Educators must light the flame of current and future young ‘glocalisers’

Worldwide, two billion babies will be born, each one reaching school age and needing access to high quality education between now and 2030, according to the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. In the same period more than 1.2 billion young people will transition into adulthood and begin looking for a job.

In 2015, the United Nations unveiled its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Providing an education where both the teacher and students explore not only the physical world, and the power of knowledge, but also investigate their own thinking patterns and behaviour will be critical for the successful implementation of the SDG Goal 4, which envisages quality education for all.

UNESCO reports that while Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is increasingly becoming mandatory in the national curricula worldwide, much more is required to incorporate ESD into teachers’ training.

With only 7 per cent of countries reporting ESD as mandatory, this suggests there is a significant gap in the capacities of teachers to deliver an education that fosters ecological imagination, critical thinking, independent thought, and a greater awareness of the interdependence of all life.

A key challenge, therefore is the need to focus on retraining teachers and educators to give them the skills needed to think beyond their core subjects, moving freely across disciplines and encouraging students to embrace multiple worldviews to design solutions to humanity’s most pressing challenges.

How do we achieve this type of education? Should we favour Paulo Freire’s invigorating critique of the ‘banking’ model of education, which regards students as mere receivers of education, devoid of creative impetus? Or should we challenge educators to equip our students with the practical skills, analytic abilities and philosophical depth to reshape the human presence in the world.

By this, I mean an education that replaces the extractive consumer economy with one that eliminates the concept of waste, uses energy and materials with great efficiency, and distributes wealth fairly within and between generations. I mean an education that promotes interdependence and working together to reverse climate change and increase the bio-productivity of the planet to create a collaborative rather than a competitive society for all.

The social sciences also could benefit from a school garden. Students can learn about sharing, equality, inclusivity and social justice as imperatives for a peaceful co-existence locally and globally. There are also opportunities for exploring democratic decision-making.

There is a significant danger in misinterpreting the 17 SDGs as separate disciplines that need to be dealt with one by one and in isolation. Our academic disciplines, government departments and international institutions operate in a siloed expert-lead fashion that makes such whole systems thinking and collaborating difficult to achieve.

To address this Gaia Education and UNESCO Global Action Programme have recently launched the educational tool ‘SDG Community Implementation Flashcards’ containing more than 200 questions investigating the social, ecological, economic and worldview aspects of each SDG.

They have been translated into the five UN official languages and highly interactive training events have taken place in a diverse range of settings around the world, including tribal communities in Orissa, intentional ecovillages in the Global North, Ashrams in Thailand, universities in Europe, even Red Cross asylum welcome centres in Denmark.

The 1.8 billion young people around the world today represent a dynamic, informed, and globally connected engine for change. Local stewardship and global citizenship should be cultivated at every stage of human development.

In this context I would rather call them glocalisers – glocal is about being locally attuned to the bio-cultural uniqueness of your territory but also globally aware, and able to grasp the bigger picture.

The poet Yeats once said ‘education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire’. This is the task before educators: igniting the fire of the current and future young glocalisers, harnessing their aspirations so that they can in time redesign the human presence in the planet.

May East, CEO Gaia Education. 
Excerpts of a talk during the UN High Level Meeting on Education convened by the President of the UN General Assembly.

This article was originally published in the Scotsman.