horizontal spaces? How exactly can these ingredients be implemented in practice while still being so embedded in modernity’s ways of thinking, sending, relating and being? We have recently also started to reflect on how education could center more on unlearning separation between humans and “nature”, or center more on collapse, change, Indigenous knowledges, storytelling and empathy and how these might reshape our ingredients in the future.
This PRALER reader gives inspiring examples of liberatory education projects around the world. Various examples that have already put in practice some of our ingredients, already exist for example in grassroot movement spaces such as ZADs or in collectives such as the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, Nazemi and Climate Vanguard.
With this article, we hope to inspire degrowthers to challenge their own notions and practices of education, to explore these unanswered questions and try out the ingredients in practice. We would also love to hear about your reflections and positive unlearning experiences.
An earlier version of this piece was published in German on Blog Postwachstum.
A reflection from participants of the Life After Growth summer school which took place in Kalentzi, Greece, in September 2023, and sought to rethink how we value, care for and nurture our collective affairs through the commons.
Education for sustainable development (ESD) is the educational stream of the sustainability discourse. One rather critical component of ESD has a lot in common with the degrowth discourse. Nevertheless, ESD has blind spots that prevent it from effectively contributing to socio-ecological transformations. Key points from the degrowth discourse could help making a degrowth-informed ESD an active part of positive socio-ecological transformations.
