starting with what we need.

Landing a job with a 401K won’t be enough to satisfy me.  We all need much, much more than the material security that these things provide.  I’d bet a lot of money that these high school students understand this too.  They’re smart cookies.  I found these quotes so compelling for two reasons:

1. I liked the first quote because it showed the earnest drive that this student has to thrive in the world/society where she lives.  The murmurs affirming what she said illustrated that all of these students’ have keen awareness that their ability to thrive is first dependent on having material things.  Things like food, and prescription medications, and somewhere safe to live.  They want school to give them access to knowledge that they will need to provide for themselves and the people who they love.  All this so that they can spend more of their “precious time alive developing their potential.”  This makes sense to me.  Actually, I think it’s beautiful.

2. I liked the second quote because it showed me how much the students trust their teachers.  They trust their teachers to assess them on things that matter.  They trust that what their teachers, and the government, and the College Board think is important is actually important.  They expect and want to learn what is important.  I have a lot of beef with the tests that these students have to take--I know they do a lot to reinforce things that are not good--but I think that students’ trust in their teachers and in society is beautiful, too.  Teachers should cultivate this trust, treat it with a whole lot of care, and when the time comes to teach skepticism, they should do it as gently as possible.        

We need to teach skepticism gently because it has the potential to break our trust with community, and trust is the root of sustainability.  In my experience, having teachers, society, and sometimes even my parents define what success is has felt good.  At their best, these definitions can help us to place our personal understanding of success into a broader context.  They do not need to stymie us even as they make us realize our terrifying impact in the world. 

We cannot all have our own singular definition of success because we don’t live in vacuums.  This is fact.  All of our readings have said it.  You couldn’t find one person in the whole world who believes the contrary.  We can ignore our community, but that doesn’t change the fact that we live in a community.  If we want to be sustainable, we need to lend ourselves to a communal definition of success.  Trusting the people and the plants and the rocks and the animals and the water around us is the first and scariest step toward sustainability.  It's also the most important measure of our sucess in the "exam of life."