We are limited by our education, guided by experience, and judge by our context. After one-child families, wholistic education is the best way to improve society. Why teach our children to make the same mistakes we have made for generations? We need well educated critical thinkers.

Belief Systems

A lot of people are dug deep in their belief system. Faith in one’s religion has been used as an excuse to suspend the intellect. How do we introduce critical thinking to see behind the curtain? How do we get people to sit around the kitchen table and realize we are getting screwed by wage slavery, unnecessary consumerism, tremendous inequity, and life-long debt? How do we get people to realize that less is more?

If we give them information little by little, eventually the walls will start breaking down and they will begin applying that information in their daily life. It takes a while for people to open their eyes to evolve to live a more balanced and happy life. Education is not trying to change who they are as human beings, or turn them into radical leftists. No one is saying we have to tear down Walmart. Just give people a complete education to make their own choices.

Sharing ideas ideas helps us become a better world. We need learn more about the important ideas about this planet that we live on so we can have a better future for our children. Parents may not agree with everything that their children learn, but isn’t having more information how each generation improves on the next?

Dumbed Down

Ignorance is complete when one does not know they are clueless. We are biorobots programmed to perpetuate civilization to survive. Most of our problems are from misguided, and misinformed leadership and electorate. We are trapped by our own inadequate education and our overpopulation preventing us from walking away from the system. Away has gone away, and we don’t even know it. That is why indigenous peoples fight to the death to not be put in captivity. They know modernity is a prison of our own choosing.

Weak-minded people are preyed upon by conservative exploiters. By eliminating choices, we all become prisoner of society and the control system. Poor education, reduces expectations, and hides externalized costs. Loosing our connection to Mother Earth, makes people vulnerable to organized religions. Religions divide society, and offer poor science fiction as a substitute for enlightenment.

Expand Values Beyond: Only Human Needs Matter

We have strived for generations to build movements to gain equality for all people. The problem is, we left out the other 30 million species we are killing off. The values of society at large and organized religion are all about people. Civilization has educated us to believe it is ok to turn a blind eye to the destruction we wrought on other life. We do not think about the ecosystems we destroy, the trillions of non-human lives that are lost and will never be born, nor the tapestry of life-systems we have shredded. It takes tens of thousands of years, without our interference, to rebuild an intact old-growth ecosystem.

We just don’t care, and that’s is wrong. Education is also about values. If a species does care about all life, then it has lost its right to exist. As long as we teach that Nature is a resource to be exploited, and we pay people to do so, then we are programming and rewarding our children to harm non-human species without remorse. If our values do not include empathy to all life, then they are immoral.

Empathy for all life begins with our diet. Remove meat and fish from our diet and end the suffering of billions of domesticated animals and the destruction of wild places for grazing and feed. Teach how dam removal can restore wild fisheries. Teach the alternatives to dams such as penstocks to generate power, and rail to ship commodities.

Social Philosophy

At a high level, civilization separates humans from nature. For example, each modern building tears a hole in Nature. Every civilized human destroys Nature’s biodiversity to live. Young children should be aware of these dichotomies and be able to verbalize them.

Teach storytelling and imagination. Allow children to invent and act out new worlds. Playing in a local old-growth ecosystem is a right given by Earth to all beings. Just invent new ways of being. Teach children to think outside the box and to have the insight to throw the box away as adults.

Relationship, Community, And Gender

We have lousy at community skills. When we lived in small interdependent tribal groups, we had to get along with each other to survive and make a living. Today we also don’t know most of our neighbors, and have zero skills to produce our own food and shelter. Humans evolved by being interdependent. Interdependence and diversity create resilience.

Our intimate relationship skills are quite poor as well. Half of marriages end in divorce, and half of those staying together are unhappy. Maybe marriage should last for seven years with an option of renewal. No divorce hassle if you want out.

There is one relationship style that makes people more respectful of one another. Everyone has experienced miscommunication, jealousy, and has some fear of abandonment. Polyamory is not for everyone, but people experienced in multiple long-term loving connections can become very conscious on how to manage the dynamics of relationship. Poly people have to use a shared calendar, talk about needs, unsaids, withhelds, and attachment. Communication has to be open and honest. Check-ins are valued, and drama is minimized. Ethical is displacing hierarchy. The feminine can be in balance with the masculine. Metamours, your lover’s lovers, know and support each other. STI testing and communication is current. Love is love.

If we can also reimagine society through the lens of the feminine, we will reverse destruction and begin to regenerate Earth. Men are goal oriented; while women see the big picture, must carry life, and have greater empathy for all.

Family Planning

Besides how do you get pregnant and STI’s, what else should we be taught early and by whom? Let’s face it, most parents do a lousy job of sexual education. High school biology text book illustrations are incomplete and medically inaccurate. Sexual education must go deeper into what the consequences of non-family planning are. Sex and love are related. The relation should also be better understood spiritually as young adults.

Our greatest problem is overpopulation caused by having more than one-child per couple, and by not getting permanent birth control. We are taught by society and most organized religions that having children is a god-given rights. Wrong!

The closets thing we have to a right is a privilege that society grants us. Nature grants no rights, she only grants self-survival. However, when a society or species fails to maintain its habitat, top soil, and biodiversity, it eventually loses its survival.

Civilization, our current human social organized system, is quickly destroying our habitat because it is based on large static populations that are far in excess of local and global carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the population of a species that its ecosystem can maintain before it degrades the system for other species. Civilization makes a living by turning Earth into human biomass or services. All other species except corn, cows and pets are rapidly dying. The entire Chinook salmon run of the Sacramento river has died this year because we gave away too much the water to farmers.[1]

Humanity is in harmony with an indigenous education[2], but civilization forces humanity to destroy the world. It comes down to education combined with choices given to call. Education expands and reveals hidden choices. Civilization cannot be fixed. Civilization is nice, it gave me this computer, but it is an unleashed an atomic bomb to all non-human life. The closest thing we can do to evolve civilization is to have one-child families with gender equality. The damage caused by civilization, and the need to reduce our numbers by 10-100x must be taught in schools.

Love Where We Live. Defend What We Love.

The people who should be the greatest defenders of the Wild are the rednecks who live there. But they have been so broken down by corporations and let down by the government that they are searching for individualism that makes them feel important, heard, recognized, and validated. What do you do when Tysen says you have to grow 40,000 chickens, or you will loose their contract and your house. Or Weyerhaeuser says they need every single tree your grandfather planted. This is a difficult place to be. People have to accept destroying their landscape because it’s the only way cities will give them money to survive. Rural people can’t up and quit, and ruin their lives.[*]

End Divisive Politics Created By The Urban–Rural Divide

People are afraid of change because there is risk involved. There is the devil you know vs. the devil you don’t. They sacrifice everything in their lives to have their American dream. Morals go by the way side. If they are destroying the environment, so be it. It is more important that they take care of their family. They are betting this will work. It’s all they have, because its the only choice they have been given.

Supporting a big bully who does not apologize for his behavior only makes disenfranchised people feel better, but it does not improve their situation.

Urban and suburban dwellers share responsibility for destroying rural landscapes through their ever-growing demand for resources. Urban peoples own a double responsibility: First, it’s their growing population and consumerism that creates the demand. Second, they have taken away all options for rural self-reliance by making everyone dependent on money, and good from cities.

Rural people should be pissed off and want better because this is the same thing we did to Native Americans. Rural people live in the garden of eden, given a more independence, they may stop allowing cities to pay them to destroy their home.

The bottom line, is that real experience is the basis of education. If you can see it, you can believe it.

The root of the problem is that people are not taught the consequences of not having only one-child. City dwellers are not transported to see the colossal damage of clear-cuts to make toilet paper to wipe their asses or build more stick-framed houses. They are not shown the destroyed prairies and deserts now devoid of almost all vegetation from overgrazed cattle. They do not see the poison fields where migrant workers live to grow the GMO chemical foods. The bottom line, is that real experience is the basis of education. If you can see it, you can believe it.[*]

Life And Permaculture

When we shop for food, clothing, and shelter we have no connection to the source, and our costs are externalized. If everyone had to spend a year growing food and another restoring forests, they would have a greater appreciation for where our sustenance comes from. If we shop, we appreciate the store. If we grow and wildcraft, we appreciate life and the land.

Teach permaculture design, indigenous skills, and ecology in middle school. Every child should work in the school garden, and spend a weekend camping under the stars. Every county in the United States should protect and restore wild parks large enough to sustain the original biodiversity. Dedicate 20 percent of more of every country to wild open space.

Teach natural systems from the hydrology cycle and weather; to local geology, aquatic, prairie, and forest ecology. Through the seasons, teach edible, and medicinal plant identification and uses. Every high school graduate should be able to describe at least 50 local native plants and animals, and how to build healthy top soil. They should even have experience growing a few native plants from seed. Starting in elementary school, give each student a small plot of their own to grow what every plants they desire. Make it a safe place to relax throughout their entire school career. Imagine how big a tree can grow over 12 years!

Meditation And Yoga

Meditation is a practice that can bring us more awareness in our lives. When practiced with a sense of compassion it can have extensive benefits on how we interact with ourselves and others. The more developed our meditation practice the more quickly and clearly we can access a deep inner wisdom. We can increasingly become aware of all kinds of emotions and thoughts that arise within us, learn to calmly sit with them with compassion, and learn not react to them in unskillful ways. Repeated practice of meditation can change our lives and the lives of those around us. It can wake us up to our full potential.[*]

With the foundation of meditation, the teaching of yoga can be added to deepen the awareness of self, and bring us greater health and vitality throughout our lives. Yoga compliments other exercises, maintains our flexibility and balance as we age, and calms the mind. Yoga practice also clears and calms the energy to make focused meditation come more easily.

Diet And Fitness

If almost half of Americans are obese, then we have poor nutrition and exercise education and choices. One has to wonder, if given the damage to our bodies and healthcare costs of junk foods, if there should be a minimal nutrition standard to sell a food to the public? Young children in elementary and middle school should be explained how unhealthy foods affect our bodies and the Earth. Be honest with children that animal husbandry is animal death-camps.

Put our values where our mouths are. Offer only organic plant-based vegan meals in schools. Teach how to cook vegan and raw. One of the barriers to eating healthy is knowing how to cook healthy. Allow all to eat healthy by converting our food chain to organic. It’s a matter of values.

Have healthy elderly people and young athletes speak to students about their nutrition and fitness. Teach physiology to all. Explain what real fitness is. Walking is barely exercise. Dedicate large open spaces for people to be fit in. Again, with one-child families, there are fewer people, so there is more open space, and people are not forced to try to exercise in crowded cities.

Scientific Method

Our society and economy is based on science. As many people as possible must be educated in how we go about making decisions in science. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. The point is the the result or answer using the scientific method is repeatable and provable again and again so we can base policy and even our beliefs on it. It’s a way we can all mutually agree. Lastly, greater scientific knowledge as the the esthetic and mystery of the beauty of life.

Equality of Education

The inequity built into our system starts with education. Therefore, all education must be equal. It should not be possible to purchase a better education. If there is a funding standard that makes education equal, then fund public schools to the same level as private schools. Make college education free for all those who qualify. Reallocate funds from the defense to education. Create the Department of Peace while we are at it.

These are just some ideas to grow happier people, and a better society for the future. Let’s teach our children well.

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Chuck Burr is author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution. Revised 10th Anniversary, Fourth Edition.

[1] SFGate, ‘Near-complete loss’ of young salmon in Sacramento River possible, California officials say. July 20, 2021. Amy Graff.

[2] Center for World Indigenous Studies. https://intercontinentalcry.org/

[*] Thank you to Denise R. for contributing Meditation and Yoga. Laura W. for contributing Belief Systems and Divisive Politics.