Creating something new with the tools of the old does not work. We cannot build communities and workplaces that are focused on wellbeing, reciprocity, safety, and justice within an economic system geared almost exclusively toward profit and growth. Each day we witness global violence, extraction, and exploitation of our Earth and our people that, in a profit-over-people system, is inevitable.
Too often, we sit in the comfort of our classrooms, and train ourselves to passively identify challenges without proactively discussing solutions. This course is for students who sense that something fundamental is wrong about the system in which we live — and that we study and train to become a part of. It is a course based on a basic premise: we learn by questioning and doing, rather than passively adopting the premises of the old.
If yet another racial equity workshop or task force is not the answer to structural racism, then what is? If replacing fossil-powered cars with e-cars is not the answer to avoiding climate collapse, what is? If escalating work hours and screen-time is not the answer to a meaningful life, what is? If new regulatory guidelines, triple bottom lines, and corporate social responsibility commitments barely make a dent in our pillaging of the planet, what would?
This course asks, “What are the systemic issues you care most about?” and then empowers you to courageously envision what structural change can look like for this issue, through connecting with and learning from community organizers, social movements, politicians, and changemakers who are working on these issues right now. Action oriented, we hope to use this house course as a catalyzer for you to identify ways (small and large) to plug into ongoing campaigns and projects that are moving towards structural change.
We invite those who have experienced serious limitations of a traditional education in tackling major structural problems facing the planet’s people. We invite you to study and learn from those with first-hand and lived experiences of issues commonly and passively discussed in the classroom. In this course, our classroom is real world experiences.