Educating for the anthropocene: schooling and activism in the face of slow violence

Scientific consensus holds fast to acknowledging the anthropogenic acceleration of climate destabilisation, and a larger sea change in cultural values and proliferation of written and screen texts trends towards heightened awareness and concern for the urgency of environmental action. Nonetheless, there remains an uphill battle to be fought against the mired politics of the status quo and the enigmatic role that education might – nay, must – play in this larger mission. In Educating for the Anthropocene, Peter Sutoris brings cultural anthropology to bear on the potential for schooling as (to butcher Audre Lourde’s well-known axiom) both a necessary tool to be wielded and, simultaneously, a house to be dismantled in the undoing and redoing of global norms and imaginaries around the environmental expectations, limitations, and languages ensconced by centuries of colonial and neoliberal shaping.

Demonstrating his ethnographic integrity, Sutoris’ ambitious foray is emblazoned with self-awareness, reflection, and admission of complicity. Shockingly optimistic for a study founded upon Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur, Educating for the Anthropocene focuses on field work in Pashulok, India and Wentworh, South Africa – crucibles of the postcolonial in that they are still today slowly decolonizing ‘“communities “‘of the future”’, where the accelerating face of slow violence is found … ’ – therefore, they are also ‘places of the past’” (10). These sites act as iconic bearers of just how deeply educational institutions, forged in colonial fire, smoulder with the vestigial safeguards, not only of ideological frameworks but of the role that schooling plays as a buttress for epistemological dogma and existential limitations.

Building a critical framework between Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism and Ricoeur’s public anthropology, Sutoris insists that education is systemically political, and that ’”politics” is not abstract but radically practical’ (6). Deeply grounded in the preservation of the ideological status quo and social mechanisms of colonialism and, subsequently, neoliberalism, education functions less to prepare future citizens for what they can do than what they cannot, less shapes what imaginaries are potentially envisioned than determining which are kept in the dark. Educating for the Anthropocene thus acts as a corollary within the space of pedagogy and schooling for the cultural argument shaped through Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, echoing the growing acknowledgement in environmental communication and environmental decision-making as to the wider cultural foundations governing our ability – as individuals, as societies, as a species – to respond to the pressing challenges of a growing climate crisis.

Whereas Ghosh addresses the failures of literature and the arts to provide radically new frameworks for a radically changing ecology, Sutoris positions education as a battlefield for this challenge. On this battlefield lies a struggle between the suppressed voices that might offer an alternative world and the maintenance of the very sociopolitical bases that underpin anthropocentric climate change – wherein Ricoeur’s ‘horizons of the possible’ are engrained. The book’s aptly titled introduction, ‘The Shock of Recognition: (De)Politicizing Education’, introduces the two ethnographic case sites as demonstrative of the legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism on how education holds back change, in particular with regard to education around the environment – or as Sutoris puts it, ‘how tangled hands-on environmental education was in a web or racism, paternalism, and apartheid’ (3).

In particular, the schools and schooling systems in India and South Africa offer important crucibles for how social systems plagued by the vestiges of external oppression and internal division manifest as what Rob Nixon popularized as (and Sutoris returns frequently to) the slow violence of long-term environmental degradation and its adjacent health threats and human dangers, themselves disproportionately distributed across the social and global fault lines of climate racism and environmental injustice. Spotlighting student filmmaking and other pedagogical excursions at the intersection of socioenvironmental and artistic knowledge production, Sutoris ultimately positions education as a form of activism. Whether in terms of teachers being role models, or students shaping bridges between past and future generations, activism is endemic to education – both are models of change, ‘shifting away from social, cultural, and political reproduction’ (196).

The closing insights of Educating for the Anthropocene offer three ingredients of education for the Anthropocene: radical imagination, agonistic pluralism (in which difference is acknowledged as an adversary to engage, not an enemy to destroy), and intergenerational dialogue. As the book offers promise towards, the process of education – As the book argues, in order to be a determining factor in our collective response to the urgent demands of the climate present – requires a bridge between past and future, between the stewardship practised millennia ago and a preservation of the planet required for future generations, prefaced on collaborative polyphony and creative imaginaries.