Critical Civic Education and Social Ecology: Power, Nature, and Social Transformation

Stephen Duplantier

Southeastern Louisiana University

International Conference on Civic Education Research

New Orleans, LA

November 2003

Paper available at

In Charles Merriam’s classic Civic Education in the United States (1934) the author described the disconnection between his formal education in government, which was limited to an analysis of the Constitution of the United States, and the “rapid changes going on in American social and economic institutions and the inevitable adjustments in the political world.” He writes: “This was taught as if there were no more problems of government at all, except that of ability to memorize a text…” (Merriam 1934, p.113).

Merriam recognized in the tumultuous decades of the 20s and 30s that a civic education not in tune with the “progressive changes” would tend to keep civic education behind the times. The two trends he saw looming 70 years ago were bull’s eye prognostications of the tumult of our own times. The chief ones were:

“1. The relation of technological development to social life in general and political life in particular.

2. The rise of new forms of organizations thrusting up through the older types, especially in the economic world” (Merriam 1934, p. 114).

Regarding the first point, Merriam recognized how transportation and communication changed the relations of political economy. Boundaries and connections of cities and states, not to mention the people in them are changed by transportation and communication, and this would change government in complex ways. Merriam’s civic crystal ball showed a clear picture of the other “trend” which has massively changes American political and social life, and that of the rest of the world—human and non-human––as well: the modern corporation.

One more change that Merriam did not see emerged partially as a result of the rise of the corporation—more rapid and ruthless exploitation and destruction of the environment. Corporations have no ecological or social consciousness (despite what the greenwashed PR advertisements on television and other mass media portray), and this has tended to amplify and make more efficient the general tendency of civilizations to actively destroy their habitat and contribute to the decline of the planet’s ability to support life (Shepard 1982). Merriam would certainly agree that massive environmental destruction would change political and social life.

Against the mythic meta-narrative of the civic nature of the United States derived from Athenian and Roman civic republican and Enlightenment liberalism, there is a requirement for incredulity. The hard evidence of corporate domination, and the erosion of civic structure and process due to changes in communication and transportation technologies (discussed by Merriam), and now environmental destruction demands better civic education discourse as a corrective measure—in other words a progressive civic ecological pedagogy. A better “reading of the world” (to use Paulo Friere’s phrase describing the predicament of the learner, and the technique of coming to consciousness) needs to precede the “reading of the word”—that is, the more formal steps of learning (See Friere and Macedo 1987). Civic education is the discipline, par excellance, for such readings.

A Better Reading of the World

Today, an enlarged conception of the civis (city) would take in not only the rus (the rural), but also natura (the wild, non-human). For truly, where do the boundaries end? They do not end, but flow one into another in the most infolded complexity imaginable. Thus, civic education is also good biology, ecology, complexity theory, and network science.

Let’s look at Merriam’s trends and see what has become of them. Beginning earlier, but reaching a peak in the 1980’s with Reagan’s presidency, a reversal took place. From Charles Merriam’s cautions about the dangers to American government and civic life from the rise of powerful corporations, we saw a reversal. Reagan championed a position that pronounced government as the enemy, and promoted the

“free market” ideology of corporate dominance of public life. Big business would save us from big government, goes the perverted logic of a topsy-turvy civic life.

How could something so backward be believed? Herbert Schiller has discussed how a transnational corporate political directorate controls consciousness by domination of "informational and cultural space." An example of the successful control, whether engineered or not, of informational and cultural space by corporate capital is the non-existence of discussions of corporate power in the civic education curriculum standards. If the current civic education standards were used as a kind of political DNA for the reconstructing of civic life, then the results would be a still-born mutation: we could not reproduce the political and social system we actually live in if we ran such a political DNA “program.”

Is even knowing about the extent and power of the corporate takeover of public life a thinkable thought anymore? What is the real state of affairs? Has so-called private enterprise “unfettered by social accountability” taken over the public weal? (Schiller 1996 p. 12). Corporate capital and it's interlocking oligarchical directorate of world wide systems of production, marketing, distribution and control of the political structure constitute an paradox: a system of control and domination so big, so powerful, so omnipresent, yet so invisible to the average citizen, who still has notions of a civic order as treacley as a Frank Capra movie.

Schiller puts these civic myths to rest. He writes, “Big business today is the locus of systemic power. It is the site of the concentrated accumulation of the productive equipment, the technological expertise, the marketing apparatus, the financial resources, and the managerial know how.” And …”(T)he interests of big business are most powerful in the formulation of national and international policy” (Schiller 1996, p. 19). Put bluntly corporate capital runs this country and much of the world through the electoral process (Raskin, 2003). Money rules and “anti democratic views and practices proliferate” (Schiller 1996, p. iv).

A Wider Community

Civic education cannot possibly prepare students for civic life in a community if all the parts of the wider community are ignored or overlooked. Although there is more awareness about this today thanks to the work of identity politics in raising questions about formerly “invisible” minorities, we have not gone far enough.

Without diminishing the importance of any of the struggles of various minorities, civic education also must include the wider communities of non-human members of bioregions. Animals, plants, even the living land and sea are community members. This fact is not new: tribal peoples and pre-industrial nations were less exclusive in their tallies of citizenship and recognized the wider community.

In our time, Aldo Leopold has been the most eloquent proponent of the wider community. Leopold described this in what he called the Land Ethic. An ethic, “ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence” (Leopold 1966, p.217). “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. …(T)he land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from a conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow members and also respect for the community as such” (Leopold 1966, p.219-220, emphasis added).

Caroline Merchant has recently described in more contemporary phrases a “partnership ethic,” similar to Leopold’s. Merchant’s ethic is the simple recognition that “people and nature are equally important to each other…. A partnership ethic holds that the greatest good for the human and nonhuman communities is in their living mutual interdependence” (Merchant 2003, p. 223). This is a straightforward recognition in our age of ecology that would seem unassailable. But because of the over dominance of “business interests,” there is a problem. Merchant attributes the difficulties of enacting a partnership ethic to the “free market economy’s growth oriented ethic, which uses both natural and human resources inequitably to create profits” (Merchant 2003, p. 239). Merchant looks at this so-called globalization for what it is—not a mystical and inevitable phenomenon, but “the power of the global capitalist system to remove resources –especially those in third world countries—without regard to restoration, reuse, or recycling is a major roadblock to reorganizing relations between production and ecology” (Merchant, 2003, p. 223).

In short, modern industrial societies act as if they are “independent from the natural world” (Cf. Ponting 1991, p. 406). Clearly, they are not, and the result is that the world capitalist system is in runaway mode.

From Critical Pedagogy to Critical Ecological Civic Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy, first articulated by Paulo Friere and ably continued by others, especially Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, is essential in the struggle for a wider view of human communities and a restoration of civic education. Friere taught that the world must be “read” by those who would educate themselves and take their place in civic life. What better mandate for a renewal of civic education could there be than reading the world? Friere’s practice of reading the world and then reading the word as a trope of understanding the deep complexity and background of our situation and predicament means more than the “world” of society, culture, and political economy. It must also mean the very ground and rock, air, and water, and the biogeographical cycles and flows that pass through us and out full communities.

Friere’s famous work is the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” He was, of course, referring to impoverished peasants in Brazil, and by extension, everywhere. But the oppressed are not only the “wretched of the earth” but also the poor, wretched earth itself. The oppressors of the earth and its communities cannot and would not liberate the oppressed. Civic ecological education cannot come from outside of the oppressed. The liberation of the oppressed requires political power and yet the full community has little, vis-à-vis international capital’s dominance of institutions, weapons, and ideologies that prevent recognition of the true state of affairs. Friere’s prescription for reading the world was never more urgent than now.

Friere sees space for beginning change in “educational projects” which begin the process of awakening consciousness of the oppression. “The oppressed unveil the world of oppression.” (Friere 1971, p. 40); this is the narrative of the reading of the world. The essential first step of telling the story in liberatory educational practice is the discovery of the predicament the learners/community finds itself in, discovering who the players are, and some of the rules of the game. In the wider conception, communities of the oppressed have been extended to include oppressed nature. The “unveiling” of the wider community and the connections to it is a most revolutionary act. Unveiling means accurately describing the relationships of power, destruction, and exploitation.

Friere wrote, “It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the ‘rejects of life’ ”(Friere 1971, p. 41). If dollar values could be put on the actual costs of destruction of biomes and species, the cost of the loss of the World Trade Center in New York would seem small. The oppressors of the earth are the real terrorists. What is any more terrifying than the destruction of the oceans, climate, forced extinctions of species, clear cutting rainforests, pollution of the earth and waters so that elites may get richer and make more profits. The oppressed see the world and their communities being destroyed before their eyes, The change may be rapid or slow, but the oppressed are told that it is inevitable, and that they are responsible, since destruction of the earth is the “price of the modern conveniences and luxuries” that everyone wants. Commodity fetishism, itself a main process of capitalism, is used to justify the destruction of the earth and its bioregional communities.

Some Tasks for Critical Civic Ecological Pedagogy

A reading of the world reveal sites for critical civic pedagogy, which, then turn into sites for cultural work. Critical pedagogy leads to a critical learning that is engaged. Indeed, a central theme of Friere’s work is “role of educator as an active agent of social change” (McLaren 1996, p. 125). Civic ecological pedagogy in Friere's style should transform and create new forms of fully engaged biotic communities and civic ecological new economies to oppose the “logic of capitalist accumulation and alienation” (McLaren 1996, p. 144). Where does the work start?

The world’s bioregional communities witness and are victims of the active destruction and despoliation of cultures, local economies, habitats, and natural environments through resources rape and pollution of the dominant corporate forces. As capital used the Cold War to eliminate competing economic systems is today capital encouraging the apparent invisibility of the actual facts of the inseparability of human from the natural. The evidence for this is the bad accounting practices of corporate capital. By now, we know about the phony accounting practices of Arthur Andersen and Enron, WorldCom, and rest of the criminal corporations. But this is a deeper malaise: it’s the inability of the accounting profession to even think thoughts about full environmental accounting (although there are some stirrings of ecological accounting. See Gray and Bebbington, 1993).

The word “globalization” is often on the lips of sincere people trying to make sense of changing complex realities. Globalization is shorthand for the corporate dominated world oligarchy which drives resource exploitation, commodification and, markets with client nation states supplying at public expense, the armies and police powers for security of their enterprises and to enforce the oligarchs ability to cross borders at will and roam the earth in search of resources and cheap labor to turn the resources in to commodities dripping with surplus value, while subjugating the earth’s cultures and material.

There is no “democracy” in any literal sense of the word. The Greek word “cratos” means power and “demos” is people. The word is ready for the dustbin of history since it has been deregulated and devalued--turned into a teleprompter slogan. “Whatever the transnational elite calls democracy is more accurately termed polyarchy…neither dictatorship nor democracy. It refers to a system in which a small group actually rules, on behalf of capital, and participation in decision-making by the majority is confined to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoral” (Robinson in Castells 1999, p. 17).

A Possible Solution

The bleak picture being sketched of the shambles of civic life in exploited environments by anti-democratic and anti-nature forces is stunning. Can anything be done? There is hope in some conclusions drawn form research in complexity theory and network science: information flows can help. “Society” can be described as a flow of energy and power in networks. This is terrifying, insofar as it seems like the final dehumanization and delocalizing of the little autonomy that local scale cultural and political economies have left. (That is, it seems as if another nameless, faceless, anonymous force is controlling civic life and destiny). It may be so. In fact, capital’s predations are certainly amped up by 24-hour markets and electronic network of trading and exchanges.

Yet, these same networks are potentially liberating because, as Manuel Castells tells us, the flows of power in a network become independent of those wielding the power, and the power of the flow takes over (Castells 1999, p. 58,59). “The flows of power are easily transformed into the power of flows. This is a fundamental characteristic of the new society. An obvious example is that of a financial market: once a speculative movement is triggered in the international market, the reserves of the central banks of the wealthiest nations may be gobbled up in a few days while trying to go against the flow. Who are these speculators? Many people and nobody. There are certainly organizations (actually networks) living off the turmoil in the financial markets, but they have no real power by themselves. Their role is to trigger a dynamic of flows that surpasses by far any organization’s (or group of organizations) wealth and power” (Castells 1999, p. 59).

Castells sees other examples in other domains of activity, music, culture, and ideas. “In all cases, extremely important social, economic, and cultural consequences follow the formation of turbulences in the space of flows.” These flows are not predictable, and thus the consequences of human actions are not predictable (Castells 1999, p. 59). This, says Castells, is a “fundamental characteristic of the new society.” In fact, society is the network and the network is society, not in simple metaphorical ways, but in deep, structural and dynamic ways. The history and sociology of hitherto existing societies and civilizations is well described by the language and concepts of complexity theory and network theory.