Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

for economic development. SDG 4.7 seems to be
regarded as a basket of luxuries to be retrofitted to
a model of schooling primarily designed for narrowly
conceived economic purposes. However, SDG 4.7
actually challenges us fundamentally to rethink
dominant assumptions about the purposes of
schooling. That today we are at least thinking about
the environment shows that progress is possible.
In the 1960s, dubbed the ‘development decade’,
concern for the environment was minimal. The fact
that it is much more common now owes much to the
capacity of education to establish new horizons in
public debate. But the further challenge for education today is to move beyond
refinements to curricula and textbooks, and confront the regimenting agenda
of mass schooling and its role in accentuating inveterate competition at the
interpersonal and international levels.
This is why critical
inquiry and
imagination are crucial
in equipping future
generations with
the intellectual and
emotional capacity
for dealing with the
challenges that face us
This requires that we rethink not just the content and orientation of school
curricula — on which the analysis for this report primarily focused — but the place of
schooling in our broader social and political systems. National discussions of how
education can be used to promote sustainability, peace and global citizenship
have typically treated the problem essentially as one of ‘thought reform’, to be
effected through the top-down tweaking of curricular messages. But approaching
the challenge of transforming attitudes as if it were a task of technocratic
adjustment is both incompatible with a humanistic understanding of education,
and likely to prove ineffective even in terms of a narrow ‘competencies’-based
agenda. Such an approach also — not coincidentally — serves to distract from the
profound inconsistencies between humanistic understandings of education, and
instrumentalist understandings of citizen-state relations that view people as
‘human capital’: as ‘means’ in the service of state-determined developmentalist
‘ends’. If we want schooling to create the foundations for a sustainable, peaceful
future grounded in consciousness of our shared humanity, we need to rethink
not just how schools teach students, but also how states relate to their citizens
— through institutional arrangements, and through the provision of key public
goods (including education). Issues of pedagogical practice within the school,
and civic practice outside it, cannot be disentangled.
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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