The Future Sustainability of Education and Research

In the opening paragraph of the promotional materials for the Oxford Forum I participated in last spring was a quote I pulled, “…discuss issues central to all our work and discuss practical steps towards the future sustainability of education and research.  So in preparation for my talk, I asked the following question:

“Is it the sustainability of education and research that is the focus of the conversations or is it how education can contribute to sustaining human and other life on planet Earth? Maybe both?

If we successfully educate for a sustainable future, then we will create favorable conditions to make the shift toward a sustainable future, because EfS will have contributed to our individual and collective potential and that of the living systems upon which our lives-and all life-depend.  If we don’t educate for a sustainable future in the way the Benchmarks describe, then we won’t need to worry about education because we won’t be here. We do not have the luxury to spend any time on the latter scenario.  

The unsustainable direction in which we are headed is largely due to bad, anthropocentric, outdated, linear, old paradigm, fixed mindset thinking that is perpetuated in school systems that were designed to train people to work in factories, not designed to change or to make change, and not designed for life-long learning.  So if we make the mid-course correction we need to make in pre-service schools of education and the schools themselves, we will increase the possibility that humans and other life we flourish on Earth indefinitely.  We love Einstein’s quote, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same thinking we used to create them”.  Education for Sustainability is that different way of thinking and is our ode to Einstein.

 Our goal in Education for Sustainability is to change the world, not only to adapt to the changing world. We want to change and evolve the way of thinking that is driving unsustainability, to a way of thinking that can drive sustainability and regeneration. Sustain-ability is the capability to thrive over time on this very diverse, interdependent and ever changing planet. We can’t sustain the planet.  We can only try to sustain humans and other life on the planet. And if it is humans and other life we want to sustain, then we need to learn how to contribute to the health of the social and physical systems upon which we depend. We have to learn how to live well in our places without undermining their ability to sustain us over time.  We liken our challenge to the Copernican Revolution.  It is a fundamental paradigm shift.  

Though in times of dynamic stability, adaptation is usually necessary for survival, our perspective is that it doesn’t make sense to only adapt to the changing world we are in because we will be adapting to the unsustainable situation we created for ourselves (known now as the Anthropocene) and future generations, coping with decline and slowing down on the way to the cliff—None of which will solve our problem.  We have to turn—to make the mid-course correction required to prepare all the children and young people [and, by extension,  their teachers, families and communities] to participate in, and to lead with us, the shift toward the future we want, i.e., a healthy, sustainable and regenerative future.      

In essence,  the sustainability of education and research is, and will continue to be, completely dependent on the education and research for sustainability. - Jaimie Cloud