UN’s organization for international collaboration in Education, Sciences, and Culture, UNESCO, has recently announced two ambitious global initiatives.
The first initiative ‘Education for Sustainable Development: Towards achieving the SDGs’ (ESD for 2030), is a 10-years global framework for ESD, which links explicitly to what one could call that “language for sustainable development,” embedded in the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030. This initiative, which will be launched at a conference in Berlin, May 2021, aims at developing the following three core dimensions of Education for Sustainable Development:
- Transformative action and each learner’s transformation process: First, transformation necessitates a certain level of disruption, together with courage and determination. Second, there are stages of the transformative learning process and edification of the individual (which also are dependent on context), which needs to be explored
- Structural changes: There is a need for ESD to pay more attention to the deep structural causes of unsustainable development, particularly the relationship between economic growth and sustainable development.
- The technological future: Technological advances may provide solutions to some of the “old” sustainability problems, but some ESD efforts to change people’s behaviour may no longer be relevant. However, the technological solutions themselves may bring new challenges or create an illusion of having solved the original problems. (paraphrased from UNESCO’s Framework for the implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) beyond 2019)
The second initiative, Futures of Education – Learning to Become, expands the idea of sustainability of education, learning, and edification into a perspective beyond the SDG2030 agenda. It aims at reimagining “how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet,” and it operates with a horizon of 2050 and beyond.
This initiative is, firstly, opening up for questions regarding the fundamental changes in the relation between humans and nature, which will occur in the 21st century, often described through the notion of the Anthropocene. Secondly, even though there is not an infinite number of answers to the challenges, which follow from these changes, then there is still a manifold of more or less promising futures that can be imagined (also from various cultural contexts).
These imaginations and valorizations of different futures might influence how we perceive the options for both acting in the present toward the future(s) and remembering the past.