“Old men make wars, but it is children who will make history” – Ray Merritt.

Dear Climate Healers,

We live in an era when humanity is critically examining many systems once considered normal. This essay invites us to gently examine one such system, not with judgement, but with conscience.

It is the education system.

There is a question that most children ask before the age of five that older adults quietly stop asking. It is not a complicated question. In fact, it is one of the simplest questions that come to our minds,

“Why?”

Why do we eat what we eat? Why are most people malnourished when there is more than enough food? Why do we build things the way we do?

Somewhere along the way, education, as we have built it on Planet A, learned to answer these questions quickly, tidily, and in ways that kept the existing system intact. It taught students to succeed within the world as it is, rather than to wonder whether the world had to be this way at all.

This essay is an invitation to sit with that observation, not with anger, not with blame, but with the gentle curiosity of someone who suspects that something important has been quietly left out of the curriculum.

Nelson Mandela said that education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. We tend to agree with Mandela’s words when we read them. Education is clearly a powerful weapon, but a weapon is aimed at something.

We need to ask what is education aimed at and what can it be aimed at instead?

Planet A’s Education System

Planet A, as a civilizational operating system, has a set of core directives, to grow the economy endlessly, maximize individual consumption, extract resources efficiently, and treat Nature as separate from humanity. These directives are not written on any wall. They do not appear in any institutional mission statement. But they are woven into the fabric of what the education system rewards, what it measures, and what it quietly teaches students to take for granted.

Consider what a conventional education prepares students to do. It prepares them to compete for grades, for university places, for jobs, for status. It measures intelligence as the ability to recall information and perform on standardized tests. It organizes knowledge into separate disciplines, science over here, social studies over there, business somewhere else, as though these things have nothing to do with each other. It prepares students to enter an economy, and only occasionally pauses to ask whether that economy is worth entering.

None of this is malicious. Educators are primarily generous, dedicated people doing their best within systems they did not design. The point is not to criticize professors, teachers, or even schools. The point is to notice that every education system encodes a set of values and to ask, with genuine openness, which values are being encoded in ours.

Planet A’s educational institutions teach separation. The human being is separate from Nature, the individual is separate from the community, the present is separate from the future, the consumer is separate from the consequences of consumption. These separations are not stated explicitly. They are transmitted through what is studied, what is eaten in the cafeteria, what is rewarded, and what is never mentioned at all.

Cafeteria as Curriculum

There is a fact about education systems that is easy to overlook, perhaps because it is hiding in plain sight. Schools are, among other things, some of the largest food providers on the planet. Around the world, schools serve over 450 million meals every single day. Universities add another 200 million.

That number deserves a moment of quiet attention. 650 million meals a day, served to students who are simultaneously being educated about health, the environment, and how to live in the world.

What those meals say, what they silently teach, is not a neutral message. A cafeteria that serves predominantly animal-based food, alongside a curriculum that discusses climate change and biodiversity loss, is teaching a form of cognitive dissonance. It is asking students to care about the planet in the classroom while modeling the opposite at lunchtime.

This is not a small contradiction. Animal agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation, species extinction, and a whole host of other environmental, ethical, social and institutional existential crises, which can all be bundled together as the PolyCrisis, since they stem from the operating system of Planet A. Animal agriculture uses 80% of agricultural land to supply just 18% of global calories. The food served in educational institutions is not separate from this PolyCrisis. It is one of its primary expressions.

What students eat, what they are taught and what the institution values are not three separate things. They are one lesson.

Some institutions have begun to notice this. When Oakland Unified School District shifted to plant-based Vegan defaults in its school meals, critics predicted revolt. Parents would complain. Children would refuse to eat. The program would fail. Instead, meal participation increased, food waste decreased, and students reported enjoying the food. The district saved money. Other districts started calling to find out how Oakland had done it.

This is not offered as a universal prescription. It is offered as evidence that things can be different and that the difference, when it comes, is often gentler and more welcome than we expected.

Planet B’s Education System

Planet B’s education system does not require different buildings. It does not require a revolution, or a demolition of what already exists. It requires, more modestly and more ambitiously at the same time, a different set of questions, asked with patience, with care, and with genuine willingness to hear the answers.

Where Planet A’s education teaches separation, Planet B‘s education system teaches interdependence. The students who understand that the food on their plate is connected to the land, the water, the climate, the farmer, the animal, and the community, those students are not just more ecologically literate. They are more fully human. They can trace the consequences of their choices. They can see themselves as participants in systems, not just recipients of them.

Where Planet A’s education system teaches consumerism as normal, Planet B‘s education system teaches sufficiency as a form of wisdom. There is a difference between knowing how to accumulate and knowing when you have enough. The latter knowledge is older, quieter, and harder to test, but it is more essential.

Where Planet A’s education system teaches students to solve problems within existing systems, Planet B‘s education system invites them to question the systems themselves. This is not a call for radicalism in the classroom. It is a call for genuine critical thinking, the kind that does not stop at the edge of the things that we have decided not to examine.

And where Planet A’s education system models a world in which human beings are at the top of a hierarchy that includes all other life, Planet B‘s education system models something older and more truthful, that we are part of a family of living beings, and that our health and their health are not separable.

A Gentler Examination

None of this requires anyone to be a villain. The education system we have inherited was built by people who were trying to serve their societies, as those societies understood themselves at the time. The industrial model of schooling with its standardized curricula, age-segregated classrooms, examinations, and the factory bell, was designed for an industrial world. It worked, in its way, for the world that it was designed for.

But that world is changing. The PolyCrisis that now presses upon us with its ecological, social, institutional and ethical dimensions, isn’t a crisis that can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it. It requires something more integrated, the ability to examine complexity, to reason across systems, to act with awareness of consequences that extend beyond the immediate and the local.

This is, in fact, a description of what good education has always aspired to do. The invitation is not to invent something entirely new, but to recover something that has always been at the heart of learning at its best and to extend it, with some urgency, in directions that we have been slow to travel.

Education systems shape the future by shaping young people. When education embodies Planet B protocols, it prepares the next generation not just to imagine a different world, but to help build it.

What might that look like in practice? It might look like a science lesson that does not stop at explaining photosynthesis, but asks students to consider what a world with more forests would feel like to live in. It might look like a math class that calculates not just profit margins but ecological footprints. It might look like a lunch queue where the default is a bowl of warm dhal and rice, made with care, and where students understand something of where it came from.

It might look like a school that treats the question of how we eat as being just as worthy of examination as the question of how we calculate. Because it is.

An Invitation, not a Demand

This essay has been written as an invitation to curiosity, not a demand. The next time you are in or near an educational institution, as a parent, a teacher, a student, an administrator, a governor, or simply a person who passes by, you might allow yourself to wonder, quietly and without judgment: what is this place teaching? Not just in the lessons, but in the cafeteria, the culture, the habits, the silence, the assumptions.

You might wonder what would shift if the institution asked, explicitly and openly, whether its food, its curriculum, its values, and its institutional behavior were aligned with the world that it claims to want. Not to create that alignment overnight, because these things take time, coalition, patience, and care, but to ask the question. To let it sit. To see what it stirs.

The students being educated today will be making decisions in the future that we cannot yet imagine, about a world that we are only beginning to understand. The most important thing we can give them is not a set of correct answers, but the capacity to ask better questions and the courage, gently and steadily, to follow those questions wherever they may lead.

For more ideas along these lines, please read There IS a Planet B and the forthcoming A Guide to Planet B.

With much love,