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Tomorrow's Children: 
Partnership Education for the 21st Century
© 1999 by Riane Eisler

Excerpt from
The Epilogue:
The Partnership School of the Future

When I think of the school of the future, I see a place of adventure, magic, and excitement, a place that, generation after generation, adults will remember from their youth with pleasure, and continue to participate in to ensure that all children learn to live rich, caring, and fulfilling lives. An atmosphere of celebration will make coming to this school a privilege rather than a chore. It will be a safe place, physically safe, and emotionally safe, a place to express and share feelings and ideas, to create, and to enjoy, a place where the human spirit will be nurtured and grow, where spiritual courage will be modeled and rewarded.

In this partnership school, children will learn about the wonder and mystery of evolution. When they look at the sky, they will know the amazing truth that our stars, which seem so tiny from afar, are not only immense but afire with enormous energy, and that the energy of one of these stars, our sun, made possible the miracle of life here on Earth.

They will be awed by how the inanimate became animate and enchanted by the myriad ways life has continued to reinvent itself. When they look at a stone, leaf, or raindrop, they will be aware that the tiniest subatomic particles share properties with the largest constellations of stars, that energy and matter are not really separate, and that all life forms on our planet share elements of the same genetic code and come from a common ancestor. 

They will understand that this interconnected web of life that we call Nature is both immensely resilient and terribly fragile, that we need to treat our natural habitat with caring and respect, not only because we depend on nature to survive, but also because nature is a thing of wonder and beauty - because, as our Native American and prehistoric European partnership traditions tell us, it is imbued with the Sacred.

In this partnership school, young people will hear many stories of the wonders of life on our Earth. They will learn that cooperation and caring play a major part in the life of many species with whom we share our planet, and that what marks our human emergence is not our capacity to inflict pain but our enormous capacity to give and feel pleasure. They will know about chemicals that, by the grace of evolution, course through our bodies, rewarding us with sensations of sometimes exquisite pleasure when we create and care. And they will understand that this pleasure is ours not only when we are loved but when we love another, not only when we are touched with caring but when we touch another with caring.

Tomorrow's children will know that all of us, no matter what our color or culture, come from a common mother, way back in Africa millions of years ago. They will appreciate difference - beginning with the difference between the female and male halves of humanity.

They will have mental maps that do not lead to the scapegoating and persecution of those that are not quite like them. Both girls and boys will be aware of the enormous range of their human potentials. 
They will be equipped to cultivate the positives within themselves and others. They will understand what makes for real political and economic democracy, and be equipped to help create and maintain it. They will have learned to value women's contributions throughout human history, and to give particular value to the caring and caretaking work that was once devalued as "merely women's work." 

They will also understand that this work is the highest calling for both women and men, that nonviolence and caretaking do not make boys "sissies," and that when girls are assertive leaders they are not being "unfeminine" but expressing part of their human potential.

In this school of the future, children will learn to be just as proficient in using the lenses of the partnership and dominator models as in using computer technology. Partnership literacy and competency will be cross-stitched into all aspects of the curriculum. Children will learn to regulate their own impulses, not out of fear of punishment and pain, but in anticipation of the pleasure of responsible and truly satisfying lives and relationships. 

Stories will be told of heroic women and men who worked for a safer, more equitable world. There will be tales of inspirational leadership. There will be laboratories for developing partnership social and economic inventions: laboratories not only for learning about the natural sciences, but also about the social sciences and how we may use them to create a partnership world. 

Partnership education will be part of everyone's consciousness, as the whole community will recognize that children are our most precious resource - to be nurtured, cultivated, and encouraged to flower in the unique ways each of us can.

Partnership schools will be resources of and for the whole community, linked to other schools, communities, and nations through electronic communications fostering a world community. 

In partnership schools, tomorrow's children will form visions of what can be and acquire the understandings and skills to make these visions come true. They will learn how to create partnership families and communities worldwide. 

And they will join together to construct a world where chronic violence, inequality, and insensitivity will no longer be "just the way things are" but "the way things once were." 

Many of us are already fashioning some of the educational building blocks for constructing the partnership schools of the future.  As we saw in these pages, there are many resources for us to use and develop. There is also, as we saw, a great deal that stands in our way. 

But working together, we can build a new educational system based on the principles of the partnership school. And as we do, we will not only lay the foundations for the new education young people need for the 21st century, but for a more sustainable, equitable, and caring world.

Riane Eisler

The Center for Partnership Studies

P.O. Box 51936
Pacific Grove, CA 93950
USA
Phone 831-626-1004
Fax 831-626-3734
center@partnershipway.org