We have to learn to live on our planet, and that's a job that involves educators, says DAVID LOADER.

 The learning focus in schools today is, appropriately, on the development of skills like numeracy and literacy, and on a curriculum designed to prepare young people for a productive and satisfying life as adults in the future. We have to ask ourselves, though, whether this is a school's only responsibility.

The aims for Australian schooling are defined in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians made by the nation's education ministers in 2008. This statement makes it clear that schools have a responsibility to do more than pursue academic achievement in terms of the development of successful learners; they have to develop confident individuals, and active and informed citizens.

Schools are not just academic institutions; they operate in a broader personal and community context, and the community values to be inculcated include the desire and capacity to work for the common good as responsible local and global citizens.

Responsible citizens are concerned not just about community, but also about the whole ecosystem. Similarly, responsible schooling should be concerned not just with student development. Schools need to be working to ensure that their young people have a liveable society and ecosystem in which to thrive in the future.

Some see 'progress' as providing people with better food and longer lives. Others, less optimistically, see it as an insatiable appetite for economic growth that is destroying the life systems on which human wellbeing depends.

As Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting observed in 'Seattle: a warning ignored' in the Age last year, 'A third of the world's soils...are depleting faster than we regenerate them. On every continent an environmental catastrophe is brewing.... Australia is a cocktail of water scarcity, salination and soil erosion. The continent would have been better off if we had never discovered it.... We have been living in a civilisation that has been destroying the life systems on which human wellbeing depends. Never has it been so hard to argue that there is such a thing as progress and that it is represented by liberal capitalism.'

Whether you think our pursuit of economic growth is a good thing or a bad thing, we can all agree that our environmental problems have multiplied, and they've gone from being local to global, from relatively simple to highly complex. We can also all agree that they need to be addressed. The question is, how? The next question is, why should this issue be of critical concern for educators?

The answer to the first question lies in the answer to the second. As the man behind the Natural Step framework, Karl-Henrik Robèrt, explains, with Herman Daly, Paul Hawken and John Holmberg in 'A compass for sustainable development,' 'We are at a point now where we need to renegotiate the rules of our economic game so that they conform to the rules of the biophysical world, which cannot be amended, changed or negotiated.'

Put simply, we have to learn to live on our planet, and that's a job that involves educators.

The rules for our use of finite resources, according to ecological economists, in a nutshell are that:

• we develop renewable resources whose rate of use does not exceed its rate of regeneration
• we stop using non-renewable resources, and
• we reduce pollution emissions such that those emissions do not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment.

Robèrt and colleagues nominate some critical requirements for any model of sustainability. Three of these requirements are particularly relevant to schools, since schools work with society's young people to develop an informed and active democracy as well as a responsible citizenship. These are that:

• on the microeconomic level, a model of sustainability shouldn't require individuals to act against their self interest
• a model of sustainability must be pedagogical and simple to disseminate, to enable the public consensus necessary to put any model into practice democratically, and
• a model of sustainability mustn't be adversarial or engender unnecessary resistance.

Our major focus in terms of restorative action currently is with structural and technological change. In places like Kyoto in 1997, Copenhagen last year and Mexico City this year, nations have and will look for agreement on a number of fronts and hopefully will seek agreement on further ambitious targets to reduce the damage already done to the Earth's biosphere.

The kinds of structural and technological changes being proposed are positive. Last year's Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference actually ended with a political agreement to cap temperature rise, reduce emissions and raise finance, but such action doesn't go far enough. Essentially, what the Copenhagen conference proposed was a solution through government management and new technology – things like new sources of renewable energy and the development of devices with lower energy consumption – as well as burying carbon emissions and growing more trees.

The problem, however, is more complex than can be solved by governments and corporations through technological and structural changes. We need some deep personal and cultural changes in the thinking of the people of the world, particularly the people of the first world.

We citizens of the world need to moderate our demands for more and more goods and services. Put in the negative, we can't continue to value rampant production and consumption ahead of all else and expect that this will not harm the planet. Put in the positive, we need to value our relatedness to the world around us and to each other. In the words of Richard Hames, we need to be more 'appreciative,' we need a world view that unites humanity rather than dividing it, and we need a better relation to and understanding of a biosphere for which we must take more responsibility. Hames sees such uniting appreciativeness as a new spirituality that could transcend our current atomised materialism and the moral confusion about consumerism that goes with it. As he points out, we may actually be witnessing the 'natural disintegration' of our materialistic civilisation.

Change comes when we break out of a way of thinking. We have an implicit framework that we use to view the world, that shapes our beliefs and values, and filters out what we label as 'illogical.' Most of us in the first world have a focus on the individual, which can lead to a lack of social cohesion, atomisation and unrelatedness to others or the world around us. How then are we to find meaning and purpose in our lives?

Australian researcher and writer Richard Eckersley back in 1995 pointed out that, 'Modern western culture is increasingly failing to meet the basic requirements of any culture, which are to provide people with a sense of meaning, belonging and purpose.'

Keith McGinn, an information and communication technology coordinator at the Berwick Technical Education Centre of Chisholm Institute in Melbourne's outer south-east, goes further. His premise, in 'Beginning with Chekhov' at a forum hosted by Melbourne’s Centre for Adolescent Health last year, is that 'The..."grand narratives" of contemporary Western culture are not sufficiently robust...to provide young people with any "reason for being" in their lives, beyond individualism (and) material consumption, and...this...is manifesting... in...adolescent risk-taking.'

A sustainable future isn't going to arrive simply through the action or inaction of the representatives of nation states in Copenhagen, Kyoto or Mexico City. It's going to come about through some deep rethinking of our values and beliefs, particularly in relation to individualism, material wealth, the biosphere and our fellow humans. Schools that wish to be relevant today and future focused can't ignore the challenge of social and ecological sustainability, and the values and beliefs that underpin sustainability.

The challenges we face include confronting consumerism, ensuring biodiversity, achieving good governance, building individual and community responsibility, and delivering equity to all. If a school is to teach sustainability, it has to address it across the whole curriculum, not in some optional or minor subject. If we want our society to develop a sustainable future, we need to address the consumerism, materialism and selfishness that appear at its deepest cultural foundation. If you or I want to live in a more sustainable way then we need to view our fellow humans as partners, not competitors, and the biosphere as something to be lived with.

We need to change our thinking, but we also need to change the way we live. Australians now have the largest houses on average in the world. Do we need such large living spaces? Do we need to heat and cool so much? We've already learned to survive with less water and may yet have to learn to live with even less. What about in our workplaces and schools: could we live happily with fewer resources there, too?

One of the strategies in 'Living Sustainably,' the national action plan for education for sustainability of the Commonwealth Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, is to focus education systems on 'achieving a culture of sustainability in which teaching and learning for sustainability are reinforced by continuous improvement in the sustainability of campus management.'
The focus here is more upon developing the green aspect of the campus, using fewer and renewable resources, but there’s no explicit encouragement to examine underpinning values and beliefs, although the government is calling for people to be creative and responsive.

As the 'Living Sustainably' plan puts it, 'Through information and awareness, but more importantly by building people's capacity to innovate and implement solutions, education for sustainability is essential to reorienting the way we live and work and to Australia becoming a sustainable society.'

Imagination and creativity are essential, but they're not enough if we want to secure a sustainable future. That future is something that we are each making through our action or inaction. What we decide has personal consequences but it also affects others and may influence what they decide in turn. What each principal and each teacher does in relation to sustainability influences their school's students, but could also influence other schools and could ultimately shape our society's future for the better.

David Loader is an education consultant and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Jousting for the New Generation: Challenges to contemporary schooling, published by ACER Press. Email davidloader@bigpond.com

For references, visit http://teacher.acer.edu.au

Source: Teacher- The National Education Magazine “award winning Australian Journalism”  March 2010 Issue