Review by Michaela Corniea 

“One of the greatest and most urgent challenges facing today’s children relates to how they will nurture and educate tomorrow’s children.  Therein lies the real hope for our world.”

-Riane Eisler, Tomorrow’s Children p. 7

Riane Eisler’s blueprint for partnership education, published in 2000, closely examines the U.S. education systems and its weaknesses.  In Tomorrow’s Children, Eisler notes that the current system (current in this case referencing the 1990’s/2000’s, though this is also applicable to today’s system) is based on the dominator model that controls most aspects of society.  In schools, the dominator model demands standardized testing, control, and competition (x).  The need to step away from this model is made evident in the increasing levels of violence, exploitation, and neglect in schools and society as a whole.  As humans, Eisler says, we are born with “an enormous capacity for love, joy, creativity, and caring” (6).  Where the dominator model fails to accommodate these virtues, Riane Eisler’s partnership model encourages them.

The partnership model focuses on interconnectedness, helping students critically examine connections in society and other areas of life.  Throughout this book, the author illustrates exactly how the partnership model will allow students — and through them, society as a whole — to thrive in a more welcoming, democratic and egalitarian society.

I picked up Tomorrow’s Children to read after I finished Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.  While Riane Eisler looks at more modern childhood education in the U.S., Freire’s book was published in 1970 and focuses on adult education in Brazil.  However, both link education to the growth of society as a whole.  As Eisler puts it, “there is one factor that can play a major role in providing young people with the understandings and skills to both live good lives and create a more sustainable, less violent, more equitable future: education” (xiii).  While the educators do differ somewhat in their suggested audience and solution, they have a common understanding: education needs to be reformed for the sake of a better future and stronger society for all.  It should be no surprise that these books, tied together as they are, come from the same collection at the East Side Freedom Library.  You can find them on the shelves of the Larry Olds collection, which I wrote about here.  The main message of the Olds collection is highlighting how education can link to social change, and Freire and Eisler are two strong examples of this.

Eisler wrote Tomorrow’s Children with educators in mind.  There are many sections of the book that describe a lesson taught through partnership education, including lesson plans shared at the back to further illustrate actionable steps teachers can take to incorporate the partnership model.  The author breaks down each school subject through a partnership lens and then shows how the students can learn and benefit from the lessons.  For example, she looks at life sciences and describes how those classes can be used to show students how we are all interconnected “with one another and with our natural habitat,” and that “by destroying the biodiversity of our planet we not only destroy other life forms; we also harm ourselves and future generations” (142).  Eisler takes this a step further as well, suggesting that students can examine businesses and how their practices can help or harm the environment.  This is connected to the understanding that changing harmful behaviors often requires change in the larger social and economic systems (143).  So the goal of the partnership model is truly to emphasize the connections in life, fostering empathy and giving the skills to “put empathy into action” for the growth of a better society (52).

One of the aspects of this view I found particularly important as a general reader (rather than an educator myself) is the focus on equality and the acknowledgement that the process of changing the system cannot be an easy one.  Eisler says many times that the partnership model is gender-balanced, integrating “the history, needs, problems, and aspirations of both halves of humanity into what is taught as important knowledge and truth” (xvii).  She draws on studies to emphasize why this is essential for the betterment of society, stating that the dominator model overlooks the contributions of women which has negative effects on girls’ self-worth, and also on boys and the social system as a whole through a distortion of our entire system of values (39).  The study of humanities through a partnership lens is also an important one, Eisler says, as “students can become aware of the important contributions made by women and nonwhite men” (187).  Of course, this is not as easy as just changing what is taught; there are processes and systems that must be changed in order to explore the full potential of partnership education.  

“To create the kind of education children need, our social and economic policies cannot continue to shortchange education,” Eisler states (22).  In the forward, Nel Noddings writes that challenges to the dominator model are often omitted from policies, and “systemic” change does not often refer to a change to the partnership model but instead to an overhaul that allows for more control from top to bottom “to preserve the highly competitive model already in place” (xi).  Eisler also takes time to focus on socially and economically disadvantaged groups, stating that systems that focus on personal change without also looking at social change fail to acknowledge structural issues and deny the reality of the disadvantaged (192).  The acknowledgement of these obstacles as well as close examination of where they originate is one aspect of the book that general audiences can appreciate; though not everyone can teach in the partnership model, we can take part in changing the policies that have the dominator model firmly locked in place.  As Riane Eisler states, “We have the power to create for ourselves the reality we yearn for” (5). 

If this topic has caught your interest, be sure to check out the Larry Olds collection at the East Side Freedom Library for more related books.  Suggested titles include Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, and Prisoners of Silence, Savage Inequalities, and The Shame of the Nation all by Jonathan Kozol.  Also related might be On the Outside Looking In by Christina Rathbone (which I reviewed here) and And Still We Rise by Miles Corwin which can both be found in the Randolph collection.  There are of course other wonderful books to explore in the library as well, and I encourage you to follow your curiosity straight to the ESFL and the variety in the collections.