High School Lecture Series
PUBLIC LECTURE
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 7:00 pm, SF Waldorf High School
TENDING THE ROOTS OF SUSTAINABILITY:
EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN AND THE EARTH
Craig Holdrege, founder and director of The Nature Institute, author of Beyond Biotechnology
How can we as adults help children have deep experiences that let them become rooted in the world? Part of the work is for us to overcome our own tendencies to over-intellectualize and to create a distance between ourselves and nature. In other words, the problem with children is often adults. Do we encourage our children to enjoy the night sky or do we explain to them how many light years away those stars are? Do we talk about genes and hormones to children before they have observed how a plant grows? We live in an age in which we “know” a lot, but this knowledge is often not saturated with experience and relationship. Can we learn to hold back, to provide opportunities for quiet observation? Can we learn to characterize and portray the world around us so that children gain open-ended concepts that can grow as they grow? A sustainable future depends on human perception, thought, and action becoming strongly rooted in what the wisdom of nature can teach us. For then we can increasingly learn from life to foster life-engendering activity on the earth.
Craig Holdrege spearheaded the founding of The Nature Institute in Ghent, NY in 1998 and serves as its director. His areas of study include philosophy and biology, and he worked for 21 years as a high school biology teacher in Waldorf Schools in Germany and the United States. Since the 1990s Craig has been involved in teacher training and mentoring high school science teachers and has given many courses for adults in a phenomenological and experiential approach to nature study and biology. He has written numerous articles, including many on the topic of genetic engineering. His most recent book is Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering (University of Kentucky Press, 2008).
For more information, please contact John Burket, HS Biology and Earth Sciences.
A talk for grades 9-12
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 11:55 am - 12:40 pm
THE FUTURE HISTORY OF THE ARCTIC
Charles Emmerson,
author and geopolitical expert
In The Future History of the Arctic,
geopolitics expert Charles Emmerson weaves together the history of the
region with reportage and reflection, revealing a vast and complex area
of the globe, loaded with opportunity and rich in challenges. He
defines the forces which have shaped the Arctic's history and introduces
the players in politics, business, science and society who are
struggling to mold its future. The Arctic is coming of age.
On March 23rd, Mr. Emmerson will tell the story of the Arctic -through the stories of those who live there, those who
study it, and those who will determine its destiny.
Charles Emmerson has been a Global Leadership Fellow and Associate Director of the World Economic Forum, heading the Forum’s Global Risk Network and acting as their resident geopolitical specialist. Formerly, he worked for the International Crisis Group foreign policy think tank. He graduated top of his class from Oxford University, and, as a recipient of an Entente Cordiale scholarship, studied international relations and international public law at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He now lives in London.
For more information, please contact Mary Anne McGill, the high school librarian.
A talk for grades 9-12
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 11:55 am - 12:40 pm
PEARL OF CHINA
Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. During the Cultural Revolution, she was ordered by Communist officials to denounce Pearl Buck as an American imperialist. At seventeen, she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao’s Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. Min moved to the United States in 1984. Her first book, the memoir Red Azalea, became an international bestseller and was published in twenty countries. Since the completion of Red Azalea, Min has written four subsequent works of historical fiction: Katherine, Becoming Madame Mao, Wild Ginger, Empress Orchid and The Last Empress. Her books attempt to re-record histories that have been falsely written. “If my own history is recorded falsely, how about other people?” she asks. Both critics and writers have praised her work, calling it “historical fiction of the first order.” Her new novel, Pearl of China is a fictional account of the 40 years that writer Pearl S. Buck spent in China.
For more information, please contact Mary Anne McGill, the high school librarian.