The Folly of Growth

Many thanks to Paul Henderson for the following:

I’d like to draw your attention to a fascinating collection of articles in the 18th of October special issue of New Scientist entitled ‘The Folly of Growth’ http://tinyurl.com/5d7tgf  which brings together key thinkers from politics, economics and philosophy who profoundly disagree with our current growth based global economic model in favour of a ‘steady-state’ model. In my last piece ‘Privilege and Scam’ I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that our current education system, in which learners learn to earn, can never have any educational integrity because its prime directive is to increase GDP and ‘The Next Learning System’, in which learners will primarily learn to learn, could never be economically or politically sanctioned without a massive global paradigm shift away from affluenza infected values. This shift is exactly what is being called for in the aforementioned special issue. If you plotted global figures of compulsory state school attendance on the graph on pages 40-41 it would make a fine fit with the other disturbing data. It seemed to me whilst reading these articles that the only big missing piece in their jigsaw picture of a future sustainable society with a ‘steady-state’ economy was ‘The Next Learning System’. The described vision of a society based on a steady state economy would negate the need for double income families thus paving the way for a non-custodial learning system. Another interesting thing about this is that on p53 it describes people as working either part time or as a co-owner of a business rather than an employee, which is very similar to what John Taylor Gatto answered last month at the Schoolhouse conference when I asked him how he envisaged a global society educated through ‘open source learning’