"Why Study for A Future We Won't Have?"

Outing a Trick as Old as the Hills

This book is a collection of new and previously published essays about education, schools, study, and their interweaves with our ecological circumstances and with the long, often deeply buried, mixed and contested ancestries of thought and action that we drag along in our living, often without quite realizing it.

My work, both in writing and in the day-to-day work in schools with teachers and students, has been focused on exploring how much contemporary teaching, learning and curriculum are, however unwittingly or unwillingly, complicit in our “ecologically sorrowful times.” Schooling, broadly put, is fashioned after what turned out to be an ecologically disastrous form of fragmentation that despoils the living disciplines of knowledge with which schools have been entrusted. It also despoils the grace notes of teaching and learning itself by degrading the living fields in which teaching and learning might occur. Degrading the affection and deep pleasures of coming to know. This great analogy—between the degradation of ecological interrelatedness and the degradation of the interrelatedness of knowledge and experience and study—forms one core of this book.

The other core is this. My own work, over decades, has been directly focused on how “ecopedagogy”—a rethinking of theory and practice regarding teaching, learning and curriculum—offers, I believe, a hale, viable, sustaining, and rigorous alternative to these inherited complicities. I have seen it working—vibrantly, joyously, with tough and good work for and from all concerned—in school classrooms, in teachers’ writings and discussions, in students’ ventures, and in the work of us “university” folks.

It is not easy, but arranging and orchestrating a whole and hale classroom is never easy no matter what way you do it. Tugging against an often simply unknown undertow of worn-out ideas, images and practices simply make trying to shift away from these legacies all the tougher. It makes for cynicism: why study at all?

The good news is, there are myriad sources to draw from, myriad examples to try out, to emulate, in this long-standing orbit of, I have found, hopeful, relieving and generous work. There is nothing “new” about this move toward an ecologically viable understanding of teaching, learning, and curriculum. In my own case, I’ve been “at it” for nearly 35 years, and I am utterly surrounded and supported by a vast body of good, solid work, far beyond the scope of my own voice.

This book is simply a small breath of threads, of course, because the breadth and variety of sane, vivid classroom work and the philosophies that underwrite it goes beyond any one voice. This be but one set of paths and trails to follow, full of hints and side trails, each side trail with its own kin and relations (see Latremouille et al. [2024] and all its cited offshoots and bloodlines; see also Seidel and Jardine [2016], which is full of writing by practicing teachers and school administrators about such matters).

The sorrowfulness of our current ecological circumstances is undeniable, as is the uprising of often well-warranted anxieties, feelings of powerlessness, of being trapped or overwhelmed. I’m currently editing my way through this writing you are reading while news of Yellowknife, N.W.T. and Kelowna, B.C remain headlined, as news of the tropical storm heading to California is yet to be in full herald. And the fact that these references are utterly out of date is, somehow, somehow, part of the fix we’re in.

There’s smoke in the air where I live in the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, 53 degrees N., 4200’ or there abouts. At one point, the dogs stood inside in the doorway looking out, staying in. Animal bodies wise to the warn. The air quality index here in Bragg Creek topped 215 (https://www.accuweather.com/en/ca/bragg-creek/t0l/air-quality-index/2289595). It is now down to 27.

Why sit here writing? Why be relieved by this clearer air? This clearer head? Short answer: I have two grandchildren living 10 km away. I must do any work I am able to do. I write. We all must find that locale of our own agency. And, let me say it outright. I must do it no matter its outcome, no matter its future. What else might I do instead?

My own weep and wail are not going to last.

There is something else mixed in here that is also seems far more pronounced—nebulous, hazy scatter shots of often deliberate deceptions and distractions that are preyed upon so easily, that, in often deeply buried ways, profit at our often-hidden expense. They are mixed, too, with a myriad of promises that take an old, familiar shape. If you wail, I alone can fix it. Sound familiar?

Try to read this as a sort of ancient echo of an ancient bait-and-switch: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening” (Trump, 2018), coupled with claims of being redeemed, finding justice and retribution by whomever is making that promise (D. Smith, 2023), that same source being one who must maintain our anxiety and seem to remedy it in one deft gesture.

That it is difficult to carefully consider this maneuver itself without getting caught up in all the barking surrounding who exactly said it in this case—that is also part of our troubles. It is a marketing maneuver bent on suckering anyone who can’t snap out of its well-shaped and well-designed spell. We—I—get sucked in, mesmerized, angry, and thereby disabled. The disabling, of course, is part of the trick. This trick is as old as the hills, as old as our animal-body susceptibility to falling for it. It is simply uninformed and harmful to believe that this is something new or that it is a trick only “they” use or “they” fall for, even though its current drastic-ness is undeniable. That very “us and them” is itself manipulated to the profit of some and the agony of the earth and our earthly being.

Yet another trick as old as the hills. And I cannot let myself forget that the grievances preyed upon themselves are real, so the untangling and uprooting of the trick means that the root troubles remain. This last move should, of course, be one of the greatest concerns. It is not just tricks all the way down.

It is an old wisdom to remember that the present is always on the edge of portend, of looming. And being wrapped up in its temptings can elicit a “naive self-esteem of the present moment” (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxii) where my own so-called “gut reaction” can take over, blindly or otherwise. To stop. To consider. To come to know with great intimacy and detail. These things can get scared off in the stampedes of immediacy.

Even the Ravens who’ve come for years are a bit a-skitter and askew.

Thus be our current tangle. The environment heats our air and our imaginations, news seems fake, fakery seems promising, electronic inundation pelts from all directions, geared to cultivating wanting more and more, faster and faster:

One becomes kind of world-weary. You go through a stage where you just look at this world and think it’s crazy! “I’m living in a madhouse! Society is nuts!” And you think “No! Not this again! Don’t they ever learn? Do we have to go through this again?” If you attach to world-weariness, you attach to just another thing. (Sumedho, 2010, p. 95)

Schools and those who populate them are both suffering under an ecologically disastrous inheritance, and they are often unwittingly perpetuating and perpetrating that very disaster. And this, I suggest, has seeped deeply into the very logic used to understand the living disciplines entrusted to school, how to handle them, how to teach and learn them. It has seeped so deeply that it has fallen out of view, this inherited logic, and it is this that must be interrupted. It is this to which a more ecologically sane theory and practice of teaching and learning and curriculum must set itself. As you’ll see in the chapters that follow, research and theory itself is part of the culpability, here, and finding new ways to study must themselves find interrelatedness, intergenerationality, sustainability, place, interrelatedness, aliveness in the very act of studying well itself.

There is no doubt at all that the glib, standard story of [ever-accelerating] reality, is full of powers and potentialities, interests and persuasions, histories, interests, and profitability, lies, deep truths, insights, stupidities, and on and on. There is little doubt at all that what is needed is something like a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Gadamer, 1984) aimed at carefully and in great detail, untangling us from these blinder-binds. And this, as long experience has shown, must be done over and over and over again. It is relentless work, to remain alert and on the vibrating edge of suspect and resolve, worry and relief, somnambulance and insight. Again, an old story in which we can take heart. The tough task we face is nothing new, and we have companions—ready and able bodies of flesh and work and friendship, writing and conversation, birds called and foxes trotted.

But, of course, again, here is what has also happened, that questioning our circumstances has itself become easily marginalizable as “conspiracy theorizing,” itself often unwittingly manipulated by the very potentialities and powers that want to remain profiting from the surface stories.

There is, it seems, no time to sit, to think, to carefully consider, to commiserate and to encourage. Yet here I am, keyboard to hand, and you, book browsing or leafing through or sat down for a long feast of words. It is heartbreaking to be old enough to have experienced this in a very long arc of time, this acceleration I first experienced in so many schools so long ago, about the cast of mathematics education in schools (Jardine, 1990a), about curriculum integration (1990b), about the relentless pursuit of more and more writing in the early grades (Jardine & Rinehart, 1993; Jardine, 1994), the frazzled mood of classroom activities (Jardine, 1996).

Right at the point of weariness, here comes, lasery-eyed from the camera’s insistence on flashing, late afternoon, August 31, 2023:

It is not so much that this bear is an “other” (Shepard, 1996), but that it is a relative, that is most deeply transformative and alarming to my ecological somnambulance and forgetfulness. It is not just that I might come awake and start to remember these deep, Earthy relations. It is also that, even if I don’t, they all still bear witness to my life. Relations. Who would have thought? Coming across one of us that I had forgotten. Coming, therefore, across myself as also one of us. Such a funny thing to be surprised about again. In the face of this Great Alert Being, I, again, become one of us. Great Alert Being, this bear. Great Teacher. His and my meaty bodies both of the same “flesh of the [Earth]” (Abram, 1996, pp. 66–67), rapt in silent conversations (p. 49). Where, my god, have I been? (Jardine, 1997, p. 124)

Of course, my spine uprighted taking that picture. Of course. I was being studied, no doubt.

What a strange and sad and sorry mess. And yet here comes an email the day before the picture:

… this is what it is like to encounter prophets. We went wading in rivers and got caught in the most horrific terrifying thunderstorm and hiked for over 30 minutes in ankle deep mud and hail and water shaking with cold after sheltering and shivering in totally a not safe place where another human joined us and had just seen a bear. We sat in tall grass (like the deer!) in a little piece of aspen grove, where we could just see the tips of each other’s heads. (Jackie Seidel, personal communication)

It is difficult, I know, to not read some of the language in this book and the sources it cites as sheer exaggeration. But there is a deep seam of artful philosophizing requisite of it. Like this: bears, every fall and spring. Migratory: “every repetition is as … original” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 122) and new as that great alert being above. At the very same time, every repetition makes every repetition seem richer and fuller. Each bear sighting is perfectly and only and exquisitely itself and “it has its being only in becoming and return” (p. 123). What does this mean, for heaven’s sake? That last year’s bear ambles shift up and rise and get remembered, just like last year’s garden bespeaks this year’s. Just like one grandson makes the two-year-old now an older brother. “To be present” to this “means to participate” (p. 124) in an “increase in being” (p. 140) because, of course, I’ve become a grandparent of two, just like that. And everything old murmurs and creaks and rises up in witness. This is what ecological insight looks like. This is what hermeneutics offers as a theory of human understanding and experience.

Every that age-old citation from 1997, alongside that new email just arrived, add themselves to the complex ecosystem of experience, knowledge, remembering, recounting, relating, and weaving. I must say, though, that some days those old papers read like antiquated headstones, weathered, mossy, and a bit unreadable. Of course, attaching myself to that is being tricked all over again. That murmurs of graveyard walks which can have their own insights under the moss-gatherings and dates and hints and sorrows. That bear seems like a death-omen and a prophet all at once.

However, here I am, two grandsons in hand. My own narrow abilities can’t budge many of the tangles twisted up here—economic, market-driven, gender-tilted, racial, Indigenous, political, media-aroused, colonial, power-laden, deceitful, malicious, or simply dull-minded. I must remember that the good-hearted, well-intended, beautifully expressed, lovely things, are themselves tangles, too. This betangledness is the heart of ecological work, of hermeneutics, of teaching and learning at its ripest and most ready.

We all find ourselves meagre in these times, but, well, again, here we are. Luckily, this area of work is broad and deep and strong and teeming and on hand. What is contained here is—of course—just one fabric fold of threads.

“It’s Here, Eh?”

Dozens of Calgarians gathered on the steps of City Hall to demand government action on climate change Friday afternoon. Similar climate strikes in more than 130 countries around the world took place under the Fridays for Future banner, calling on politicians and industry leaders to do more to stop global warming. “I don’t believe that the people who don’t believe in climate change have any logic,” said Day Kloetzel, one of the students at the rally. “Climate change is real. There’s lots of evidence already. I’m here because I want people to think the truth,” she added. Kloetzel was surrounded by other students who hoisted handmade signs with messages like, “Why Study for A Future We Won’t Have?” (CBC News, 2019)

And what comes to my mind right away?

But what to do, what to do?

The geese say only, “study”

Robert Bly (2008)

“Everything points to some other thing. Nothing comes forward just in the one meaning that is offered to us” (Gadamer, 2007e, p. 131). Damn geese. I tracked an overhead gaggling pair just yesterday at my grandsons’ house. Spellbound under an arc of sight and sound overhead, itself rich enough to last a lifetime. The two-year-old, in imitation—one of the great human arts—touched his ear with a finger when he heard. Not just “I hear something” but also a gesture for me to “listen”:

Genuine literacy is most creatively a discursive activity that does not rest with a pedagogic literalness that puts language at the service of the will. Reading the world, inscribing and being profoundly inscribed by it, has to do more with deep attunement or hearing and involves a kind of obedience to life’s deepest resonances (< Fr. Obeir, “to obey”; > L. ob audire, “to hear from”). (Smith, 2020b, p. 158)

The maps of migratory lines are things of great beauty and knowledge. Reminding me—get back to that manuscript and figure out what to do about it. These geese are near to migration lines. This book, too, is a long stretch. That bear, winter coming, is migrating uphill, not south.

Such is my own lot. I write. I do what geese tell me to do. Well, some of the time. Meanwhile bears migrate uphill, so to speak. Whether these lines be their futures, though, I don’t know. They will migrate. Or not be. I will cease. Breaths will curve. Such be futures.

“Why Study for A Future We Won’t Have?” I expect that this title phrase gave you a start. I did me, for sure. I knew I had to hold it close and live with it long before I knew what I might have to face to do that. It straightened me up a bit.

I’m playing amid peas and carrots in the garden, these days, with my two-year-old grandson and watching the warm squirms of his young brother, under 2 weeks old in my bent arm, my shirt pulled up and over to block the orangish smoke-sun. I wrote the word “currently” beside each age and each age aged by the time I got back to the writing. This is not off topic. We move into a future one way or the other, and that is the futurity that needs study, repeated, open-hearted. Picking peas to shuck and freeze for the winter sure to come, even though this summer’s weather trembles that future, trembles our dreaming, trembles my eyes sore from smoke.

Red and itchy. Looking for places to settle.

Part of what follows in this book are chapters that rose up out of lingering around this new life in, and under, and amid these “ecologically sorrowful times.” These babes in arms and in hand make that main title all the more necessary to face, full on as much as I possibly can, in ways that I can, I always hope, help out and be a bit useful. I have to protect myself, too, measure my own measure, and not just end up spent at a breach I cannot attend. There’s a chapter on the guilt and necessity of loving this time with the vibrant “aliveness” of two wee ones in the face of screaming news, chapters on how “aliveness” and “inter-generationality” are key and core to what study must study.

I’ve even ventured to say that it is not clear, with my grandsons nearby, exactly who is giving or receiving an early childhood education right now. Feeling meagre again, happy armfuls and river water rushes—ah, of course:

Lean, thin, emaciated” (of persons or animals), from Old French megre, maigre ”thin” (12c.), from Latin macrum (nominative macer) “lean, thin” (source of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian magro), from PIE root *mak- ”long, thin.” Compare emaciate. (Online Etymological Dictionary [hereafter OED], under “meager, adj.”)

I know it might seem frilly and foolish, but our mixed and shared languages hide secrets were living in and living out as much as does the pea garden’s yields. Language, too, is an overwhelming ecological plenitude and mystery, if you treat it the right way, full of lodged memories, and long-forgotten pathways, especially now, up against arising tongues and tales long suppressed or marginalized—of birds, of tongues, of voices, of owl-swoops, outside the euro-orbit that can read back into this orbit something hale, healing one hopes.

Meanwhile, an old friend, Chris Gilham from Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia has been visiting family in Medicine Hat, here in Alberta. I sent him an early draft of this book’s proposal and we commiserated over the drastic, foreboding flooding back home in Nova Scotia.

And with a single, singularly Canadian phrase, he summed:

“It’s here, eh?”

Yes. It’s here. And here we are sat square in the midst. Educators, parents, grandparents, two-footeds anxious over the smoky air, dogs hesitating at the doorway, bear, head down ass up headfirst into compost, just like me reading Tsong-Kha-Pa all over again, digesting, filling my belly, nourished. Scholars, writers, readers, teachers, learners, those with handmade signs on the steps of City Hall. All squaring off with that title, that “why,” Chris’ both utterly clear and also nebulous “it” that’s “here” in specific and palpable ways, as well as in a brand-new and age-old blur and murmur of blood-curdles.

“Sorrow” is rooted etymologically in the idea of “care,” but this only if it does not paralyze me. It is one of the deep roots of hermeneutic insight—care, German Sorge as in the nature of our being human (its source in the contemporary hermeneutic tradition is Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time [1926/1962]). To maintain myself in this wee slipstream of insight and light, I must, over and over and over again (this is part of our lot,) refract my study away from its Medusa-like spells. We are not just bound. Stories of Medusa can free us just a tiny little bit so that we can clear our heads, talk with each other, parse what we’re hearing, relieve some of that which we were just flailing in. This, of course, is why there are stories of Medusa that let us get nearby enough to learn. Studying, properly allowed, can provide us companions that let the immediacies of my own experience work itself out into a world of companionship.

In what follows, this is a key to how I hope this book will be read. It is how it was written. It is why much of what follows details the work of hermeneutics, not only as a way of studying teaching, learning, curriculum schools and so on in sane, rigors, interrelated and interdependent ways, but how hermeneutics itself a deeply ecopedagogical “philosophy” of how thinking and experiencing work, how we get stuck in traditions, how we might enliven those which portend life, how livable relations between the young and the old, the new and the established might work, what the dangers are, where suspicion might lie and how, of course, suspicion can itself devolve away from its alerting function into one more dead end about fake confidences in fakeries.

To maintain myself in this wee slipstream of insight and (however dim the) light, I must think again, write anew, gather up the loved ones nearby, over and over and over again remember, commiserate, find that old Don Domanski poem and read it out loud, let my voice quiver over the words and the breaths between them. This “over and over” is itself part of our lot, not a failure to be efficient and effective enough. This is part of what our work requires. We are not building a new speedway Utopia, because, as the phrase betrays, that is “no place, fast.” We are not expecting something that will last forever, because forever is not an especially Earthly pursuit. In fact, that sort of hallucination born of fear and trepidation is only one of the circumstances that brought us here to this sharp brink.

Those of us who are teachers and students know about how here, mid-August writing this, there is a portend of new arrivals coming soon. We realize that working things out again, and again, is not the error of our ways but its profound strength and resilience, one we learn precisely from our ecological circumstances, one we’d better learn by paying good attention to these new arrivals. We be finite no matter how enlivened our work; this is the reason for some chapters below—they aren’t meant to be “morbid” but, instead, enlivening of our actual lot, making its Earthly fabrics real and palpable and full of encouragement, commiseration, and the poetics and fresh airs that can swirl up around us, even in the middle of the acrid smell this summer.

The new and the established. The young and the old. The coming and the going: Like my two grandsons, we can experience, experiment, commiserate, share, laugh, cry over a bumped forehead and cuddle wet and hot for a hug. We can love birdsongs and seek out the conditions of their arrivals and the ways of maintaining both them and our attention to them. We can share this affection over their swoops, study aerodynamics and migration patterns. This by itself won’t “save the world,” but what would you have us do? Nothing “by itself” will do that. It does increase the prospect that my actions will become more considered, more delicate, more adoring. Cleaving near it would make schooling more in line with the ecological bloodlines that are oozing all around us, to study this, deeply careful, well, over and over, here, there, every single curriculum topic can be treated this way, as a living field worthy of careful attention, and that acts of teaching and learning can re-gain some of their gracefulness and toughness and love.

Some of this fanciful sounding parade has been a long-standing-one in my own odd wander through these matters as a scholar, parent, teacher, student, grandfather, companion, writer, co-author, friend, fellow-being—and this last of air and Ravens, too, nearby Elbow River waters, old memories of cicadas of my young (ref), and even the cougar that killed one of our dogs years ago. This: