Alan Reid, University of Bath. I'd like to start my response to these .... While Andrew Stables has discussed the effects of there being no absolute foundations for ...
On the possibility of education for sustainable development Alan Reid, University of Bath
I’d like to start my response to these papers by thanking the contributors for the challenges and issues they have raised for how we might think about and respond to the possibility of education for sustainable development. The challenges and issues we perceive do, of course, vary extensively. What I would like to do in this concluding part of the symposium is introduce three themes that come to my mind in response to the papers. First of all, I’d like to raise the question, What’s in a name? I would like to invite you to try playing, at least a little, with matters of form and function with regard to education and sustainable development. I will also spend a few moments considering, What is possible in education for sustainable development? And the effects of how we frame spaces and constraints. And finally I will present what is little more than the challenge of instrumentalism, Rather than what education might do for sustainable development, what might sustainable development do for education?
In developing the theme of this symposium, it might be wondered why we are talking about education for sustainable development, rather than education for the environment, or even education for development. As we have heard in the presentations, great play is made of the links between environment, ecology, nature, landscape, environmentalism, sustainability and education. However, had this session taken place when environmental education, rather than education for sustainable development, was the main focus for our efforts, I wonder what and where the differences and similarities to what we have heard would be. Considering the roots of education for sustainable development, there is a sense of the more things change, the more they stay the same, although if this is history repeating itself, perhaps this time it will be in a more modest vein. Perhaps one area that impinges on education for sustainable development more than environmental education, and its reliance, unwittingly or not, on disciplinary forms of knowledge, is the broader attention now being given to learning the lessons of other educational innovations and programmes of reform. I’d like to focus on these kinds of relationship by taking a brief look at the features of naming,
and what naming might represent, by borrowing one of Chet’s root metaphors and applying it to talk of fields of knowledge and interdisciplinarity. Those familiar with biology and evolutionary accounts of development and diversity may recall that within biological disciplines, techniques for representing and classifying names and groupings can draw on dendritic, phyletic, and cladistic techniques. Each method has its own set of assumptions, procedures and limitations. Within dendritic taxonomies, we tend to focus on apparent features by analogy and homology, to organise names and catalogue features – we are probably all familiar with the dendrogram that is the family tree, our interest in physical features and where, genetically, they have come from. For ESD, there is much in common with environmental education in terms of aims, pedagogies and rationales. And ESD might well be regarded as the offspring of EE and development education, although identifying the ancestors is not always as easy as this example sounds, particularly when what is dominant and what is recessive is added to the analogy. Within phyletic taxonomies, we go beneath the surface, so to speak, to consider less obvious relations between creations. Hence the use of numbers and correlations to identify similarity and difference in biochemical structures, like enzymes or DNA. On the one hand, you might have more in common with an ant than a snail with regard to parts of your genetic makeup, on the other, education for sustainable development is, at the moment at least, quite different in its underlying grammar from current policy mantras that manifest themselves within the jargon of literacy and numeracy, standards and key skills. With cladistics, we return to the focus on the variation and commonalities of common ancestry, as expressed by shared characteristics. At the level of immediate appearance, a jellyfish has more in common with a starfish than a human – both live in water, have radial symmetry, and are invertebrates – but evolutionarily, the starfish is closer to a human than a jellyfish. John Foster’s mention of a liberal education is an interesting case in point. If we did consider ESD cladistically – how might it distinguish itself from other forms and functions of education? Is it merely one of the many adjectival educations, that include education for citizenship, education for democracy, or education for economic understanding? Are such adjectival forms of education little more than part of the broad, albeit squabbling, family of education? Or do they draw their power and meaning by looking outside of education, rather than having something intrinsically ‘educational’ about them? In terms of its defining characteristics, to which brand does ESD belong, if it belongs to one at all? Or, returning to some of the root metaphors mentioned yesterday, who is the master to which ESD pays its deference and dues, and from whom it asserts its differences and rebels. My point is that in applying a biological perspective to what is possible in education for sustainable development, such forms of relationship tend to stress change over time, populations rather than individuals, communities, and niches, lineage and identities, tendencies, states and fates. And this kind
of language is not restricted to biology, such terms, including convergence and diversity, what is distinctive and what is irreducible, fit well with the tasks of conceptual analysis, and feature heavily in our accounts of the ancestry and descent of educational policy and practice – how education, and education for sustainable development, are children of their times and places. In terms of possibility, the future, while never certain, can still be shaped for education and sustainable development. And to transcend these analogies, I am asking, in a somewhat round about way, that we do indeed cast our gaze backwards and inwards, to look forward and outward, to promote meaning and possibility rather than randomness and closure, even to employ models and reconstructions of what has been, is and might be, or how change, diversification and extinction in education have come to pass, in considering what might be possible for the future. I think an example is in order. To illustrate such possibilities and their relative merits quite graphically, would we countenance ESD lying down with other concepts that have inhabited educational discourse, like corporal punishment, or does it have more worthy bedfellows? In raising this question, I am trying to highlight that education for sustainable development does not arrive fully formed, nor is it, in some sense, fixed, isolated or pure, or even that we can arrive at an uncontestable, correct version. This is also where how we understand these relationships begins to impinge on our notions of what is possible, probable, actual and necessary. What might happen if our conceptual schemes and schemata are described in this way, where questions of reproduction and hierarchy, hybridisation and divergence, are asked of what is possible in education for sustainable development? My second theme develops this. Possibility speaks of opportunity, risk, openings. But while it may be the case that in some senses if a work is not performed, anything is permitted, in terms of practice and language games, constraints limit the spaces that can be occupied and enacted. Perhaps we should head the warning in the words of Father Jacobus (from Hesse's Magister Ludi): To study history, one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one. Substitute the word ‘possibility’ for ‘history’ if you will, and entertain a more inclusive language, and the gravity, difficulties and the problematic nature of the task that the contributors have engaged in becomes increasingly apparent. To study possibility, one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study possibility means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young woman, and possibly a tragic one.
Possibilities that we have heard in the presentations include support for educational change, both reformatory and radical – for policies, institutions, and practices, but also for directions, values and purposes. But what is possible – and in this sense I am mainly meaning conceivable, does not make it necessary or obligatory. Nor should we forget the import of Gödel's incompleteness theorem in mathematics, we must be open to the possibility of another solution, thus challenging the certainty and faith we might have in our current priorities for education and sustainable development. I have already alluded to ‘educational practices’ we might wish to forget when I mentioned corporal punishment. The broader issue well illustrated in the papers is what can and what should be drawn on, and what not, in the realm of SD and education? While Andrew Stables has discussed the effects of there being no absolute foundations for education, we must recognise that what is presented as education for sustainable development - whether by UNESCO, in a national curriculum or in the rhetoric of the advocates of ESD – what is presented is caught up in the typically human response of offering foundations for materially reasonable and ethically justifiable responses to broader societal, environmental and economic issues. This leads to my final point. As Michael Bonnett has signalled, and as Franz Rauch has demonstrated so ably, one of the possibilities of education for sustainable development is to challenge the notion that education is for something other than itself, that education is, increasingly in essence, instrumental and subject to reductionism. But being non-instrumental and non-reductionist should not be embraced too quickly. I would suggest we consider other options: what innovations and time-tested practices will sustainable development, and education for sustainable development, offer education as a whole – or, to put it more bluntly, what can sustainable development do for education, rather than education do for sustainable development. Viewed in the long term, we might wonder whether education for sustainable development, or even our concepts of sustainable development itself, will be recognisable and command the attention and allegiance that it is beginning to have in 50, 100, a thousand years time. Of course, education is not set in stone either, and the ephemerality of adjectival educations should not go unheeded. Andrew Stables invites us to interrogate notions of holism and interdisciplinarity in ESD, while the history of curriculum studies on cross-curricular themes raises similar questions about implementation and degree of fit with contemporary forms of schooling. But to return to Chet’s question of valuing, enacting and re-enacting traditions – which qualities and habits have been, are, and will be, worth living in substantiating the role of sustainable development for education. To conclude, I welcome these contributions as they remind me of the potential of what Franz has summarised in his conclusion: ‘tolerating complexity and handling the contradictions in education and
sustainable development constructively, accepting existing achievements and accomplishments while being critical, engaging in co-operation while acting self-reliantly’. The terms, of course, in the title of the symposium, are highly problematic, open to a variety of interpretations and also subject to internal contradictions when arranged, as they have been, by us in these ways, and many others. I think it was Chet who noted the point, but it emerges in many of the other papers, that language thinks us as we think within the conceptual categories that the language of our cultural group makes available. Hence we need to be careful of reading off from nature either naively or uncritically, or reading off from culture for that matter, about what environmental, ecological and sustainable relations might be. While we shouldn’t preclude the possibility that there might be some pleasure for the ‘fat blokes in lorries’ in engaging with education and sustainable development, I would suggest that a broader issue for the philosophy of education is whether it is, so to speak, too late to educate sustainable development, a situation, I would suggest is a part wider educational attempts to prevent people simply sleep walking into their futures.
