TOWARDS AN ECO-HUMANIST SCHOOL

Educating for a bright future

Teaching does not merely consist in transmitting knowledge. Education plays a decisive role in opening the way to feelings, creativity, and ethics. That’s why this book wants to help imbue our teaching with an active humanism. Learning History or Mathematics can become a heavy burden or a liberating exercise; it can keep us up at night or motivate us; it can open up perspectives for us or lock us into one. In short, it can play a role in plunging us into the most banal conformism or in awakening our awareness and courage.

In short, it can play its role in plunging us into the most banal conformism or in awakening awareness and courage. There, in that mental and vital nucleus, education offers all its added value and its reason for being; education rises there to another level, to the optimal level that we all want.

The adulteration of basic democratic values and human rights and the climate emergency are conditioning our lives. The pandemic is just another consequence of our estrangement from nature and the fact that we have made efficiency, profit and speed become sacred. Dialogue, silence and reflection are not well regarded. We have to hurry. We have to function. We have to optimize. The most important thing is that this immense resource-devouring machine that we have created continues without question. Teaching should refuse to play game, because if we understand it as an integral formation of the human being, as an ethically based task, rooted in curiosity, the reason for its existence lies in questions, in critical analysis.

Seen in this way, lively and proactive teachers acquire the immense value of helping to shape a future with hope.

I. BASIC QUESTIONS

• Knowing and acting

• The importance of details

• My “self” and our “selves”. Respect and coexistence

• Calibrating and managing emotions

• The main ingredient: stimulation, conversation and understanding

II. SOCIAL CLASSROOM: FAMILIES, NETWORKS, VALUES

• Education as a possibility

• Dreams, stages, hope

• Sense of community

• Families versus school

• What happened to the certainties?

III. AN ECOHUMANISTIC EDUCATION

• Question of priorities

• Apparent dilemmas

• Dialoguing with the world

• Environment, humanism and education

• Schools with value and meaning

IV. LIVING CLASSROOMS

• Why do we become teachers?

• Teachers who inspire

• The human factor

EPILOGUE. Waking up after the virus