Education for sustainable development

What is education?

Education can be formal (schools, universities, training courses and colleges); informal (friends, museums, zoos, family, councils, media, advertising etc); or non-formal (on-the-job training, apprenticeships, internships etc).

Education encompasses life-long learning. Environmental education used to be focused on individuals and their behaviours, but now encompasses empowering individuals to envision systems/structural changes and gives them the skills to effect these. EfSD is more about expanding perspectives, and building critical skills, rather than providing information on specifics (ARIES 2006, ARIES 2009,GSE827 2010).

"Education for sustainable development is an emerging but dynamic concept that encompasses a new vision of education that seeks to empower people of all ages to assume responsibility for creating a sustainable future" UNESCO 2002 From Rio to Johannesburg p5

What can education achieve?

Through our class, I've learnt that there are two types of education - one that supports the status-quo, and one that helps empower people to bring about the changes they seek in the world (GSE827 2010). I come from a family of academics, and have always believed in education as one of the both powerful and benign: as the great leveller, in fact. But these classes have taught me that education must be carefully planned so as to not be counterproductive and a tool of indoctrination.

The IUCN Engaging People in Sustainability report (Tilbury & Wortman, 2004) highlights that EfSD, given the ill-defined nature of sustainable development as a concept, "seeks a tranformative role for education, in which people are engaged in a new way of seeing, thinking, learning and working" - that is, that EfSD is more about empowering people with the capacity to critically explore their behaviours and their environment, rather than with providing them a new paradigm.

EfSD helps build "capacity in individuals and organisations for transformational change" by "emphasising creative, critical and innovative approaches" (ARIES 2009).