Professor Martin Ashley
I retired from full-time academic work in 2013 and have finally, after thirteen years of hanging on, decided that it’s no longer appropriate to maintain the website of a working academic. I have long been an advocate of open access but without an institution to fund the article processing charge, the peer review which remains the gold standard for publication has become an expensive business. I do still enjoy writing, so I have decided that the occasional “essay” is probably the best way to keep my interest in philosophy active and I hope some of these will be of interest to those who discover them.
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The title of my 1998 PhD thesis was Value as a Reason for Action in Environmental Education. My principal concern is therefore with environmental sustainability, though as an education professor, it is with the future. Futures education or foresight studies began to feature in my work during the 1990s but have grown in importance as the world has woken up to climate change. I have therefore created two pages. The one for 2030 relates to the children I taught during the 1990s. That for 2050 relates to children and young people now. ​​​​​
I now live in the Scottish Highlands. Before that, I spent the first ten years of retirement in the most remote part of the North Pennines. I spent my childhood in Kent. Though there were good times and there are undoubtedly some very beautiful parts of Kent, I longed to escape from the overcrowded roads, the dense housing, the overdevelopment and the polluted air that is the southeast. There is a cost to this. The winters in the Highlands are long and harsh. To visit family means an expensive, all-day rail journey and hotel stay. Those costs are examples of values quantification, what I am willing to pay (WtP) for the picture on the left. The pictures on the right are the consequences of being unwilling to pay for the natural world and the ecosystems that sustain life as we have known it.
Predictions made in 1998 that were based on detailed analysis of the values of children born during the year 1982 (known in my work as the "millennium children") identified a significant increase in heat waves, storms and flooding by the year 2030. The climate has warmed more than we predicted. 2030 has come five years early. It is now looking probable that children born during the 1980s and 90s may witness irreversible tipping points. Their children almost certainly will.
The UK government has very much embraced the kind of foresight studies and alternative futures thinking that I employed during the 1990s to predict the year 2030 for the millennium children. So much so, that I have found myself playing catch up! Government foresight for the children of the millennium children is frightening and has formed the basis for my 2050 page. Meanwhile, the visionary politician António Guterres has warned us that we are on the highway to hell with our foot on the accelerator.
Value as a reason for action has motivated and sustained an approach to education in the Steiner Waldorf schools markedly different from that driven by the values of mainstream schooling. The work we were privileged to undertake in the Steiner schools has been the most widely read of all my publications - which can be seen as a measure of value in itself. Could Steiner's idea of social threefolding have prevented climate change?
Values that define identity. Value can be a reason for action in many other fields, including music and choral singing which have been interests of mine. The title of my 1993 MPhil thesis was Peer Attachments and Social Deviancy, out of which grew my interest in learner identity. Important as issues of gender and masculinity are, it is important that we do not allow ourselves to be side-tracked by a single focus on gender and thus become blind to other issues of identity which may be as important or more important