What do we mean by Education for Sustainable Development?

The question 'What is education for?' is one that is always bound to stir debate. In many countries education is associated with increasing employment prospects - governments and employers are concerned that in a climate of global economic competition they will lose out if their workforce is not as skilled as others are. This has led to a focus on 'standards' and testing in areas such as literacy and numeracy, and a focus on information and communications technology. Whilst these areas are clearly important to learning, a growing number of educators are concerned about the neglect of the 'whole child' in such a mechanistic process and question what such an education is leading to from a global perspective.

As the ecological educator David Orr notes:

"..without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the Earth”

( David Orr 1994. Earth in Mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Island Press)

ESD and The Millenium Development Goals
In addition, millions of children receive no schooling at all, hence the third of fifteen United Nations Millenium Development Goals is to try to:

"Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling."
http:// www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

Current predictions are that these goals, which amount to a programme to try and satisfy basic needs globally, will not be reached, due to a lack of political will and adequate finance. The World Bank estimates that reaching all the goals would require $40-$60 billion a year until 2015.

www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/mdgassessment.pdf

Europeans spend $6.5 billion p.a. on ice cream
www.globalfootprints.org/kids/quiz/loco/a1.htm

The US government was granted $87 billion additional funding by Congress for the continued occupation of Iraq in 2004.
www.wwdemocracy.nildram.co.uk/gaian_democracies/gd_launch.html

Many educators (including proponents of Development Education and Environmental Education) are dissatisfied with the narrow agenda of conventional education and wish to focus more on the process of engagement with learners. They believe that good education should be participatory, experiential, include personal and social development, and discuss values and attitudes. However, all educators, perhaps especially those who feel passionate about DE, EE or ESD, need to be careful about educating ‘for’. Geoff Cooper (Outdoors with Young People, Russell House Publishing 1998) quotes a Canadian educator:

“In a rapidly changing world we must enable students to debate, evaluate, and judge for themselves the relative merit of contesting positions.”

Bob Jickling (‘Why I don’t want my children to be educated for sustainable development', Journal of Environmental Education 23)

However, as has been noted in Section 2, 'What is sustainable development?', sustainable development itself is a contested concept. Just because we feel that problems are pressing, does not mean that we have to push a particular point of view – we should however continually debate the context and type of future for which we are learning information, skills and values.

Several of the educators involved in the LfSC project believe in engaging with Constructivist theory – the idea that we construct our own knowledge

(see ‘What is Constructivism?’ Denver School of Education http://www.carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/constructivism.html)
It also suggests that there is no absolute truth. Thoreau says “It takes two people to say the truth – one to say it and another to understand it.” Proponents believe we need to allow pupils to come to their own understanding of the truth.

One of the LfSC project co-ordinators in Mumbai, gave an example from one of the schools she has been working with. They decided to have a pupil debate on the topic “Greed is a sustainable feature”. She feels that the role of the teacher is to help the student hear and see effectively, but not to tell them what to hear or seeThose who proposed the motion won. The teacher pointed out why she disagreed, but left it there. A few months later they had a debate on the war in Iraq. Many concluded that the USA was very greedy, so they revisited the previous debate and decided that greed was not sustainable. She believes this indicates that both teachers and pupils need to keep an open mind.

The word 'education' is based on the notion of 'drawing out' what is there inside the learner. The methodology the LfSC project has been promoting seeks to find out where the learner is coming from and build out from there.

However, there has to be a knowledge base on which to build to be able to discuss issues of sustainability effectively - it is worrying to see how many school leavers still think the ozone hole is causing climate change. Teachers themselves are often unaware of the way sustainability is being implemented in areas such energy generation, housing, new forms of democracy such as participatory budgeting, and new economics such as extended producer responsibility and eco-taxation.

It is possible to demonstrate that some values or technologies are more conducive towards sustainability than others. Pupils and teachers need to be made aware of these, debate them and make up their own minds (see the activity: Learning from Bedzed). In order to do this, they need a range of skills and understanding of key concepts.