Education is the primary agent of transformation towards sustainable development, increasing people’s capacities to transform their ideas for society into reality. Education not only provides scientific and technical skills, it also provides motivation, and aiou social support for pursuing and applying them. For this reason, society must be deeply concerned a lot of current education falls far short of what is required. When we say this, it mirrors the very necessities across the cultures that allow everyone become responsible towards quality enhancement.
Improving the quality and revelation of education and reorienting its goals to spot the importance of sustainable development must be among society’s highest priorities. It is not that we talk just environment but also about every part of life.
We therefore need to clarify the concept of education for sustainable development. It was a major challenge for educators over the past decade. The meanings of sustainable development in educational set ups, the appropriate balance of peace, human protection under the law, citizenship, social justness, ecological and development themes in already overloaded curricula, and ways of integrating the humanities, the social sciences and the arts into what had up-to-now been seen and practiced as a branch of science education.
Some suggested that educating for sustainable development ran the risk of programming while others wondered whether asking schools to take a lead in the passage to sustainable development was asking too much of teachers.
These debates were compounded by the desire of many, mostly environmental, NGOs to contribute to educational planning without the requirement understanding of how education systems work, how educational change and innovation comes together, and of relevant course load development, professional development and instructive values. Not realizing that effective educational change takes time, others were critical of governments for not acting more quickly.
Consequently, many international, regional and national initiatives have contributed to an expanded and refined understanding of the meaning of education for sustainable development. For example, Education International, the major patio umbrella group of teachers’ unions and associations in the world, has issued a statement and action arrange to promote sustainable development through education.
A common agenda in all of these is the need for an integrated approach through which all communities, government entities, team up in developing a shared understanding of and commitment to policies, strategies and programs of education for sustainable development.
Actively promoting the integration of education into sustainable development at local community
In addition, many individual governments have established committees, panels, advisory councils and course load development projects to discuss education for sustainable development, develop policy and appropriate support structures, programs and resources, and fund local initiatives.
Indeed, the roots of education for sustainable development are firmly rooted in the environmental education efforts of such groups. Along with global education, development education, peace education, citizenship education, human protection under the law education, and multicultural and anti-racist education that have all been significant, environmental education has been particularly significant. In its brief thirty-year history, contemporary environmental education has steadily striven towards goals and outcomes similar and akin to those inherent in the concept of sustainability.
A new Vision for Education
These many initiatives illustrate that the international community now strongly believes that we need to foster – through education – the values, behavior and lifestyles required for a sustainable future. Education for sustainable development has come to be seen as a process of learning how to make decisions that consider the long-term future of the economy, ecology and social well-being of all communities. Building the ability for such futures-oriented thinking is a key task of education.
This represents a new vision of education, a vision that helps individuals better understand the world in which they live, addressing the the nature and inter-contentedness of problems such as poverty, wasteful consumption, environmental degradation, urban decay, population growth, gender inequality, health, conflict and the infringement of human protection under the law that endanger our future. This vision of education highlights a of utilizing holistic, interdisciplinary approach to developing the information and skills needed for a sustainable future as well as changes in values, behavior, and lifestyles. This requires us to reorient education systems, policies and practices in order to establish everyone, young and old, to make decisions and act in culturally appropriate and locally relevant ways to redress the difficulties that endanger our common future. We therefore need to think globally and act locally. In this way, people of all ages can become empowered to develop and evaluate alternative ideas of a sustainable future and to fulfill these ideas through working creatively with others.