by James Hollway, Treasurer of the SEEd Board of Trustees

James Hollway, SEEd’s Treasurer, explores his journey from protests with Extinction Rebellion to working in partnership with SEEd to enact change in the education system.

During the day, I came across Adam – a young man I knew from the meetings in Stroud. When I arrived on the scene, he had already been joyfully swinging for about 18 hours in a hammock, slung between two lamp-posts in a corner of Trafalgar Square. I offered him a drink and a hamburger. Smilingly, he declined, indicating that, since he was chained to the lamp-posts from which his hammock swung, eating or drinking would be unwise.

It took me a second or two to recollect that ingestion leads to egestion: the latter being most challenging when chained to lamp-posts in a public space.

The attempted kindness had betrayed my unconscious sense of separation: as if I were apart from Adam, his ‘benefactor’, as if I had something to offer him. I learned the truism that we are not separate and, on that day, in that corner of Trafalgar Square, my being there – our being there together – was enough.

The November 2019 Rebellion was crushed. A little outrage surfaced: Piers Morgan delivered a predictable flourish of moral indignation over the incident of the delayed rush-hour tube train, but beyond that, the media was mostly silenced.

Campaigning movements can place themselves apart: differently from how I placed myself apart from Adam in London but in ways that still resonate and are related to the ‘problem’. Campaigners tend to tell others what to think and do. We did in XR. I did (and my daughter would say that I still do). I now understand that by doing so, they/we/I reinforce divisions (in particular: Us/Them) that need to be dissolved, or at least relaxed, before we can begin to think and act sustainably.

That’s why I no longer actively support XR: not because I disagree with its vision, but because I don’t think campaigning suits me. However, the conversations I had when I was active led me to understand that the interests of humanity can no longer be paramount. Humanity has done too fine a job already of looking after itself. If we are to live sustainably, we need to do something far harder: feel at one with, or at least prioritise the interests of, the rest of creation.

At the same time as the second Rebellion, I was asked to become a trustee of SEEd. I still wanted to be disruptive and get something ‘done’ (quick, sharp) but I also thought it important that longer-term attitude-changing work was needed. Finding SEEd on my doorstep felt right. Helping young people to change their world for the better was exactly the sort of long-term project I was looking for.

I am still here because SEEd does not campaign – (well, not primarily, although we are trying hard to persuade politicians to pass into legislation a ‘Purpose of Education”). We do not stand apart. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those we work with, particularly the Young Changemakers. We stand together, staring into an uncertain future, puzzled and fearful.

Though we work in education, we do not teach. We do not pass on knowledge: we help you to find it. Our experience has taught us certain techniques and even a radical new perspective, but we do not ‘have’ answers. You have your answers.

Nothing good ever gets done without mutual curiosity and an empathetic collaboration with oneself and those around us. Or, to put it another way: put sustainability at the heart of learning and learning at the heart of sustainability.

Find out more about SEEd’s advocacy work here.

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Featured Image: Li-An Lim, Unsplash

James Hollway