Is Education the answer?

I would like to start just mentioning once more about the Linkedin discussions that I have mentioned on the last post. I was going through my workshop notes and noticed that we had the same discussions in the workshops as the discussions on linkedin, how cool is that? Seriously, I thought I had learnt so much from the workshops and all of sudden I had completely different views about the same subject.

From our literature we see “education” not just as formal or high education but a new learning approach that build skills that enable change and also emphasises the creation of relationships, collaborative learning. It is a completely shift from old styles of education such as seeing people as problems, teacher behaving as experts not facilitators or even trying to teach people values and attitude other them make them reflect and clarify their own. Considering those assumptions, I had a great example of other forms of education where high and formal education is really inaccessible and hard to achieve, so please read as per below:

“Hello there, here in Africa, people have just started educating girls, so this means some of us (old women) are not highly educated. [I] Am a good Example, I recycle used straws so a to make a living, but this has led me to be recognized both nationally and internationally but  am not highly educated and this is called sustainability”(BENEDICTA, linkedin Jul/12)”

Benedicta believes from her perspective, and she is right, that sustainability and education for sustainability can be achieved through an activity that she created even though she is not “highly” educated. She already understands that paradigm shift from old ways to delivery education, she is aware that theory is meaningless without practical applicability. Not even to mention that she is applying a lot of other key components of ESD such as partnerships (consumer entrepreneurs and the women in Uganda) Participation (even member of the community is part of the production) Critical reflection (ways they could improve their income and at the same time contributing to the environment). If you would like to see more about Benedicta and her community work please visit http://www.strawbags.org.

It is fascinating how people around the globe can and are introducing sustainability practices into their everyday life and don’t even realize. Now looking at the role of education, we see people not so sure about its effectiveness and so some of them don’t believe that the education is the answer. UNESCO says that education might not be the answer for all our problems but it will create new relations among people and it will foster greater respect for the needs of the environment. So educations is a long term answer, a more understand and responsible approaches to the root of problems not to its causes.

Some people believe that educations shouldn’t be “FOR” something, it might sound an oxymoron (ie. No development is ecologically sustainable) and have a very anthropocentric-economic position in order to perpetuate the status quo (ie "accelerated economic development" UN, 1992 etc). Learning should be based on a “Sustainable education” where people really get to connect with nature, community practices and have a deep understand of ecological principles. New research is coming out exploring the question of "what actually changes people's behaviours and values towards the environment" and the vast majority of answers are that "time spent in 'wild' nature" (e.g. woods, rivers, ponds, nature) and "time spent in 'domesticated' nature" (e.g. gardens, parks, backyards) makes the biggest difference - way more than formal "environmental education."