Learning for sustainability: beyond green gloss and towards serious reform

Education today: what are our priorities?

Education has at least three functions in society: socialisation, qualification and personal development. Learning for sustainability requires some serious thought on what these different functions mean considering the environmental crisis.

Socialisation refers to things, values and norms we collectively care about. In many parts of the world, taking care of yourself, being entrepreneurial and competitive, having an open and flexible mindset and being a lifelong learner have come to dominate over solidarity and equitable sharing.

Qualification has to do with the skills and competences that are considered critical in life. Nowadays, these skills are primarily geared towards succeeding in a globalising and rapidly changing economy, as opposed to helpful ‘life skills’ of a responsible citizen.

Personal development is about the space and support learners need to become self-actualising individuals who are mindful of the wider world. Sadly, this ‘learning for being and becoming’ is often marginalised, as schools tend to focus on what the national curriculum prescribes. The so-called ‘inner sustainability’ of the learner receives little attention, as does social-emotional learning.

To transform education, we need to…

Give teachers and pupils the freedom to learn and experiment without being held in a straitjacket of prescribed curricula and exams. Only then can teaching reflect the lifeworld of learners, their concerns and interests. A localised curriculum cannot be easily planned and requires connecting with the local community and stakeholders, but it makes education more relevant and exciting.

Create space for boundary-crossing between disciplines, between school and community and between socio-emotional, cognitive and embodied forms of learning. Sustainability issues are complex, and education should explore this complexity. To make the school canteen more sustainable, we need to investigate questions of energy, fairness, carbon footprint, affordability, gender, animal well-being, local versus global, organic versus conventional, etc. These are difficult questions that won’t have definitive answers, but they are too important to oversimplify or, worse, ignore.

Replace a culture of fear with a pedagogy of hope. Many young people are worried about the future: to address this, we need learning environments that invite students to (co)design and enact a plan of action, to help them become active agents of change.

Reflect more on our moral values and those embodied by the school. Without paying attention to our core values, we might become very competent and innovative but end up accelerating unsustainable patterns and behaviours, as we lack the underlying ethic of care and compassion for others, including for other species.

Take a whole-school approach to sustainability, as it allows the school community and policymakers to embed sustainability systemically and holistically in the whole school organisation and the wider community. There are schools around the world that are already working in this vein.

It is wonderful that, like UNECE and UNESCO, the European Union is also turning to education as a key component of creating a more sustainable world. But learning for sustainability will fail – in fact, will do more harm than good – if it amounts to green gloss and a ‘tick the boxes’ mentality. That old approach might have worked well in a culture of accountability, but it is wholly inappropriate if schools are to contribute to a more sustainable, inspiring and hopeful future.

Arjen Wals is Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University, where he also holds a UNESCO Chair. He is Guest Professor at the Norwegian University for the Life Sciences (NMBU) and at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen. He writes a regular blog at www.transformativelearning.nl