Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

However, the approach of listing discrete competencies — without sufficient
reflection on what is required for operationalising them — is not compatible
with the ambition of deploying education to transform established conceptions
of development, equity and justice. For the potential of schooling to promote
peace, sustainable development and global citizenship to be fully realised,
curriculum policies, textbooks and pedagogic practice must be grounded in
an understanding of the importance of the teacher’s freedom and capacity to
contextualise knowledge in a manner appropriate to the child’s milieu. This
implies investment in robust academic preparation of teachers, enabling them
to grasp the nature and scale of the challenges involved in ESD and GCED. And
ultimately, it implies reconceptualising teaching as a craft and an autonomous
profession, rather than a technical exercise in the efficient delivery of prepackaged
‘competencies’.
1. Towards Education for Sustainability
The child who has felt a strong love for his [sic] surroundings and for all
living creatures, who has discovered joy and enthusiasm in work, gives us
reason to hope that humanity can develop in a new direction. Our hope for
peace in the future lies not in the formal knowledge that adult can pass on
to the child, but in the normal development of the new man [sic].
Maria Montessori (1948/1972, p. 69)
This report underlines the fact that if ESD/GCED is to be effectively integrated
into primary and junior secondary schooling, then both the process of curriculum
design, and the reconfiguring of the education system more broadly, will require
substantial and sustained input from educational experts and practitioners.
Teachers need to be not just trained, but persuaded of the importance of
this agenda and engaged in shaping and adapting it, so that they in turn can
engage their students in a similarly interactive manner. Curricular coherence
and effectiveness requires the articulation of issues related to the sustainability
agenda, and of their pedagogical implications, in a manner that is readily
comprehensible to most teachers. Curriculum design must also acknowledge
the need to stimulate students’ curiosity and foster a critical awareness of the
difficulty and complexity of achieving environmental sustainability, peace and
global citizenship — even while reinforcing commitment to these goals.
A good way to start, with younger children, is to afford
them opportunities to learn about the natural environment
through direct experience. Many Asian countries now teach
environmental studies at the primary level, and in several
countries, including Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal,
Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a course which mentions ‘environment’
in title is timetabled in basic education (see Appendix III).
With important exceptions, however, pedagogical approaches
Pedagogical
approaches are
often largely
devoid of any
hands-on
experience of
nature
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Conclusions and Ways Forward