REPORT OF UNESCO EXPERT MEETING ON - APCEIU

16. Intergenerational equity: A consideration of the need to live off net resource production rather
than environmental capital in order to enable future generations access a world that is at least as
diverse and productive as the one each generation inherits.
17. Human rights: The fundamental freedoms of conscience and religion, expression, peaceful
assembly and association which ensure access to democratic participation and meeting basic
human needs.
18. Basic human needs: The needs and right of all people and societies for fair and equitable access to
flows of energy and materials for survival and a satisfying quality of life within the limits of the
Earth.
19. Media literacy: An appreciation of the role of the public media and marketing and advertising
industries in creating perceptions of needs and wants and the skill to identify the roles thee media
may play in encouraging and undermining sustainable consumption
20. Democracy: The right of all people to access channels for community decision making.
The curriculum is a product of both the “reproductive” and the “constructing civil society” roles of
governments. Unfortunately, the press of short-term political and economic priorities has given ascendancy
to the reproductive roles of secondary education. There are historically embedded reasons for this in Asia
and the Pacific because many education systems developed to serve the economic needs of colonial empires
for factory workers, technicians, clerks and administrators in the colonies. This has resulted in education
systems characterised by hierarchical patterns of knowledge which privilege literacy, mathematics and
abstract science; hierarchical relationships between teachers and students; teacher-centred processes of
teaching and learning; and competitive assessment and credentialing practices that favour the social
differentiation and the reproductive roles of schooling.
Summarising the impact of influences such as these, Orr (1991) draws attention to the powerful influences
of overtly academic teaching methods on the hidden curriculum and which undermine the values of a
sustainable society:
Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor
classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what the students
call, without apparent irony, the "real world". Dissecting frogs in biology class teaches lessons about
Nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystalised pedagogy that
reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. (Orr 1991: 101)
Thus, the process of reorienting education towards sustainability is a broader and more pervasive task than
that of revising syllabuses to include new sustainability concepts and devising new teaching and learning
materials that incorporate principles and examples of sustainability - as necessary as these reforms are. Orr
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