Doughnut Education
“Mom, why do you say that you hate cleaning?” - my 8-year-old daughter Neva asks, merrily soaping the wooden floors in our living room in central Antwerp, Belgium. We are in covid-19 lockdown and won’t be seeing our cleaning and ironing lady in the foreseeable future. “I guess it’s because I like reading and writing more than cleaning”, I reply. — “But why can’t you like both? I like cleaning and maths!”
Rewind ten years back. I am at my local infant welfare centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on a regular check-up with my eldest son Simon, then two months old. The doctor is urging me to put more effort into getting Simon to take the bottle, something Simon persistently rejects. “He prefers the breast”, I explain. — “But that means you’ll never be able to leave!” the doctor gives me a perplexed and pitying look. What she really means to say is: “You should give your baby the bottle and rejoin the workforce. Only then will you become a rightful member of our society again”.
In the growth economy paradigm, unpaid caregivers are not considered as worthy as those in paid positions. The state doesn’t care about the carers because they are not directly contributing to the GDP growth. According to this twisted logic, I’m a worthier society member if I outsource the care for my child to a paid caregiver and return to my paid work elsewhere than if I care for my child myself. Even if I have a so-called bullshit job. The ever accelerating merry-go-round of the economy doesn’t take my unique relationship with my child (and our mutual attachment) into the equation. Neither do many feminists, surprisingly. “Don’t you have a life?” — this is the first phrase my daughter’s ballet teacher drops after I tell her I’m homeschooling.
Instead of experiencing success in terms of how meaningful and enjoyable our daily activities are, we teach our kids to measure success in numbers: grades at first and the number of digits on the pay-check later. We condition our children to adapt and be guided by these external motivations instead of their intrinsic curiosity and creativity.
We condition our children to distinguish work from play, chores from fun stuff. Why don’t we just let them play whatever they like to play with, unconditionally? Because that is probably what their true calling is, whether it’s dancing, or quantum physics, or both (think of Merritt Moore).
Why don’t we stop ranking our children, setting them up for a race against one another? The conventional school system is an assembly line producing the future workforce, the makers of further growth. This educational system was designed at the dawn of the Industrial Age, according to Frederick Taylor’s scientific management principles, its central tenet being standardise everything around the average, “reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality”, American journalist H.L.Mencken summarised in 1924 in his book The Little Red Schoolhouse.
This may seem like this is a leftist plea against capitalism, but the idea of growth and standardisation at all costs, Taylorism, has been applied even more ruthlessly by the socialist economies (think of the five-year plans in the USSR), literally reducing individuals to cogs in a well oiled machine. In that sense, industrialisation spread across ideologies.
And just like the Industrial Age has led to depleting the Earth’s future prospects and killing biodiversity, assembly line schooling depletes our mental balance, creativity and neurodiversity.
It is this industrialised school system that has been (at least partially) responsible for the coining of ‘the rational economic man’ and his competitive, addicted-to-growth world view. We have known since the 1972 Limits of Growth report that GDP cannot increase forever in a world of finite resources. And we have known for at least 30 years that “our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know” (quote from the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity).
We knew our home was on fire long before covid-19, but most grown-ups just failed to listen. The current crisis has made it impossible to continue living the status quo. It has made it undeniably obvious that we need to rethink our lifestyles and our goals.
We no longer live in the Industrial Age. We live in the Digital Age. And we need a new economy. A new economy representing not a factory but the diversity of the Earth’s dynamic systems. A new economy viewing ourselves and our children as more than merely consumers, workers and owners of capital.
We need a new, regenerative economy that would reflect the vital role of primary carers and embed meaningful self-organisation and flexibility (for both work and education), made possible thanks to the novel tech, reducing unnecessary emissions and traffic.
We need unconditional basic income for everyone to be able to get rid of the bulging bureaucratic controls and bullshit jobs. To ensure true equality for unpaid carers (most of them women) and true flexibility to switch careers (due to robotisation, or simply to be able to do what you love instead of sticking to a job you hate, out of fear for financial insecurity). All experiments with basic income conducted in various countries so far have shown that people awarded a basic income study and work more, not less, as well as that it provides for better bonding with one’s family.
As the past 500 years have shown, any severe crisis inevitably increases government spending and government involvement in general, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing (the U.S. healthcare system could definitely use some). Experts predict that we will see governments investing in a Green New Deal, in support schemes (Spain has already announced it will be the first European country to introduce basic income) and in novel healthcare (for example, AI-based diagnostics). We will also see more local, city economies emerge as well as more alternative forms of organising (such as more open-source content and creative commons). Amsterdam has declared it will be the first city to adopt the sustainable 'doughnut' model to mend its post-coronavirus economy.
Oxford university economist Kate Raworth’s paradigm-changing Doughnut Economics focuses on thriving instead of growth. The doughnut shape represents the “ecologically safe and socially just space”, while growing beyond this shape implies social inequity (inside the hole) or jeopardising the Earth’s ecosystem (outside the doughnut). Raworth compares unlimited growth to a tumour in a healthy organism, as we have by now created economies that need to grow whether the people living in them thrive or not. She urges us to embrace human goals and sustainability instead, within the regenerative boundaries of the doughnut. This “requires a great deal of decluttering of the myths and misrepresentations in which we have been schooled”, comments George Monbiot.
According to Doughnut Economics, an economy is considered prosperous when all twelve social foundations are met without overshooting any of the nine ecological ceilings. Education is one of the social foundations here, but while the other social foundations are pretty clearly defined, it’s essential that we agree upon a definition of education as opportunity for personal growth, as access to tools and networks for fulfilling individual talents, rather than equating education to school attendance and academic credentials. Because let’s face it: can Industrial-Age-style schooling really serve as a foundation for a new sustainable mindset?
Amsterdam Doughnut will be “the first public presentation of the holistic approach to ‘downscaling the Doughnut’” that Raworth and her international team have been developing for more than a year. “We never imagined that we would be launching it in a context of crisis such as this,” Raworth writes in her blog, “but we believe that the need for such a transformative tool could hardly be greater right now, and its use in Amsterdam has the chance to inspire many more places – from neighbourhoods and villages to towns and cities to nations and regions – to take such a holistic approach as they begin to reimagine and remake their own futures”.
I am fascinated with the opportunities reimagining our future in my home city of Amsterdam and other communities across the world will bring. However I don’t think any of it will be possible without thoroughly reimagining education, outside of the existing industrialised educational system. And I hope that as we upvalue the irreplaceable work done by the children’s primary carers, we will be able to create enough infrastructure, legal bearing, tech support and acceptance for self-directed learning, whether it happens at home or at sudbury schools, local libraries and makerspaces.
Yet, in the chapter called “What would it mean for the people of Amsterdam to thrive?” on page 7 of the Amsterdam City Doughnut, the goal for education (one of the 12 social foundations) reads: “every child receives a good education in a high quality school environment”. This persistent education-equals-school mindset is disturbing. In the 21st century, with all its accessible tech for personalised learning, education and school attendance are two very different things. In the case of my son (a profoundly gifted mathematician, asynchronous and intense) compulsory school attendance stood in the way of his education. He is thriving now, homeschooled and being able to learn at his own pace. Unfortunately, we have had to emigrate from his native Amsterdam to make this legally possible.
I’d like to draw Ms. Raworth’s attention to the fact that Amsterdam (and The Netherlands in general) is home to one of the harshest compulsory school attendance systems in the world, rigorously penalising school refusal as if that wasn’t a human right, criminalising homeschooling and even attempting to introduce state surveillance to monitor and interfere with children’s development (similar to the model recently rejected in Scotland as it was judged to be breaching human rights by the UK Supreme Court in 2016).
The current suffocating ‘learning duty’ (leerplicht in Dutch) makes it virtually impossible for Amsterdam parents to choose for a holistic approach to education, to facilitate self-directed learning, to opt out of grades or homework, to create enabling environments for self-paced study. Mandatory routines, teaching to the test and standardised curriculum rooted in external control and aimed at sorting individuals into efficient workers and managers, consistent with the original Industrial Age Thorndike-Taylor model, makes our children vulnerable in the face of the challenges of the 21st century and unfit to come up with out-of-the box solutions.
The way I understand Doughnut Economics, we should stop viewing our children as merely future workers, evaluated against a mythical average norm, and instead empower them to see themselves as unique individuals on unique educational journeys. I do hope that Amsterdam Doughnut and other city doughnuts will embrace this freedom of educational choice and respect those children who want to get off the assembly line.