Teach vs. Preach

Last week I led a series of sessions on organic, fair trade and local food at Spitalfields City Farm. We looked at the packaging, shapes and colour of a variety of foods, discussed the farming methods and respective environmental / social impacts of different systems and, so as not to divorce the discussion from the act of eating, cooked pizzas, vegetable kebabs and even dessert on a fire (I know, not the most energy-efficient method, but the young people requested it and I’m sure we’re all aware of the excitement of sitting round a fire, waiting for the optimum balance of raw/charred).

During the sessions I realised just how complicated all of these issues were. Try explaining to a child why a fair trade banana is a good thing (economic fair deal for the grower) a bad thing (airmiles, until the climate of Northern Europe changes sufficiently) and, if it’s not organic, a very grey area thing (where to begin, GM foods and monocultures are theoretically the best way to feed all the people on this planet, however, in practice, they don’t and, to put it bluntly, they destroy the very ecosystems on which we all depend for life in the first place) and you enter the Moral Maze of modern agriculture and the ethical consumer.

So how do we educate about ethics? And what are the ethics of education? By imposing my own morality on a group of school children, I am not helping them to become questioners, wonderers, free-thinkers, I am telling them to think like me, ask the questions I would ask. Yeats said that “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” but once the fire is lit do you just leave it unattended? Although I hope our sessions have got some of the students fired up about these issues, few of them will have the time, even if they have the inclination, to fully understand all the arguments attending climate change science, unsustainable agriculture, biodiversity, resource scarcity. Moreover, within an education programme you do have a certain agenda to advance, objectives to reach and an obligation to fulfil them. So how do you balance all these considerations and still create an inspiring atmosphere?