How Can Education Promote Sustainability?
Mark K. Smith, in What is Education, defines it as the process of inviting truth and possibility. In its Greek root word, educere means ‘to bring out or develop potential’. This definition reveals that education lies at the heart of economic growth and transformation across disciplines.
Thus, Sustainability Education is necessary for attaining a future of Sustainability. But is it enough?
Incorporating sustainability education into learning systems helps ensure that people across all age groups recognize the need for a sustainable world. They will do this through learning resources embedded in student curricula or taught to adults within communities. However, Sustainability is a complex and evolving concept whose definition is constantly changing, making it challenging to teach.
Many educational campaigns try to approach Sustainability from a perspective that is easy to understand. These unambiguous and straightforward messages, such as picking up litter from the roadside or switching off unused light, sometimes fail to pass the holistic message across.
An average African may be taught about the need for managing electricity consumption for their budget optimization. But they cannot immediately grasp the effect of this consumption on the ozone layer, the livelihood of inhabitants of Crude Oil-rich environments, and their long-term health.
An excellent approach to this is to ensure structured learning in sustainability education, which means that the same group of people need to be consistently taught about the complexities involved in ensuring Sustainability. The learning resources also need to be dynamic to accommodate evolution in understanding Sustainability across specific industries.
The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development also posits that sustainability education promotes critical thinking, problem-solving, and action. This means that learners can adequately understand the concept of Sustainability and think about ways to align with it within their immediate environment. This understanding should lead to small pockets of radical change that would sum up to the overall holistic transformation within each country.
However, the successful generation of this wide-reaching effect requires responsible, accountable leadership, and expertise in the systemic educational process that would lead to transformation. These concepts would utilize cost-effective methods that are scalable across entire populations.
Although sustainability education aims to bring about transformation through various teaching methods ranging from drama, debate, literature, and art, it is weak in its approach to cultural norms. For example, African culture acknowledges and affirms the need to burn waste. It is culturally safer to burn off personal effects and sanitary items than to dispose of them properly. Thus, several bonfires take place simultaneously across numerous locations, which induce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
To address these cultural practices, sustainability education needs to have culture-based learning resources that provide alternative approaches that are easily adaptable within each society. In the example above, this practice can be channeled towards electricity generation via localized biomass combustion.
In summary, Sustainability education is critical to knowledge expansion and necessary change across the world. But it also needs to find a balance based on complexity, proper planning/accountability, and cultural norms.
Author: Oluwagbemibori Olaoye
Photo: thespoke.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au
