Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Education as sustainability.
AU - Foster, John
PY - 2001/5
Y1 - 2001/5
N2 - The relation between education and sustainability cannot be an external, still less an instrumental one. Sustainability means humans, as individuals and societies, consciously trying to go with the grain of nature. Learning to understand the natural world and the human place in it can only be an active process through which our sense of what counts as going with the grain of nature is continuously constituted and recreated. This process cannot have its agenda set to subserve sustainability criteria which it actually makes meaningful. The policy discourse, parameters and indices of operational sustainability are heuristics, and the conditions for deploying them intelligently are at one and the same time the conditions for a genuinely learning and for a deeply sustainable society. This suggests, too, a basis for reclaiming education in general from the instrumentalising approaches that currently beset it.
AB - The relation between education and sustainability cannot be an external, still less an instrumental one. Sustainability means humans, as individuals and societies, consciously trying to go with the grain of nature. Learning to understand the natural world and the human place in it can only be an active process through which our sense of what counts as going with the grain of nature is continuously constituted and recreated. This process cannot have its agenda set to subserve sustainability criteria which it actually makes meaningful. The policy discourse, parameters and indices of operational sustainability are heuristics, and the conditions for deploying them intelligently are at one and the same time the conditions for a genuinely learning and for a deeply sustainable society. This suggests, too, a basis for reclaiming education in general from the instrumentalising approaches that currently beset it.
U2 - 10.1080/13504620120043162
DO - 10.1080/13504620120043162
M3 - Journal article
VL - 7
SP - 153
EP - 165
JO - Environmental Education Research
JF - Environmental Education Research
SN - 1469-5871
IS - 2
ER -