Sustainability has been defined as “Meeting the needs of the present without com-promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” (Our Common Future, 1987). Because of the wide range of human needs, as well as the eco-nomic, social and environmental systems associated with satisfying and man-aging them, sustainability is inherently interdisciplinary at the largest scale.
Social
Bearable Equitable Sustainable
Viable
Environment Economic
Chapter 13: International STEM Education for Global Sustainability 155 ...
Achieving sustainability solutions for humanity requires innovations involv-ing not only science and engineerinvolv-ing, but also economics, history, govern-ment, cultural studies, psychology and ethics, among other fields.
As John Muir once said (1911): “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Pollutants travel the globe, emitted from factories on one continent only to pollute another.
Excessive consumption of scarce resources by one country can have drastic consequences for other countries — whether per capita fossil fuel consump-tion in the U.S. and our resultant climate change debt, the conversion of eth-anol for fuel in the U.S., reducing the availability of essential food stocks in Latin America, or the use of rare Earth minerals in industry and construction in China, and the resultant impact on availability of these resources in other countries. A massive, but not unimaginably large earthquake (USGS, 2011) and resultant tsunami inundate thousands of square kilometres of Japan including aging nuclear reactors unwisely placed on coastal, low-lying ground, producing a nuclear incident which threatens to put a widespread global halt on use and expansion of one of the most effective methods we have of produc-ing energy without greenhouse gas emissions — a solution we desperately needed to address our climate change problem. We now know that we can’t have a truly sustainable society at a local or national level — sustainability can only really be achieved on a global level, because the systems that are required for sustainability are interconnected and global.
Furthermore, unless sustainability, which inherently has the implication of maintaining the status quo, is approached from a perspective that addresses equity concerns and the aspirations of people, invariably some individuals and communities may not see the value of achieving global sustainability. Why would someone want sustainability, when they are on the bottom of society?
The relative attractiveness of individual actions, when you have the choice of improving your quality of life through increased resource consumption or deferring your own consumption in the interests of unknown others on a glo-bal scale, is hard for people who have already been blessed with access to resources for generations to deal with. How much more difficult is it for those that have never had access to even a marginal quality of life to forgo the opportunity to improve their lot, relative to others? Attaining sustainability inherently requires an approach that facilitates the advancement of popula-tions locked in poverty, suffering widespread governmental mismanagement, and with minimal access to education and opportunity.
The concept of sustainability is to some extent inherently at odds with the cultural mantra of freedom, accepted widely in Western society. If freedom or
“liberty” is your core value (Jefferson, 1776), and it means being able to do anything you want to maximize your happiness and success independent of the impact of your actions on anyone else, then the concept of sustainability
154 Part III: Implications for University Teaching and Learning
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• Do we recognize the need to have a global population that under-stands the principles of sustainability, so they have a chance to put them into practice in their lives?
This paper argues that education and global sustainability are a coupled set
— you can’t achieve global sustainability without widespread sustainability education. Furthermore, education for sustainability must include STEM dis-ciplines as well as humanities and social sciences, be made available interna-tionally, and must be available where the bulk of the population is — namely at the primary and secondary levels — if we are to have any chance of making meaningful progress towards global sustainability.
The paper examines the sad state of education today globally, as well as economic, political and geopolitical complicating factors, and highlights the difficulty in educating for global sustainability when education itself appears increasingly to be unsustainable. Finally, the paper notes that leadership is desperately needed in advancing widespread sustainability education.
Research universities have a key role to play in this arena — not only through education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, but also by building, test-ing and implementtest-ing successful programs that advance sustainability and sus-tainability education at the primary and secondary educational levels and through community engagement.
GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY AND EDUCATION
Thoughts on SustainabilitySustainability has been defined as “Meeting the needs of the present without com-promising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” (Our Common Future, 1987). Because of the wide range of human needs, as well as the eco-nomic, social and environmental systems associated with satisfying and man-aging them, sustainability is inherently interdisciplinary at the largest scale.
Social
Bearable Equitable Sustainable
Viable
Environment Economic
may threaten your core values. Because these values are deeply embedded in culture and family, and because values are formed when we are young by teaching and example, developing the values that are needed to move indi-viduals to accept and act on approaches to global sustainability needs to begin when people are young, and leverage the tools that we have to impact young people. These include (but are not limited to) primary and secondary schools and educators, parents and grandparents, social and community organizations, religious communities and social media.
Education for Advancing Global Sustainability — Youth, Multi-disciplinary and International
Traditionally, education at all levels has been stove-piped into independent dis-ciplines, with relatively little opportunity for interdisciplinary approaches except at the highest level. Not only are the Humanities, Social Sciences and Physical Sciences taught essentially in different worlds, but even within these worlds, there is little enrichment or cross fertilization between closely related disciplines. As a result, it’s not surprising that students finishing secondary edu-cation have little knowledge of systems, let alone complex and interrelated ones.
The large majority of students at the secondary level typically have little to no formal educational exposure to thinking about the interconnected systems that bind together the environment, economic and social systems, nor the opportu-nity to consider their complex interactions and scenario-based outcomes.
But why should this emphasis on sustainability begin in the primary and secondary levels, instead of waiting until students reach the university? As we know, while a significant fraction of young people in the developed world have the opportunity to have a university education, a significant fraction of young people drop out of high school. In the U.S., high school dropout rates ranged from 4% to 11% across the country in 2009 (Datacenter, 2009), with the dropout rate for black and Hispanic students (9.6 and 17.6, respectively) significantly higher than for Asian and non-Hispanic white students (Child Trends Data Bank, 2011). In 2006, the national on-time high school gradua-tion rate — the percentage of entering ninth graders who graduated 4 years later — was 73% (Stillwell & Hoffman, 2008). Internationally, the Organiza-tion for Economic Co-operaOrganiza-tion and Development (OECD) provides reports on education systems, approaches and student attainment across OECD coun-tries, many of which have reached a high level of economic development.
Education at a Glance OCED 2010 Indicators (2010) reports that across OECD countries, an average of 80% of students complete upper secondary education, ranging from 26% in Turkey to 97% in Germany. Of these students, an aver-age of 56% of secondary graduates entered the equivalent of a four-year col-lege or university in OECD countries, ranging from 25% in Luxembourg to
Chapter 13: International STEM Education for Global Sustainability 157 ...
83% in Poland (in the U.S. in 2008, 69% of high school graduates had enrolled in an undergraduate education program the fall following gradua-tion). (National Science Board, 2010). This means that in OECD countries, on average, only 45% of young people enter college — and even fewer com-plete their undergraduate education. For those who drop out of the educa-tional system before university, the education they receive in primary and sec-ondary school is likely to be the intellectual toolset they carry with them the rest of their lives. These numbers reflect the graduation and tertiary enrol-ment rates mainly in developed countries. We can expect that the number of students completing secondary education and continuing to college in less-developed countries to be much lower.
Finally, because leading individuals towards sustainability involves consid-eration of values, and the formation of values takes place mainly when we are young, weaving consideration of values into education across disciplines in the primary and secondary level is an essential and too-long neglected com-ponent of education at these levels (Fulghum, 1990). This is particularly important in the area of sustainability education, in which we need to encour-age individuals to temper their urge to act solely in their immediate self-inter-est and, instead, to modify their behaviour in the interself-inter-est of others, the envi-ronment and society in general.
If we are to have any hope to bring the difficult concepts of sustainability to the largest possible audience of learners globally, it must begin in the pri-mary and secondary levels.