Cowspiracy - Questions about Education from a Movie about Food Production

I watched the movie Cowspiracy this weekend. I will admit to having been so upset that I yelled out loud a couple of times. Shocking and scary.

The movie is ostensibly about sustainability and the environment, but the "elephant in the room" story is about the unbelievable costs of meat-producing agribusiness.

There are many interesting lessons in this movie for those of us talking about education, not the least of which is how the so-called progressive organizations appear either willfully blind to the true issues, or sometimes even complicit. It's not just how organizations work that is revealed, but at individual levels the larger cognitive dissonance, the scary double-speak, and (thankfully) the bravery of a few.

I highly recommend watching this movie, and propose some questions below to have a post-movie conversation on education.

1. If you watched Cowspiracy and you weren't previously vegan, did you change your diet? If not, why not?
2. Are there things we could learn about ideas, acceptance, change, and movements from comparing food issues and education?
3. Is there an "elephant in the room" (a large or the largest issue but which doesn't get addressed) for education? Are there things we aren't "allowed" to talk about? (Examples might include the critical role of healthy families to learning, links between pharmaceutical profits and medicating youth, and a culture of compliance which feeds larger problems in our society.)
4. If there are "sinister" forces at work in food, does that change our reluctance to see or confront them in education?
5. What kind of solutions to the food issues does the film seem to or directly imply?
6. Why do the progressive organizations that say they are working to solve the problem deny the real issues? 

"Upon the subject of education... I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in." - Abraham Lincoln

I'm interested in how hard it can be to have a thoughtful, candid discussion about education--not schooling, not testing, but education as in learning. Since it feels like it's often all I talk about, I'm always surprised when I have a good, deep conversation with an educator about learning and he or she will say, "I haven't had this good a conversation in years." Does it tell us something that many teachers don't have opportunities to talk about learning much?

In some ways, there's a premium right now on "going along."  Question something--even carefully and thoughtfully--and people will say, "I just can't think about that right now, I'm too busy just keeping up." In most industries, we have a word for those who question or expose unhealthy or inappropriate behavior: a whistleblower. It's a word that should have a connotation of courage, but now is more often a pejorative.

Just ask questions about the value of mandatory or compulsory schooling, and you'll be surprised at how quickly a conversation can die. Shouldn't we have good justifications for a system that produces hurt or pain or confusion for so many? Shouldn't we be have an ability to weigh the positives and negatives of our cultural practices in so important an area? (Of equal shallowness are our conversations--or lack thereof--about the prison system. I'm not going to connect the dots there, but you can...)

One dilemma is that public schooling, the way we do it now, is such a powerful force for mass impact that even those who disagree with certain aspects of it don't want to kill the goose that lays such golden propaganda eggs. Progressive efforts often actually see education as a system to help them leverage and accomplish their goals, making it hard to see clearly the negative role of schooling when you depend on it for your own political purposes.

The conversation about education and learning should be taking place with all our people, at all levels. How, what, and why we learn are not esoteric topics only to be decided by experts; they should be an integral part of our the dialog in every community we are a part of.

If we can't trust regular people to talk about education, then we obviously haven't done a good job on that very task, have we?