Information Of Interest International "Tomorrow's Children" - Partnership School And Education

WIN News, Spring, 2000

by RIANE EISLER.

From: 'PARTNERSHIP BULLETIN,' P.O. Box 30538, Tucson, AZ 85751. Fax: 520-298-0639; e-mail: cpsdel@aol.com

PARTNERSHIP EDUCATION

"Riane Eisler's newest book, Tomorrow's Children - A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century, (Westview Press), is not just one more program or method, but a new learning tapestry for the school of the future. Partnership education integrates three core components: partnership process, structure, and content (how, where and what we learn and teach)."

RIANE EISLER writes:

"Partnership Educationl is an education to help not only better navigate through our difficult times but also create a future oriented more to what in a study of cultural evolution is identified as a partnership rather than dominator model.

For over two centuries, educational reformers such as Johann Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, John Dewey and Paolo Freire have called for an education that prepares us for democracy rather than authoritarianism and that fosters ethical and caring relations.

Building on the work of these and other germinal education thinkers, I am proposing an expanded approach to educational reform that can help young people meet the unprecedented challenges of a world in which technology can either destroy us or free us to actualize our unique human capacities for creativity and caring. I call this approach partnership education.

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. Tomorrow's Children integrates three primary components of teaching and learning: partnership process, partnership structure and partnership content.

The partnership and dominator models describe not only individual relationships. They describe the specific systems of belief and social strucures that either nurture and support or inhibit and undermine equitable, democratic, nonviolent, and caring relations. Partnership education is foundational to a society that orients primarily to the partnership model.

TRANSFORMING EDUCATION

We need an education that offers children a more accurate, and hopeful vision of human nature and our place in the unfolding drama of life on this Earth.

In the mass media as well as in much of the conventional school curriculum, we humans are portrayed as inherently cruel, violent and selfish (for example, in education's emphasis on who conquered whom in wars). But what distinguishes us as a species is not our cruelty and violence but our enormous capacity for caring and creativity. This is our essential humanity, the basis on which we can build a better future.

Young people need an education that integrates the practical and the theoretical and the sciences and the humanities, inspiring a life of meaning and service. Because the social construction of the roles and relations of the female and male halves of humanity is central to both the partnership and the dominator social configuration, partnership education is gender balanced.

It integrates the history, needs, problems, and aspirations of both halves of humanity into what is taught as important knowledge and truth. Because in the partnership model difference is not automatically equated with inferiority or superiority, partnership education is multicultural.

It offers a pluralistic perspective that includes peoples of all races and a variety of backgrounds, as well as the animals and plants of the Earth we share. Since partnership education offers a systemic approach, environmental education is not an add-on but an integral part of the curriculum.

Through partnership education, young people will learn the dramatic story of our human adventure on this Earth against the backdrop of the need and prospects for a major cultural transformation[ldots]In the partnership school of the future, children will learn about the mystery and majesty of our amazing universe[ldots]young people will hear many stories of the wonders of life on our Earth. They will learn that cooperation and caring play a major part in the life of many species with whom we share our planet, and that what marks our human emergence is not our capacity to inflict pain but our enormous capacity to give and feel pleasure.

Boys and girls will learn to value women s contributions throughout human history, and to give particular value to the caring and caretaking work that was once devalued as 'merely women's work.' They will also understand that this work is the highest calling for both women and men.

Tomorrow's children will know that all of us, no matter what our color or culture, come from a common mother."

WOMEN IN SCIENCE, WHY SO FEW?

From 'News from NIKK- NORDIC INSTITUTE FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES AND GENDER RESEARCH

P.O. Box 1156 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, NORWAY; Fax: 47 22 85 89 50

"Governments, industry and research funders around the world want to increase the numbers of women in science. The relatively recent recognition of the economic value of not squandering half of our scientific potential is the modern face of a gross roots campaign many decades old.