What Is Education For? (1990)
I f today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rain forest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, the results of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 250
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s Education For? (1990)
author’s note 2010: Delivered as a commencement address at Arkansas College—now Lyon College—in May 1990. The numbers are dated but still roughly accurate, and the point of the essay is still valid.
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f today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rain forest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, the results of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 250 species, but no one knows the actual number. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare. By year’s end the numbers are staggering: The total loss of rain forest will equal an area the size of the state of Washington; expanding deserts will equal an area the size of the state of West Virginia; and the global population will have risen by more than 70 million. By the year 2000 a sizeable fraction of the life-forms extant on the planet in the year 1900 will be extinct or in jeopardy. The truth is that many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity. It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant This article was originally published in 1990.
D.W. Orr, Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-017-0_24, © David W. Orr 2011
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people. Rather, it results from the work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel once made the same point, noting that the designers and perpetrators of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald—the Holocaust—were the heirs of Kant and Goethe, widely thought to be the best educated people on Earth. But their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s (1990) words, “it emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.” I believe that the same could be said of our education. Toward the natural world it too emphasizes theories, not values; abstraction rather than consciousness; neat answers instead of questions; and technical efficiency over conscience. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival—the issues now l
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