In community,
someone else’s good fortune is your good fortune; we are not fundamentally in competition.
3. We are all working together toward a common goal greater than any one of us. 4. My community is a rich source of resources: This could engender a feeling of right- ness and benevolence about the world.
5. Cultivating my own gifts is itself a gift to my community: We are all valuable. 6. My community reflects back the lessons I need to learn: We are interconnected. 7. My place in my community can be both fluid and fixed: I hold a multiplicity of roles.
These principles do not imply the elimination of competition or the subordination of
the individual. Leadership, differentiation of roles, and competition to fulfill those roles arise naturally in community—think not of a Marxist commune, but rather of an old- fashioned small town where neighbors know and rely on each other. The essential feature of community is, “We’re all in this together”—true not only on a social level but on an ecological level as well. How, then, to foster community literacy along these principles in a classroom? You have probably thought of some ways already. Cooperative group projects, prizes
that are only useful or fun if shared, a cooperative chore system where the contribution of each person is publicly acknowledged, student-led tutoring, community service as a class project, student involvement in creating the curriculum . . . all develop different aspects of community-oriented thinking. In community, someone else’s good fortune is your good fortune; we are not fundamentally in competition. Our interests are aligned. Perhaps it is time to bring this principle into the classroom more. Note well: I am not talking about applying traditional competitive incentives to a
Let us not use the methods of dying institutions to
teach the lessons of dying institutions.
curriculum that is about community. Nor am I suggesting that we simply apply a new pedagogy to the same standardized curriculum. Just as real community is antithetical to standardized mass-consumer society, so also is a standardized, test-driven curriculum incompatible with self-directed or group-directed learning driven by the authentic needs, interests, and desires of students. Therefore, teachers who resonate with community lit- eracy might encounter institutional inertia counter to that objective. The school system could probably use a lot of support and education itself in order to become an environ- ment hospitable to community literacy. Like the financial system though, the educational system is in a state of intractable,
probably terminal, crisis. As the old structures crumble, new opportunities emerge. Let us not use the methods of dying institutions to teach the lessons of dying institutions. To do so would be to prepare children for the past. Let us prepare them for the future, and in so doing, help bring that future into reality. We can align education with humanity’s calling to repair the social disconnection that has rent families, communities, eth- nicities, and ecosystems, and to rejoin the community of all life on Earth. !
Charles Eisenstein is a speaker, writer, and member of the faculty of Goddard College’s Health Arts and Sciences Program. He is the author of The Ascent of Humanity and the newly released Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transi- tion. Links to his work may be found on his website,
charleseisenstein.net.
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