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Towards Sustainable Education By Andrew Watson
‘I
f I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’ (widely attributed to Henry Ford). Think about this in relation to education. Consideration of the nature, purpose and pathway of formal education over the past 150 years or so reveals a mainly repetitive pattern of ‘doing things’ the same way as they have always been done, mainly because they have ‘always been done that way’. Fuelled by technology, we have been able to do the same things only faster, and to bask, self-satisfied, in the reflected glory of technological triumph – or alternatively, as recent International Baccalaureate and UK examination systems suggest, stumbled into algorithmic confusion. Nevertheless, not much has truly changed. We have just turned education into a ‘faster horse’. Perhaps the departed and much loved Sir Ken Robinson would agree. During Sustainability Education’s inaugural European summit in Berlin in May 2019, Climate Change expert Professor Johann Rockström talked of sustainability being ‘at a renaissance moment’. With the Covid-19 crisis still engulfing the world, it appears we all are. If Covid-19 has served a significant positive purpose, then perhaps it is to illuminate the extent to which we are all connected, interdependent and fragile and, ultimately, to remind us what it means to be human, with all our fallibilities, fears and endless hope. According to Rockström and Will Day of the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership, we have ten years to address the chronic emissions issues that threaten to, nay are about to, put our planet into terminal decline. Unless we immediately change the way we do things, we will soon
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have tipped over the tipping point. If ever there was one, surely this is an imperative for us all to begin to change. If sustainability is ‘at a renaissance moment’ then so is education. As a key part of the system, the education sector needs to reflect hard, and fast, on its priorities: on what the experience of teaching and learning provides for young people: on the ‘where, what, how and why’ of education, as well as the standards it sets in terms of its culture, leadership and role-modelling, in pursuit of a better, more peaceful, more sustainable world. Now is the time to re-imagine, re-consider, re-think, and reboot how a vision of the future can be nurtured by an experience of education. A simple definition of sustainability refers to ‘a set of conditions and trends in a given system that can continue indefinitely’ (Atkisson, 2013). It relates to interdependent systems of cause and effect between socio-economic, environmental, cultural and political activity around the world. Sustainability ‘thinking’ refers to the capacity to make connections and find enduring solutions which will allow the
