The "Great Transformation" of Teaching and Learning and Its Immeasurable Antidotes

• In Event: 54.080 - Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: 54.080-20 - CANCELLED: Stories of Love and Loss From Inuit, Tajik, Buddhist, and Rural American Perspectives: Living Well in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In his 1944 classic, The Great Transformation, economist Karl Polanyi succinctly described the massive shift in human society that converted humans into human rental units, converted the landscape into enclosed, monetized property, and usurped all measures of value, replacing them with a vast symbolic system of money. To these three, Polanyi could have added education: the 'Great Transformation' of teaching and learning was the extraction and refinement of teaching and learning from their embedded Indigenous context in the land and in the community and their conversion into an institutional process. I suggest that this process can be termed 'hydroponic education', since the literal definition of hydroponics is 'cultivating in a soil-less culture.' In this talk I will describe how the de-Indigenization of Europe via capitalism has led to a domino effect of de-Indigenization worldwide, and how the resultant institution of education --initially created to replace the teaching function performed in and by landscapes and communities-- is now assumed to be an inherent function in all human societies. This Euro-American assumption is challenged by Inuit elders and the Nunavut example of teaching and learning embedded in the environment and age-varied human communities. Buddhists practice the four immeasurable Buddhist meditations I suggest these four meditations—cultivating unlimited friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity—as another antidote to the purported scarcity of care. You might similarly cultivate the antidote, but you might do it by helping out in your community garden, or singing in a choir, or helping some friends build a house,, or just sitting, and being present with a sick relative. All these activities are ways we can cultivate rootedness and responsibility to landscapes and to each other and foster joy and creativity.

Author

• Derek Rasmussen, Simon Fraser University