Education for the future? Critical evaluation of education for sustainable development goals

Abstract

Building on the Millennium Development Goals, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Education for Sustainable Development Goals (ESDG) were established. Despite the willingness of many educational institutions worldwide to embrace the SDGs, given escalating sustainability challenges, this article questions whether ESDG is desirable as “an education for the future”. Many challenges outlined by the SDGs are supposed to be solved by “inclusive” or “sustainable” economic growth, assuming that economic growth can be conveniently decoupled from resource consumption. Yet, the current hegemony of the sustainability-through-growth paradigm has actually increased inequalities and pressure on natural resources, exacerbating biodiversity loss, climate change and resulting social tensions. With unreflective support for growth, far from challenging the status quo, the SDGs and consequently, the ESDGs, condone continuing environmental exploitation, depriving millions of species of their right to flourish, and impoverishing future generations. This article creates greater awareness of the paradoxes of sustainable development and encourages teaching for sustainability through various examples of alternative education that emphasizes planetary ethic and degrowth. The alternatives include Indigenous learning, ecopedagogy, ecocentric education, education for steady-state and circular economy, empowerment and liberation.

Keywords:

• Education for sustainable development
• education for sustainable development goals
• environmental education
• sustainable development goals

Notes

1 While some scholars such as Jickling and Spork (1998) have also warned that any education for anything – even for sustainability – carries a danger of indoctrination. These scholars have warned that education for the environment can also become a universalizing discourse that seeks to marginalize other approaches (Jicking and Spork 1998). However, this critique seems to under-estimate the power of the dominant education, which is currently dictating the economic vision of what human progress is, top-down, for the entire world. As Fien (2010, p. 179) has stated, the “critical pedagogy of education for the environment provides a professionally-ethical way of teaching which contrasts with the allegations of indoctrination in the critique”.

2 Looking at division between more capitalist and socialist models (or right and left political orientations), what is revealed, is that the Left/progressives are as anthropocentric and short-term utilitarian as the Right/conservatives. Both seem a very long way from Aldo Leopold’s concept of a land ethic or Arne Naess’ deep ecology, or the issues that animal rights proponents like Tom Regan and Peter Singer have brought to the table. The primacy of socio-economic issues is rarely questioned among even progressive faculty outside of a few disciplines that concern themselves with other species.