Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in
the 21st Century
(Westview Press, ISBN 0-8133-9040-0)
For children to find faith that is grounded in reality, they need a new vision of
human nature and our place in the unfolding drama of life on this Earth. What
distinguishes us as a species is not our cruelty and violence but our enormous capacity
for caring and creativity. This is our essential humanity - and the basis for both ancient
and future partnership societies.
I would like us together to envision the partnership schools of the future: schools that
we can build as we work to complete the shift to partnership education and culture.
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.
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.
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. They 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.
Inspiring stories will be told about powerful female deities - from the North American
Corn Mother and the Greek Goddess Demeter, Givers of the Fruits of the Earth, to the
Indian Goddess Sarasvati and the Sumerian Goddess Nidaba, honored as inventors of the art
of writing. Stories will also be told of heroic women and men who worked for a safer, more
equitable world - and how we too can use our creativity to create a partnership world.
In these 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; for example, the Weaving the Future: Partnership
Schools project of the Center for Partnership Studies. CPS is collaborating with schools,
universities, and other organizations in gathering, developing, and disseminating
curriculum content, learning processes, and educational structures that reflect
partnership attitudes, values and skills. Information can be obtained from the CPS website
.
Of particular interest for teachers and home-schooling parents is that, in collaboration
with the University of Kansas Center for Research and Learning (a leader in continuing
teacher education), CPS offers teacher professional development workshops in various U.S.
regions. These workshops, incorporating the partnership model in content, process, and
structure, can be taken for continuing educational credit. Longer workshops for
“training of trainers” will accelerate replication of partnership education
nationally and internationally.
In addition, plans are underway at the California State University Monterey Bay for a
Masters program for educators who want to use partnership education, blending content
(what we learn and teach), process (how we learn and teach), and structure (where we learn
and teach).
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.
Dr. Riane Eisler is the author of the international bestseller The Chalice & The
Blade, hailed by Princeton anthropologist Ashley Montagu as "the most important book
since Darwin's Origin of Species.” Her most recent book is the groundbreaking
Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century
(Westview Press). Other books drawing from her research as a cultural historian and
systems theorist include Sacred Pleasure, The Partnership Way, and Women, Men, and the
Global Quality of Life. Dr. Eisler is President of the Center for Partnership Studies,
keynotes conferences worldwide, and consults for business and government on applying the
partnership model and cultural transformation theory to all aspects of life - from the
family and business to education, politics, and the environment. Center for Partnership
Studies, P.O. Box 51936, Pacific Grove, California 93950 Phone (831) 626-1004 Fax (831)
626-3734 website
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Wisdom from Patricia Monaghan
Praisesong for Her
She is a tree in a circle of stones.
She is a crossroad at noon.
She is a breeze in the red mountain ash.
She is a hill on a night without stars.
She is a tear of the sun.
She is the moon on the ripening grass.
She is a hawk in the circling sky.
She is the eye of a hound.
She is a deer by the river of glass.
She is a berry of red mountain ash.
She is the seed of bright grasses.
She is a stone in the river of glass.
She is the sigh as time passes.
Venus of Laussel
You rise in my dreams
like the power of stone,
breaking the glass door
between wind and the body.
You are the measurer:
blood of my moons,
lines of my years.
A thread of breath
connects me to time,
wind in my blood,
a thread to your womb.
Thirteen short lines-
You rise, then are gone.
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~ Goddess 2000 Project ~
Sponsored by
Spiral Goddess Grove ~ The Witches' Web ~ Circle Sanctuary ~
COG ~ The Witches'
Voice ~ Ancient Ways
