There I am, together with Gaell Mainguy, Directeur du développement et des relations internationales du Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires in Paris. It was on Wednesday, Oct 11 and we are on the 21 floor of the "Tour de Montparnasse", spectacular view of Paris and of the Eiffel Tower.
We had a good hour or more of discussion about the role of education in shaping our future. I was truly impressed by the competence and the dedication of the people who participated in the debate. Yet, I remain somewhat skeptical about the possibility for education - at any level - to change society.
On this point, I have some personal experience as a teacher, but more than my limited record I tend to trust Jorgen Randers, one of the original authors of "The Limits To Growth" who defined himself as "a depressed man with a smiling face." That was for various reasons, one was that after, maybe, 40 years of teaching his students about sustainability, he observed that when they moved into the real world, outside the university, they behaved exactly in the same way as the people who had not been taught these matters. Dennis Meadows told me something very similar regarding his own experience. And all that fits well with my personal experience.
Basically, people normally tend to go along the path of lowest resistance and in a society that does not reward sustainability-oriented actions, they will rapidly learn how to maximize their utility function, even though that means forgetting what they learned in school.
That doesn't mean it is useless to teach sustainability and, of course, no rule is without exception. Maybe the kind of creativity that people can develop after a certain training remains an asset all over their life. It means, however, that as long as society remains what it is, the lofty principles that we learn from the science of ecosystems will not be put into practice. So, what is the solution? Well, a good Seneca Cliff can do wonders in terms of changing things!
Apart from lofty principles and Seneca cliffs, a good beer in Paris is always a good thing! Here I am, after the seminar, in a bistrot of Montparnasse together with Jean Pierre Dieterlen, a member of the Adrastia association.
H/t Jacques Chartier-Kastler for the organization of this meeting
