Saving the Endangered Link between “Education” and “Sustainability”: A literature review

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Scaling up and sustainability in education

Proposal

The sustainability paradigm of using resources for meeting current needs of humanity without sacrificing the needs of future generations (Our Common Future, 1987) has traditionally rested on three pillars: environmental, social, and economic development. While anthropocentric (Curry, 2011)— and rightly so, inasmuch as humanity’s relatively highly developed abilities (Peterson, 1999) gives it the keys to the future and must therefore be convinced or coerced (Diamond, 2005 dethrones democratic governance here) to live sustainably if indeed sustainability is to be achieved—the marriage of the three pillars hinges on the assumption that only a demographic transition can save us. Only when the majority of humans are well enough off to count on a modicum of well-being will individual families have fewer children, a precondition of avoiding global overpopulation and unmitigated resource depletion. Hans Rosling encouraged (YouTube lecture, 2010) us to thank “Dow Chemicals” and other industries for providing the means, such as washing machines and detergents, for females to learn to read, become employed and to contribute more to production and less to reproduction, thus attaining demographic transition, the golden prerequisite for sustainability.

If worldwide literacy is for that, I argue, this is a necessary but inadequate precondition for sustainability, leaving the education-sustainability link with three disturbingly unanswered questions: first, will literacy indeed lead to universal demographic transition? Secondly, what will be needed to achieve sustainability other than the demographic transition spawned by universal literacy? Third, will education ultimately facilitate the other requisites for sustainability, or might education actually diminish sustainability prospects?

Clearly environmental frugality is an important “other” requisite. (Space colonization, touted by influential technological entrepreneurs, is a premature consideration for any rational discussion of saving the currently occupied planet.) Massive global redistribution must also be integral to social sustainability going forward as regional inequities intensify, and technology promises to compound the productivity gaps that create profound winners and losers (Harari, 2018).

Added to this is another growingly sinister dynamic: inequality-driven populism and a looming global financial downswing (Dalio, 2018). That populism-generated neo-nationalism creates a non-facilitating environment for sustainability is clearly evident in the demise of an American EPA that recognizes human-caused effects of climate change. Indeed, nationalism and climate denial must necessarily go hand in hand (Harari, 2018) because recognizing climate change implies global cooperation is needed.

The vagaries that continue to cloud humanity’s prospects for sustainable ecological survival and thriving in the future, in light of global economic, geopolitical, and demographic realities makes education’s role in that survival cryptic and open for opportunistic ideological positioning and commercial interests. Lacking a clear role for education in sustainability, the education-sustainability link is in epistemic peril, and ongoing global developments contribute new chaos, further weakening that link. In this presentation it is argued that a comprehensive depiction of the envisioned relationship between education and sustainability is urgently needed, and a fledgling attempt is made to define prospects, goals and priorities.

Author

• Mark W Langager, International Christian University