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 Education for the 21st Century By Riane Eisler Keynote to 2004 HomeSchool Association of California Annual Conference
Introductory Remarks The title of my talk is “Education for the 21st Century,” which is also the subtitle of one of my books on education, Tomorrow’s Children, in which I basically applied my multidisciplinary research over three decades to education to look at what kind of education young people need in order for them to meet the unprecedented challenges they face in our world today. What we are going to be talking about is very different from the conventional discourse out there on education—about test scores and privatization, and slogans like “Leave No Child Behind” bandied about at the same time that education funding is cut, that Head Start funding is slashed, and so on. Basically, what this conventional discourse represents is not only a recycling of the old traditional discourse about education, which is about ranking people—who is going to do better and who is going to do worse—what I call the domination system. It also represents what Paolo Freire called “banking education,” a whimsical term indicating an approach to education in which the teacher just deposits something in the child’s brain and this deposited bit of information is supposed to come back out of the child’s mouth or pen, or, today, since we have updated this concept, out of the child’s computer. And of course, that’s not really education; that’s instruction. It is also indoctrination. Education, Social Context, and a New Model To help explain what I mean by a partnership model and a domination model of education, I am going to tell you a bit about myself, and then we will look at an integrative framework, because my work focuses on that. This integrative framework of education for the 21st century has three interconnected elements: process (how we learn and teach); content (what we learn and teach); and structure (the learning environment). I am going to pay particular attention to partnership content. Why? Because we humans live by stories; we live by narratives about reality, about what is important and unimportant, about what is good and bad, about what is possible and impossible. By homeschooling your children, you have a tremendous opportunity to offer young people alternative narratives. But let me start with me. I can attest from my own life experiences to the enormous impact of stories, of narratives. I was born in Vienna, Austria, at a period when, in terms of the new conceptual framework that I have introduced of the partnership model and the domination model as underlying possibilities for structuring relations, beliefs, and institutions, there was a massive regression to the domination model. It was the period of the Nazis’ rise to power, first in Germany and then in my native Austria. From one day to the next, my life was totally shattered because of the force and effect of the narratives, the stories that people like my parents and me, who happen to have been born Jewish, were subhuman, that we had to be exterminated, that there should be license to hunt and kill us. By a miracle, my parents and I were able to escape Vienna. We were very fortunate. We were able to purchase a visa to Cuba, one of the few places in the world that sold visas to Jewish refugees. We were actually able to escape by a hair’s breadth because we were on one of the last ships to leave successfully before the St. Louis left, which some of you may have heard about, because a movie was made about it, called Voyage of the Damned. This ship was carrying a thousand Jewish women, children, and men. The Nazis decided to make this ship’s voyage a test case for whether or not the world really cared about the persecution and killing of Jews; they basically got a green light for their planned “final solution” for the “Jewish problem”—in other words, the extermination of Jews. So, in cahoots with the Cuban government, who were paid by them, the Nazis spread a wave of anti-Semitic stories in Cuba, in Havana, whipping up popular sentiment against that ship’s landing. This was long before Castro. It was an era when Cuba was called a banana republic; it was a time of a very corrupt regime in Cuba. To make a long story short, none of those people traveling on the St. Louis was permitted to land in Cuba; worse, not a single nation in this hemisphere would let them land, including the United States. So the passengers had to go back to Europe, and of course many of them were killed in Nazi extermination camps. Very early, for me, that experience led to questions, questions that I am sure many of you have asked, questions that we are asking now, after 9/11, questions that we are asking about Iraq, about the Congo, about Sudan. Does it have to be this way? When we humans have such an enormous capacity for caring, for empathy, for creativity, why is there so much cruelty, so much insensitivity, so much destructiveness? Does it have to be that way? Or do we have alternatives? Those are very real and pressing questions. [Editor’s note: In her personal memoir, entitled The Gate, Riane details the experiences of her family’s escape from the Nazis, as well as the effects that these experiences had on her.] And I think these are real and pressing questions for kids, too, who when faced with unfairness or injustice wonder and sometimes ask, “Does it have to be this way?” My research, many years later, was animated by these questions. One of the distinguishing features of my research, other than being cross-cultural, historical, and multidisciplinary, is that it draws from a larger data base than do most studies of society, which, as you know, focus mostly on politics and economics. They ignore where we all live, our personal relations, our intimate relations, our family relations, and yet many of these stories are quite accurately called the Story of Man. Of course, we are told, “Don’t worry. ‘Man’ includes ‘Woman,’” right? Well, of course, actually “Woman” includes “Man.” But the point is that part of our heritage, from these earlier times, when even Western society oriented much more to the domination model, has been a view that only those matters are really important that deal with the public sphere from which women and children have traditionally been barred. So, to say that such a society was male-centered is quite an understatement. In any event, if we don’t look at the whole picture and only look at part of it, then we can’t see the configuration of the picture, which means that we cannot connect the dots or see the patterns. What thus became evident to anyone using this methodology was that none of our conventional classifications—capitalist versus communist; right versus left; religious versus secular; industrial versus pre- or post-industrial; north versus south; east versus west—that none of these conventional classifications describes whole societies. None of them. Not one of them. The Importance of (Understanding) Relationships Consider, instead, relationships based on mutual benefit, mutual accountability, mutual empathy and caring. Not ideal relationships. We’re very odd: If somebody talks about an alternative to the domination system, the expectation is that the alternative has to be perfect, whereas the system causing so much misery, so much distress—well, that’s just how it is, and we put up with it. In any case, I use the words “partner” and “partnership model” when I’m discussing or describing mutually beneficial and mutually accountable relationships. I also need to emphasize, though, that, when I talk about “partnership,” I don’t just mean “collaboration.” We do need more collaboration, certainly, but people collaborate in the domination model, too. The 9/11 terrorists collaborated; the people invading Iraq collaborated. People collaborate and cooperate and do terrible things within the domination model. This research gets us away from this very simplistic and not very productive way of thinking so that we can really look at what the configuration is that will support the kinds of relations that we so want and yet that we’ve still not generally attained. (At this time, the domination model, mixed with high technology—nuclear, biological warfare, not to speak of the “conquest of nature” by means of high technology—really threatens our very survival.) So, what we are talking about here is a massive cultural shift. And you homeschoolers are a very important part of that shift, because, obviously, education for the domination or dominator model and education for the partnership model are very different, and homeschooling is rife with opportunities to avoid the dominator model and to use and spread the good effects of the partnership model. If we look back just a few hundred years ago, to the time of the European Middle Ages—that is, to the so-called good ol’ days of the Age of Faith—if we closely examine this time period, we can see some partnership elements here and there, to be sure, but, basically, we see a society that actually looks a lot like Afghan society under the rule of the Taliban. Think about it: the Inquisition; the Crusades (that is, the holy wars); the witch burnings—you know, whether you stone a woman to death slowly or burn her to death slowly, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Exemplary public violence to instill terror so that nobody deviates from orders from above, be this obedience in the family, or be it in the State. Now, obviously, the kind of pedagogy, the kind of education, for this sort of society was on the order of “spare the rod, spoil the child,” and not just as a little slogan. If you read some of the accounts of childhood, even as late as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period, you find that brutal, physical violence was the norm, as unfortunately it still is in some cultures and subcultures today. As far as education went, again, consider such things as canings of children—that is, physical terror—not to speak of the fact that kids’ education consisted largely of their just memorizing, by rote. They were being prepared to obey orders from above. Although to a large extent we have been leaving such practices behind, unfortunately—and this is very, very important to keep in mind—much of what we have inherited in the canon, in the curriculum, as well as in our teaching methods and in our structure, is our heritage from these earlier times. So, what is your job, and what is your opportunity? And remember that you are free to do this work, because you are homeschooling. You can use the analytical lenses of both the partnership model and the domination model to evaluate, because you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Rather, you want to figure out what you want to keep from what’s out there, what you want to leave behind, and what you want to replace, and, yes, what you want to replace it with—because that, too, is one of your major responsibilities. Many of you are interested in self-directed learning. But, directed in what direction? And that’s also where you have a large role to play—in helping to provide your children with the kinds of materials, resources, and ideas that will sharpen their critical thinking skills in paradigmatically challenging ways. A Close Look at the Partnership and Domination Models If as I said, you look at Hitler’s Germany, at Khomeini’s Iran, at the Taliban, if you look at the Samurai of Japan, if you look at the Masai of Africa—in other words, if you look at these societies that seem to have nothing in common—what you find is that they all have the same core configuration. The first part of that configuration is a fear- and force-based family and social or tribal structure: rankings of domination and strong-man rule, in the family and in the State or tribe. The second part of the configuration is something that is absolutely ignored, as I mentioned earlier, in most political, social, and even anthropological studies of society, the last of which come a little bit closer to looking at the whole of the society than do other types of studies. In this second structural configuration, we find that, in all of these societies, there is a rigid ranking of one half of humanity (the male half) over the other half of humanity (the female half). Every last one of them. And this is very interesting, because, when these regimes come to power, one of their mantras—whether it was Hitler in Germany or Khomeini in Iran or the so-called rightist-fundamentalist alliance here in the United States—is always, “Let’s get women back into their ‘traditional place,’” which of course is a code phrase for “subservience.” Groups like the Promise Keepers made that very clear. They gave men two choices: either ignore or leave your families, or regain control within the family. Well, there are other choices, but not in the dominator mind. I have to stress this point: If you have a dominator mindset, if you are socialized properly for this model, then there are only two alternatives for you—you either dominate, or you are dominated. And herein lies the rub, because, who wants to be dominated? So, women manipulate, because that’s what the powerless, the disempowered, do, and men think that they must be in control and act accordingly. Well, there is the partnership alternative. And I can attest from my own life to the promise of this alternative, because, in my second marriage, I have been blessed to have a partnership relationship with a man. I want to digress for a moment to help make this point. My husband and I are both writers; we’re both creative people. However, in the old model, I would have been his muse, and he would have been the creative man. In the partnership model, we’re both creative, and we’re both each other’s muses. We both support each other. And, I have to tell you, it’s really much more fun! But back to the configurations. Another of the mantras of the people who want to get us back to the good ol’ days—when most men and all women still knew their place in these rigid rankings of domination—is, “Let’s get back to a ‘traditional family.’” Although that might sound very nice, unfortunately it refers to traditions of domination. In “traditional families,” children learn early on that it’s very, very dangerous, and very painful, to even think of disobeying orders, no matter how brutal, no matter how irrational, and no matter how damaging they are. And you can see that this is foundational to precisely the kind of society we’re trying to leave behind. So, again, this kind of education, starting very, very early in the home and going all the way through, is essential for this model because of its need to reinforce the third part of this configuration: every one of these cultures is characterized by a high degree of built-in—built-in—socially accepted and, yes, even idealized, abuse and violence, whether it be in the form of child beating, wife beating, pogroms, lynchings, warfare, and so on. It’s “heroic” warfare, or it is “moral” violence. We know this because, unfortunately, such ways of thinking are so built into our traditions. So, part of our job, as I said, is to sort these things: there are good traditions, and there are terrible traditions. In some places, slavery was a tradition. Clearly, we want to leave that tradition behind. It’s the same way with this whole dominator configuration. A Change in Models Now let’s talk about the partnership side so that you have this framework, this configuration, that transcends all of these conventional categories—right/left, north/south, east/west, developed/not developed, etc. You can find a partnership model in a tribal society like the Teduray of the Philippines, and in an agrarian society, such as the Minangkabau of Sumatra. Now, the Minangkabau are two-and-a-half million people, but you never hear of them, do you, in anthropology or in your curriculum? Nor do we read of the Teduray, even though several books have been written about them, including a lovely book called Wisdom from a Rainforest, by Stuart Schlegel, the anthropologist who studied them. Well, don’t we need to give this information to kids? I write about these things, as do others, such as the anthropologist Peggy Sanday, who wrote a wonderful, thick book about the Minangkabau, entitled Women at the Center. These writings exist. And young people are entitled to know about them. Worldwide, there are, of course, strong partnership trends, of which homeschooling is a part. A good example is a very advanced, industrial (indeed, largely post-industrial) group of nations—the Nordic nations: Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Although these societies are not ideal, consider for a moment that, because they use a partnership configuration, they have much more political and economic democracy than do societies that rely on a dominator configuration. To speak of democracy only in terms of voting is ludicrous. In Iraq, the citizens are about to elect a theocracy—a regressive, religious fascism, really, is what they’re about to vote in. So that’s not democracy, and we need to teach our kids that just having elections is not the point. When we talk about democracy, we mean real participation, and we also mean economic democracy, in which there aren’t these huge gaps between haves and have nots—gaps that you don’t find in the Nordic nations. Economic democracy, too, is part of the partnership configuration. The Status of Women Now, if you take nothing else away from this talk, I want you to please listen to this next point, because it is very, very important: As the status of women rises, so also does the social and fiscal priority given to traits and activities that are stereotypically associated with women and femininity—and this correlation has nothing to do with anything inherent in women and men. When I say “stereotypical,” I mean just that: dominator stereotypes. The Nordic nations support policies that are caring of their population. Caregiving, that most essential human activity, in the domination system is relegated to a secondary place, to women, as in “that’s women’s work.” Contrast: universal health care, child care allowances—not just tax credits—for every family. Elder care with dignity—with dignity—is not considered a handout. We think of such a society as a welfare state, but it isn’t. It’s what my friend Hilkka Pietila, from Finland, calls “a caring society.” (Author’s note: See Hilkka Pietila, “Nordic Welfare Society –A Strategy to Eradicate Poverty and Build Up Equality: Finland as a Case Study,” in Journal Cooperation South, Number two, 2/2001, pages 79-96.) Partnership and Peace Which takes me to the third part of the configuration. Not coincidentally, it is in these Nordic nations that you find the first peace studies. In the United States, we have all of these war academies, but the Nordic nations pioneered peace studies—you know, that sort of wimpy, sissy work of peace, right? That feminine work. But anyway—and this point, too, is very, very important—the Nordic nations pioneered the first laws prohibiting physical punishment of children in families. This is a global trend, which is moving slowly but which is very essential. For, if we talk about a world of peace, and yet children are still being taught in their families, from a very early age, that the way that you get what you want, the way to get someone to comply, is through force, then the lesson that children learn is that it’s okay, that it’s even moral, to use force to impose your will on others. In this scenario, what have we got? We’ve got training, but not for peace. So we have to think of connecting the dots. Before I leave the topic of the Nordic nations and talk about partnership process, content, and structure, I want to mention something else very interesting. At the beginning of the 20th century, these nations were very poor. Remember the potato famines in Norway, during which people fled en masse to the United States? People were starving. And it was this investment—yes, this social and monetary investment—in caring for people that made it possible for these nations to develop what we hear so much about today: a high-quality human capital. That is, people who are able to function better, who are better nourished, who have a value system of sharing, and who don’t feel threatened by sharing. Unfortunately, I don’t have time today to go into more details about all of this, but you can read about it in my books, especially in Tomorrow’s Children, The Power of Partnership, The Chalice and The Blade, and Sacred Pleasure. My point here is simply that these societies, the Nordic societies, always rate at the very top of the United Nations’ human development rating. And not only that: Finland rated second only to the much wealthier United States in global competitiveness. So, when people tell you, “Yeah, but it doesn’t work,” just give them a few facts. That’s what we need; we need to have the facts that you are not given. Partnership Education Now, how does this system relate to what you are doing? Well, since you are doing homeschooling, many of you are moving to seeing and treating children as your partners (or already see and treat them as your partners). You see education not as something that you do to children, but, rather, as something that you do with children. You are aware that there are lots of wonderful methods out there—peer teaching, for example. You know how good peer teaching is; that is, you know how mutually beneficial it is to have kids teach other kids. As a homeschooler, you know that, to be a teacher, you have to learn. And collaborative learning is one of the most effective ways of learning—and it’s fun, too! Individual assessment tools, which are used to evaluate children's progress rather than to rank children against each other, are also important partnership educational tools. So, basically, we’re talking about a whole battery of approaches that, despite having been shown to be pedagogically very effective, are still not part of the conventional school system, whose workings, as I said, are now part of the general regression worldwide to the domination model. (We’re in a period of regression worldwide to the domination model, as evidenced by, for example, the rise of so-called religious fundamentalism, the spread and intensity of violence, and the talk of getting women back into their traditional place. All of this is part of the tension between the partnership and domination models, worldwide.) Structure and Content We have a wonderful video based on Tomorrow’s Children and put out by the Media Education Foundation—who do some of the best educational videos in the nation, as many of you probably know—in which we feature some of the schools that use partnership education, such as the Nova High School, an alternative public high school in Seattle. It’s fascinating, because the kids at this school participate even on the committee that selects teachers (it’s the kids’ education, after all). Theirs isn’t the only voice, but it’s one of the voices. And not only that, the kids play an active role not only in determining the rules, but also in seeing that the other kids abide by them. This is an urban school in a poor neighborhood, and it is totally violence-free. It’s a partnership school.1 Let me now move on to talking about content: the narratives, the stories. Every curriculum is based on a certain set of assumptions about the nature of reality and about human nature. The current mainstream curriculum, not to speak of the education the kids get through the mass media, which is horrific—it’s very much dominator education—gives kids a very distorted and very limiting view of what it means to be human. You as homeschoolers are in a wonderful position to counter these messages by providing young people with alternative materials about a variety of topics, such as, for example, the way that evolution is taught. Kids are entitled to know about evolution; they’re entitled to know about this extraordinary pageant, this history of life, this majestic story of the evolution of life and then of the evolution of all these species and of the evolution of us, of humanity. But, they are also entitled to a narrative that doesn’t just emphasize, as is the case in the conventional narrative, those characteristics appropriate for the domination model: namely, selfishness and violence. These are the characteristics sociobiologists and so-called evolutionary psychologists, whose ideas are so popular now, emphasize, and they are also the characteristics highlighted in the standard texts on evolution. We are told they are our evolutionary heritage, that they are millennia-old evolutionary imperatives rooted in our biology. But, think about it: everything that we think, feel, and do is rooted in our biology; otherwise, we would not be capable of thinking, feeling, and doing it. Yet the implication is that only selfishness and violence are really significant. Well, our capacity to care is also rooted in our biology. In fact—think about it—by the grace of evolution, we humans receive biochemical rewards of pleasure not only when we are cared for, but also when we care for another. You’ve all experienced it. You know that’s true. You feel good. This should be Biology 1A, shouldn’t it? But it isn’t. So, it’s your job to provide this teaching. I deal a lot with this topic in Tomorrow’s Children, because I think that those narratives, those stories, are so important. In Tomorrow’s Children, I introduce a concept that I call “meaningful evolution.” This way of looking at evolution can be a kind of bridge between the core religious values —that is, underneath all the dominator overlay that religions acquired historically, religions at their core do have partnership values -- and what we know from science today. For example, we’re learning from science about the interconnection of all of life. This concept is beginning to seep into the curriculum. We’re learning from science the tremendous, exciting story, which I write about in Tomorrow’s Children, of the evolution of love: from reptiles—which lay their eggs and then either leave them or, in the case of the rainbow lizard, eat those that do not get away, the others’ having scurried into the brush as soon as they are hatched — to the shift to mammals, in which we begin to see caring, primarily by females, but also, in some species, by males. In fact, we see caring by males even earlier than the appearance of mammals: the little female sea horse, for example, lays the eggs, but the male carries them in his pouch, and the baby sea horses then hatch from his pouch. Kids need to know that males in other species also in some cases participate in caring, and certainly we know that, in our species, males can and, thank goodness, are beginning to participate in caring much more, as we shift more to the partnership model. One of the most wonderful partnership trends has to do with the numbers of men who are beginning to do fathering in the stereotypically nurturing, mothering way. That’s part of the movement towards partnership. But most important, kids need to know that evolution isn’t just all about selfishness and randomness, that there are these other movements in evolution, and that, yes, we humans have a role in evolution. We have the capacity for so much caring, so much creativity, so much consciousness. It’s our job to build the kind of culture that makes it possible—the kind of society that makes it possible—for us to realize these capacities rather than to continue supporting and relying upon the kind of structure that constantly inhibits them. Cultural Evolution Now, if you actually look at Stone Age art—I deal with this topic in my books The Chalice and The Blade and Sacred Pleasure—you don’t see a single image, not one image, even hinting at this cartoon's portrayal of "human nature." On the contrary, you see a focus in that art on the giving and renewal of life. That’s right. Even the animals depicted in pairs are not hunting; they’re male and female. What you also see are these so-called Venus figurines, that is, these full-bodied figures (sometimes pregnant) with large hips, which some archaeologists say are just dolls. How strange. I mean, here you have the Venus of Lausell, who can’t be a doll because, first of all, she’s carved at the entrance of a cave sanctuary; she's not portable. In addition, she clearly is telling a story: in one hand, she holds a crescent moon, with thirteen markings symbolizing not only the cycles of the moon, but also women’s menstrual cycles, which are synchronized; and, with her other hand, she’s pointing to her vulva. Well, clearly, this image is all about life and fertility—and about giving life and nurturing life rather than taking life. Of course persons living in the Stone Age took life; of course Stone Age cultures weren’t violence-free. No culture is violence-free. But the difference is that we have a culture that really demands violence in order for us to maintain rigid rankings of domination. That’s the basic question for our future, isn’t it? What can we do to change this? Young people really have to understand that we can construct a different culture, that there is an alternative. Partnership Models, Gender Balance, and Our Children’s
Future What I’m getting at is not that the partnership model reverses the roles and thus makes women dominant over men, but, rather, that it embraces and fosters a different way of understanding human relationships, a way that is marked by egalitarianism, and not by domination or control. And thus it embraces and fosters gender balance in the culture. Gender balance is not “just a women’s issue,” which, unfortunately, it still is for many persons who, like all of us, have been socialized to think of it as such. Isn’t that strange, that matters affecting the lives and, yes, deaths in many parts of the world of the female half of humanity are considered “just secondary” -- and that an issue such as gender balance is relegated to the linguistic and socio-political status of being “just a women’s issue”? We wouldn’t think of speaking about or categorizing men’s issues in that way, would we? This distinction in our thinking points to an important reason that we need a more gender-balanced curriculum. And this is where you come in. Because, it’s one thing to say to a child, “Be self-directed,” “Follow what you want,” but it’s another to provide for that child materials that offer alternatives, including materials that offer more gender-balanced alternatives. If you look at the curriculum in mainstream schools, you see that it’s really pathetic. When I was going to school (after we had immigrated to the US, that is), I used to feel like an outsider. I thought, “Well, I’m Jewish; I’m an immigrant.” Only later did I realize: it’s because I’m a woman! Because just about everything, when I was going to school, was by and about men: philosophy, art, literature, science, you name it. Well, that’s wrong! For the sake of everyone’s equality, the curriculum should have been gender-balanced, by which term I don’t just mean that the curriculum needed to have included the women who throughout history have been written out of the canon, whom we are now reclaiming—the ones who managed, by dint of incredible fortitude of character and creativity and chutzpah, to use a Jewish word, to elbow their way into what was male-controlled, which was everything: again, the arts, literature, science, religion, politics, economics. Rather, I’m talking about including in the curriculum the contribution of women in their role of caregivers (this is a theme that also runs through Tomorrow’s Children). Where is that topic covered in the curriculum? And given its absence from the curriculum, why would kids think that caregiving is important? Why would they come to that conclusion if they aren’t studying its importance? Although there are so many things that I’d like to share with you, because we are running out of time let me leave you with just a few more thoughts, if I may. What do we want for our children? We want to help our children not only by giving them the skills and the knowledge to navigate through these difficult and increasingly dangerous times. We also want to give them the wherewithal so that they can envision and create that better future, that more sustainable, humane, peaceful, equitable future, without which, frankly, we don’t have one. And trying to attain this goal means not only that you give your own children the best education that you can; it also means that you become involved in changing education worldwide. To be sure, this is a tall order, especially since we’re all
already very busy. But, you know, as a mother and a grandmother,
I’m passionate about this matter because we live in a world in
which, really, no child can ever be safe unless we change the
dominator cultures worldwide. I invite you to join me in this initiative, about which you can find out more information by going to the website www.saiv.net Part of my work has been to identify leverage points, points that have a cascade of systemic effect. And ending family violence and other forms of intimate violence is a key leverage point, because this violence has devastating effects not only on millions of women and children, an outcome that is tragic enough, but, in fact, on all of us, since intimate violence is a springboard for a host of social ills—all the way from crime and juvenile delinquency and learning difficulties to, yes, terrorism and war. You, as I said, are already pioneers in so many aspects of partnership education. So, let’s join together here and work through SAIV to break through cycles of violence where they originate -- in children's early exposure to violence as a means of imposing one's will on others. I’ve given you a lot of material today. I hope that you will use the analytical lenses of the partnership and domination models to sort out, for your children’s and families’ education, those ideas and materials that you want to retain, those that you want to leave behind, and those that you want to replace. Concerning replacement, I’ve also given you some idea of the kinds of resources available both in my books and in other places. I encourage you to visit the website for the Center for Partnership Studies www.partnershipway.org, where you’ll find all sorts of useful and fascinating information and resources for your homeschooling work. You can make a huge difference. Homeschooling is a growing movement. If you begin to teach alternative narratives, which no longer present the domination model as the only possible moral and cultural path, then we will have a generation that will be able to live in this world, on this beautiful planet, in more peace and with more equity. And, yes, they will then be able to create a world in which all children can realize their enormous capacity for caring, creativity, and love. I thank you.
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