Why we need an education for sustainability, not sustainability education.
What sort of education do we need to face the challenges and opportunities of our time?
This question has always been at the heart of our work at ThoughtBox. Ever since we started, our core aim has been connecting people with the knowledge, skills and practices needed to create and sustain a thriving world.
Understanding how rigid the National Curriculum is – yet seeing the huge gaps forming and widening around the sort of learning we need in our changing world – our programmes have always been designed to help schools fill these gaps in order to support these needs, whilst Government policies ‘catch up’ as it were.
It is therefore a hugely positive step that the DfE (Department for Education) have released their long-awaited Climate and Sustainability Strategy for English schools.
Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi set out the DfE’s ‘whole-system approach’, with proposals focusing attention not just within the curriculum but on the wider educational landscape, covering:
Climate Education
Green Skills and Careers
The Education Estate
Operations and Supply Chains
Data
For those of us who’ve been pushing this for years, there is a lot here to celebrate: the recognition that teacher training is an essential part of this sort of learning; the understanding that we need to support young people with the skills and practices needed for jobs in the future which don’t yet exist; the appreciation that the DfE must not ‘start from scratch’ but instead work with existing educators, organisations and partners who’ve been working in this space for decades, to build on their wisdom and experience and move forward together.
Most significant, perhaps, is their declaration that we need a ‘whole-system approach’. This is a big step in the right direction, and builds on work that many of us in this field have been championing and promoting for a long time.
And yet, a large elephant sits in the room.
A part of their proposal focuses on developing and implementing a climate curriculum. However, whilst it may feel simpler to just ‘slot in’ some climate lessons between English and Maths and quickly upskill our teachers to deliver these lessons, that isn’t what this sort of learning requires.
Climate education is not simply knowledge to impart – it also includes behaviours to develop, practices to inhabit, skills to strengthen and mindsets to advance. It is a way of learning that will in time evolve into ways of living and thriving together in our changing world.
The inconvenient realisation that the education system, as it currently stands, is actually perpetuating many of the personal, social and ecological crises that we face.
This is a hugely problematic elephant, admittedly. And we’re choosing – deliberately in some cases – to not look at it. Yet there it stands.
Our mainstream education system is inadvertently burdening young people – and teachers – with ever increasing pressures, disconnecting people from their sense of emotional wellness and leading to a rising mental health crisis. It is disconnecting people from each other, forcing students and teachers to compete with each other for grades and salaries, for attention, for resources, for success, as well as exasperating issues of social injustice. And it is literally disconnecting people from the outside world and our innate relationship with nature by making everyone stay indoors and sit down for 6+ hours a day.
In essence, mainstream education is actually contradicting the three pillars we all need for holistic health and wellbeing: personal, social and ecological wellbeing (what we call Triple Wellbeing). When we start to recognise how the climate crisis is also a crisis of social justice and human emotion, we begin to understand how our schools are not nurturing the mindsets needed to respond to the challenges ahead, but are instead inadvertently stifling them. It’s a terrifically inconvenient, big fat elephant for sure, but there it stands. And we ignore it at our peril.
But here’s a thought…
Rather than seeing this elephant as an inconvenience, what if we looked at it a little differently and saw it as an invitation to do things differently?
Speaking of elephants, I’m reminded at this point of the fable of The Blind Men and the Elephant. For those unfamiliar with the story, six blind men are sitting together, arguing over what an elephant is. Each of them touches a part of the elephant and is convinced that they see and understand what it is:
“It’s like a giant snake!”, says the blind man touching the trunk.
“It’s smooth and solid like a wall,” says the man touching the elephant’s side.
“It’s sharp and deadly like a spear,” says the man touching the tusk. And on it goes, with each fixated on their understanding gained from ‘seeing’ just one part of the whole elephant. It is only when the Rajah comes to them as they argue and invites them to stand back a little that things start to change: “Perhaps if you put all of the parts together, you will finally see the truth.”
And so it is for us. One of the other inconvenient truths of our education system is how we’ve decompartmentalised and fractured learning to be separated and removed from context – and as such created an education system which is at odds with the deeply interconnected world in which we all live.
Within the new DfE strategic approach, if we – for example- slot in an option Natural History GCSE or Climate Leaders Award, yet continue to keep plugging away with schooling in these same discombobulated ways (and don’t step back to see the bigger picture at large) we’re missing the truth and the opportunity to see the ‘elephant’ in its entirety.
Our lives are not compartmentalised and separated, as is mirrored through mainstream school. Life is a lot ‘mushier’ than that – especially when it comes to responding to the current social, emotional and ecological crises that we face.
At present, the education system is not functioning as a system and – as such – is not able to adapt and respond to problems that arise, but is instead forced to stick plasters onto gaping wounds. This is not the fault of the teachers and leaders within, it is a flaw of the design. Yet what this means is that the way we are educating is actually contradictory to the way we need to be living in order to survive and thrive in our rapidly changing world.
Environmental education is exploring and learning together the knowledge, skills and practices we need to thrive. As such, the whole notion of why and how we’re teaching and learning needs to evolve. Collaboration, critical thinking, empathy, resilience, systems thinking, practices for wellbeing: these are the essential ‘green skills’ we need to be focusing on.
What we need is an education for sustainability, not sustainability education.
So let’s take this opportunity to start embedding these practices fully across our learning spaces. This is why ThoughtBox exists – to offer schools daily practices for sustainable and regenerative futures. We’re upskilling teachers, empowering young people and supporting schools to focus on regenerating the root causes of illhealth in our communities through a framework focused on self-care, people-care and earth-care.
Now is the time for us to be bold in this space, to recognise the root causes of the climate crisis and to focus our attention on developing an education that will allow both people and planet to thrive.
This is a marathon we’re on, and we’re here for the journey, as are so many of you who recognise the need for a more systemic and empowering approach to climate education. We look forward to supporting you and your community to flourish.
Rachel Musson | Director of ThoughtBox Education
ThoughtBox is working with schools worldwide through our focus on regenerating education, offering supportive training and a whole-school approach to education for sustainability. Get in touch to find out how we can support your school: hello@thoughtboxeducation.com