The Scarecrow May Have No Brains, but Modern Education Has No Heart and Thus No True Sustainability

The Scarecrow has no brains; the Lion no courage and the Tin Man, no heart. And Dorothy herself, an orphan isolated in grey, bleak, Kansas, has no sense of belonging. So off they go to see the “Wizard”, hoping from that... [ view full abstract ]

The Scarecrow has no brains; the Lion no courage and the Tin Man, no heart. And Dorothy herself, an orphan isolated in grey, bleak, Kansas, has no sense of belonging. So off they go to see the “Wizard”, hoping from that great, powerful ruler to get their needs met for what each values most. Unfortunately, behind a smoke and mirrors media-advertising campaign, their search uncovers a massive fraud of leadership. The great “Wizard” and “wisest” ruler of their land subsequently defining what is important, valuable and rewarded, is a charlatan, a “nothing” and a “humbug”*1.

What they discover instead on their road of problems faced and problems-solved together -- true experiential-based education -- is real learning about themselves and each other and therefore their true value to themselves and their community; the meaning of life itself. Indeed it was always there inside themselves, never to be determined by someone else far away – or on “high”. Certainly never to be defined, as many modern educational systems are, by those who economically own the means to define “value” only economically, obscuring desires for power and greed destroying the more sustainable caring values.

An education system that obscures and obfuscates the very premise of hidden values, teaches instead a separation of head and heart, a cognitive dissonance that confuses the empirical distance between rhetoric and reality. Subsequently, any true sustainable education would also learn to examine and dissect underlying values and their coherence with the desired sustainability actually enacted in the world.