A new paradigm

This article first appeared in our Earth Day 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

Main image: learning community of the School of Mother Earth, Roma Verde Garden, Mexico City

THE SCHOOL OF MOTHER EARTH

Something is no longer working; we have become disconnected from nature and its dynamic processes, and built a linear model based on competitive relationships where the only thing that matters is to possess and consume. This generates a circle of greed.

The environmental emergency and the climate crisis urgently demand that we imagine a new way of understanding and relating to the world, and that we propose new forms of social organisation that enable interconnection with nature.

We must construct a new epistemology: a new narrative space through which we can examine ourselves. It requires new interpretations that reveal other facets, so we can weave a new educational framework that acknowledges that rationality is not the only way to interpret the world.

This new pedagogy is found in the ways Indigenous peoples wove their knowledge with nature; science was not a method but a dialogue, where the empirical world became art and craft and where the interconnection with the cosmos allowed for holistic understanding.

Through this understanding, each element of nature revealed a symbol that made it possible to construct the reality in which they lived and, more importantly, felt. Human beings communicated with nature, and nature responded.

A return to the sacred

The School of Mother Earth seeks to foster and promote the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples who interpret science through their interconnection with nature. Teaching relies not on rote memorisation but on lived experiences; it is a return to the sacred through an empathetic understanding of the ecosystem that surrounds us.

The central proposal behind the School of Mother Earth is to work with children and young people to create a living pedagogy where knowledge is acquired through the practice of community actions, without neglecting the philosophical explanations and concepts necessary for a systemic understanding.

Empirical and scientific knowledge are united; the educational programme integrates art and science, crafts and techniques to solve problems and find solutions.

The essence of this approach lies in recognising the physical body through the importance of posture and breathing, while also exploring artistic potential and systemic reflection.

Ending dualism

We need to create new narratives to tell the story from a perspective capable of seeing the plurality, diversity and inter-culturality that we are – that leave behind the binary, dualistic and dystopian discourses with which traditional schooling makes us interpret reality.

In these times, as we witness the advent of a socio-environmental collapse, the only way to turn things around is by making education a process of life action. This will only be achieved if we begin to teach that the Earth is a living being that breathes and feels, and that we must, therefore, interact with it from reciprocity and ecosystemic understanding – the ayni – through which receiving is only understood when we are capable of giving.

A network for change

A key objective of the Pachakuti Network is to activate the School of Mother Earth and its self-managed spaces; the School launched in Bolivia at the headquarters of the Kawsay Foundation, and plans are underway to expand to other organisations that form the Pachakuti Network. These organisations are located not only in Bolivia but also in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico.

The initial target audience is teenagers, but the idea is to extend the curriculum to children as well. The goal is to demonstrate that an alternative epistemological perspective can offer us a different relationship with life, where separation from nature is not the norm.

The focus is instead on the profound connection we have with Mother Earth, and a recognition that our life processes are embedded in the continuums woven by the web of life.

This presents a multi-species, pluridiverse vision that has always been present in the worldview of ancestral peoples, but which the western, anthropocentric perspective lost by elevating reason as the sole way to interpret the world.

A window to hope

The vision of the School of Mother Earth is, above all, a window to hope; if we don’t profoundly change our perspective, we will continue to see nature as a resource at our service and not as a collaborative ally.

Our commitment to this vision is to the future, because without it there isn’t one. The Earth needs a biocentric worldview, and that’s what the School of Mother Earth embodies.

Let us then allow ancestral knowledge to flourish, because Mother Earth needs to be heard – and we must begin to learn to interpret what she tells us through wind, fire, water and earth.