Head of School’s Notebook | Our Planet

March 28, 2018

During last week’s revisit day for accepted students, I was speaking with the grandfather of one of our future Cate students. We were talking about schools and teaching when he paused, looked at me with a worried expression, and said very earnestly, “What about the planet?”

“What about it?” I asked, more than a little perplexed.

“I’m worried about it,” he said. “We’re not taking very good care of it. Do you teach that to your students? How to care for the earth?”

I wasn’t sure, frankly, how to answer that question. I’d like to think we teach our students how to care for and about all manner of things – themselves and each other, our campus, their respective educations, the environment, the wilderness that abuts our campus, the Carpinteria Valley, the Sierra, all of it, And the students bring their own intrinsic interests and passions to bear, surely some of which concern the planet.

Since that conversation I can’t escape news – most of it disheartening unfortunately – about the planet’s challenges. The New York Times is doing a study of the massive floating island of plastic detritus now covering a vast stretch of the central pacific. 37,000 tons of debris. Everything from children’s toys to fishing nets to Clorox bottles. It is breaking down, slowly, becoming micro-plastics ingested by fish and turtles and other marine life. Eventually, the plastics will travel through the food chain, and end up on our plates.

There was another article about sea ice, which forms and breaks up at the earth’s poles during winter and summer. This winter the sea ice coverage is the second lowest in history, nearly three times less than that which was recorded in the 1970s. There is speculation about what that might mean, most of it revolving around rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.

It is hard to know what to do with information of this sort. Perhaps we should, as that concerned grandfather said, teach this to our students, and share the ways in which we are underserving our planet. But I think they know. The attention to issues of sustainability and conservation and environmentalism is strong on our mesa. It animates our kids in ways that are pretty darn affirming, even with all the sobering news about garbage and melting ice caps and the like.

But there is a larger question, too, about the role of teachers or a school in telling students what issues they should care about. Academic endeavor is by its nature a fraught endeavor because real scholarship, the sort we are trying to catalyze in students, is about pushing beyond what anyone could or should be told. It is a journey enabled by skills of inquiry, curiosity, and an intrinsic need to know something that isn’t known or understood by others. It’s good old-fashioned exploring.

Our job – as parents or peers or teachers – is to find a way to help light the flame, inspire a little wonder or a compelling question, and begin to organize the ensuing odyssey. The lines of intellectual travel will never be straight or predictable and in many cases (perhaps most) the intended destination will never be reached. But the learning will still be profound regardless of how close or far from a student is to the mark. More important, the planet – and everyone on it – will likely be the beneficiaries of such inquiry.

If anything can save the world, perhaps it’s a good education for its inhabitants and caretakers. That’s what I should have told that grandfather.