Although schools appear straightforward as centers of learning and training, some are asserting that underneath the hood, they are a part of a network of cultural institutions making up a contemporary challenge called the posthuman condition. The posthuman condition is an idea that philosophers and cultural theorists around the world have endorsed which seeks to explain the unique state and challenges of modern societies.
It asserts that our society’s everyday transactions, including education, are dependent on physical and natural forces that seem to disappear, however, in the background of our perception and social communications. Underneath school ceilings, walls, and floors are thousands of pipes and wires that make it possible to carry out the school day. Our cafeterias are sites where we rely on plant and animal goods to ensure students remain energized and ready to learn.
Yet these animals and objects that are ever vital to our schools rarely receive credit or mention in our everyday talk of education and learning. This tendency—to fade these forces into the background of our cultural practices—has given rise to a worldwide intellectual movement experts are calling posthumanism. Posthumanists represent a global community of thinkers linking the invisibility of our society’s most constitutive physical and natural resources to the climate crisis and fight for a sustainable future.
The idea is that the exclusive attention we pay to human actors in education—to students, parents, educators, and policymakers, to name a few—is part of a wider disregard for the physical and natural resources that power our schools, societies, and lives. The posthuman turn taking place in education and academic scholarship is attempting to overturn this social convention through the posthumanist framework, a paradigm for teaching, learning, and inquiry.
This call has given rise to posthumanist theories, like new materialism and animal studies, that are actively reshaping sustainability debates and practice in education. New Materialist theories like Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) provide lenses for understanding the complex web linking humans, modern societies, and the nonbuilt environment. Animal studies has shown that human and nonhuman animals are more alike than previously posited. These theories are impacting present-day teaching and learning on the ground.
One case is the CLASS Act moving through the California state legislature (Compassionate Learning Advancements for Science Students Act). This science education reform initiative is seeking to allow families to opt out of animal dissection in science classrooms, a measure posthumanist educators endorse, hoping it will contribute to sustainability. Florida’s Palm Beach County School District is advancing similar measures. Its Green Champions program is a national model where school staff undergo professional development to help their schools develop a sustainability action plan.
These initiatives show that education is integral to facing the challenges raised by the posthuman condition. Schools heavily rely on the built and nonbuilt environment to carry out their missions and students are entering a world where the sustainable future of our societies hinge on understanding this complex web. With these challenges afoot, posthumanism is a helpful paradigm that takes these matters out of the background, putting them at the heart of our inquiry, learning, and teaching.