9. Preparing Agents of Change
Sustainability requires knowledge about ecosystems, about how global politics and economy function, about societies and cultures, and about how to share a good life on this Earth, the only one we have. Nobody can learn to live a decent life together with others, humans and non-humans, through merely cognitive knowledge. SE is built on reflections, discussions, and individual and joint actions regarding values, attitudes, and a vision for the future.
The grey present and the bleak future we see today show us that a collapse of humanity is imminent in the collective dream we are living out today. But what is this dream to which we are now falling victims? It is the dream of mastery over nature, making it provide for our daily needs and turning the world into a safe, gentle, and foreseeable place. It is the dream of comfort and security. Despite the constant changes that humanity has witnessed since the dawn of the industrial revolution, changes that some say are happening faster than ever before, the dream of mastery over nature has been remarkably stable.
The dream of controlling nature, of making people the masters of their own destinies through making nature the servant of humanity, has been realised with more thoroughness than anybody could have imagined a century ago. Nature has been exploited in all imaginable ways, since while we have striven to realise this dream of mastery, we have lost all sense of a limit. While gaining control over nature, we have lost control over ourselves. In 1957, the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright was already concerned about how technology – developed to realise the dream of security and comfort – had turned into a master dictating peoples’ lives.
According to von Wright, knowledge can be used for both good and bad ends. Therefore, both humanity’s self-acquired happiness and self-inflicted suffering have increased tremendously. In addition, increased technological control has affected people’s desires and proven dangerous to their mental equilibrium. The technology that humans have created as their servant is now their master (von Wright, 1993, p. 127).
Facing the current sustainability crises, we need a different dream. Instead of dreaming about mastery over nature, we must learn to dream about harmony. To realise this new dream, we need a new vision for education. In a recent book titled Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action: Toward an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Systems Change, Christina T. Kwauk and Radhika Iyengar describe five roadblocks to “preventing the education sector from becoming a game-changer in climate policy and action” (2021, p. 4). The second roadblock is a lack of radical vision. If education is to be part of the solution of our current sustainability crises rather than adding to the problem, educators as change makers must be able to overcome these roadblocks. We agree with Iyengar and Kwauk that “the global education community must look deeply and critically into what it would take to transform our education systems in order for them to realize the rapid and radical change needed in our socioeconomic and socio-ecological systems” (p. 9). The starting point for such a change must be a new vision.
When we talk about transformative education in the context of SE, it is not only a transformation of the mind that is needed; we also need a transformation of the heart. We do not need to be smarter at managing the land; we must instead learn to love and respect it. Rather than seeking green growth, it is we – the people – who need to grow green. Instead of growing bigger, ever more demanding, ever needier, we need to grow within; we need to cultivate our perceptive capacities, our capacity for empathy, and our capacities for love.
