An Obligation to Endure

Oct 15, 2026

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An essay by Susan Laird explores how fear shapes superstition and cruelty, then applies that lens to contemporary climate change and its educational consequences. Drawing on Rachel Carson’s work and personal experience in prairie observation, it connects drought, wildfire, and ecological disruption to broader national and global impacts across politics, economics, religion, arts, philosophy, and schooling. It also addresses the pressures on educators and students and asks how one can endure in this transforming climate.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLifestyle

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Two Climate Changes—Global and Educational

An Obligation to Endure Susan Laird, University of Oklahoma Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life. —Bertrand Russell,“An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”(1943) There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. —Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962) With ever more demands from the education profession’s “Organization Men”1 (and women2) for faculty labors over proliferating assessment protocols and clerical tasks, new technologies, fundraising and marketing initiatives, heavily documented application proposals to garner some institutional support for expected work now otherwise personally financed, and colleagues’ and students’ own related stresses, when can an educational foundations scholar even find time needed for that contemplation on learning and life so necessary to our calling? Educational foundations graduate students whom I teach and advise—simultaneously professional educators and mothers of infants and school-aged children, some also caregivers for family elders—tell me they read, think, and write primarily while their households sleep. So intense are their thirst and hunger for this foundational inquiry as educators and learners. They have survived sexual and racial oppression, religious abuse, symbolic and domestic violence, poverty and crushing debt, disability, cancer, eating disorders, rape, unintended pregnancy, and anti-intellectual bigotry. A few do wage-labors in and around schools, but most work today in colleges, universities, human service agencies, and various social movements. Their struggles as educators, for justice and joy, inspire and sustain my own sense of obligation to endure in this field. Everyday, therefore, I wake up to the prairie train’s honk—eager to watch a new dawnhour spectacle of growing light, lifting night away, unspeakably beautiful, emerging from behind that broad wooded horizon, maybe glowing like gentle fire, maybe clouded pale and silvery or tinted pink and blue. The sunrise beams through these silhouetted treetops; a neighbor’s dog barks; wind-chimes ring; mourning doves coo and peck the ground; finches and cardinals flock to feed here. I dare not take for granted this wondrous setting where I do my contemplative work as an educational foundations scholar—today rereading Rachel Carson’s classic in e-book for- AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Amy Bradshaw, Tom Burns, John Covaleskie, Elon Dancy, Bill Frick, Jim Giarelli, John Green, Kristen Holzer, Penny Pasque, Joan Smith, and Courtney Vaughn for thoughtful conversations on this topic and helpfully critical comments on this article in draft. I owe particular thanks also to the editors, for compassionate patience with my delayed submission, on account of a family medical crisis. 1. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956/2002) . 2. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977/1993) . mat, Silent Spring,3 from whose second chapter I borrow this essay’s title. For one urgent question poses fearsome material challenges to our field now: How to endure, wherever we are, as our climate changes? Two Climate Changes—Global and Educational Year after year, in this ecotone4 between the Cross Timbers and the Mixed-Grass Prairie, I am bearing witness to a dramatically hastening climate change, the worst drought and summer heat since the Great Depression,5 a feast for ants and other insects, easily controlled by pesticides.6 Before Europeans colonized the prairie, natural ecological processes included spontaneous f

FAQs

What is the central question posed by the author regarding climate change?

The author asks how to endure, wherever one is, as climate changes.

How does the essay describe the prairie’s changing climate conditions?

It depicts worsening drought and summer heat, more dangerous wildfire conditions, shoreline recession, unusual seasonal colors, and declining songbirds.

What pressures do educational foundations graduate students face, according to the author?

They face increasing assessment protocols and clerical tasks, new technology and marketing demands, heavily documented proposals for institutional support, and stress affecting both students and colleagues.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jayni