failure of leadership

Surprising as it is, most schools, colleges and universities are doing remarkably little with regard to educating their communities about the ecological crisis. Instead we seem to be turning out vast numbers of students who have little or no sense of the interrelatedness of us to the planet. Noel Perrin - the Dartmouth Professor who died in 2004 once said 'neither the trustees nor the administration seems to believe that a crisis is coming.' He argued that they comprehend the situation intellectually, but they have no capability to act, to actually do anything directly to attend to the problem.
Thinking about this further it is perhaps the greatest example of what Otto Scharmer at MIT calls leadership blindspots - a manifest failure of leadership across our entire education system to attend to the most pressing issue that faces us - be we student, teacher, parent, business or whatever. It is not a simple add on component of the existing operational approach, it is a profound realignment - I feel that the world beyond education is getting this much, much quicker, than the world within education.
What I think we need to do is to build a new constituency for the future - a means to an end that will ensure the centrality of ecoliteracy in all educational activity from building design, to curriculum, to training. It needs to focus on values, principles, knowledge and perspective that illuminates the crisis is of education, not in education - we urgently need to educate along the lines of ecology - how human systems interrelate to natural systems, how we can build ecologically resilient communities and ecologically literate economies, we need to have a renaissance of ideas that focus on creating the connection - from simple things like designing the school playground as a place of direct ecological education as an edible connection from self to soil, through to a review of how all elements of the curriculum we educate our students through is focused on making connections, learning the lessons of living systems - we use nature as a guide and teacher, rather than something to be exploited, we learn that sustainability is a community practice - it challenges us to learn how to connect and work collectively to solve problems together, we learn that the real world is our optimal learning environment, it offers us a vast array of ways of learning by doing, we learn that sustainable living is rooted into a profound knowledge of place - knowing ourselves in our environment teaches us how we can see others and see how we influence the lives of others.
Our current educational leadership discourse fails, completely, to make this simple set of connections - it is time to learn these lessons.