YOU CAN't MEND BROKEN GLASS There Is a Tremendous Need to Incorporate Education for Sustainable

PERSPECTIVE - Sunday 28 November 2004

YOU CAN'T MEND BROKEN GLASS
There is a tremendous need to incorporate education for sustainable development (ESD) into school curricula around the globe, write ANUJE SIRIKIT and IRWIN CRUZ

Midori Takemoto, 14, has no tolerance for people who litter. "We should not throw garbage in the street. It would be as if we have thrown our minds and brains away," she recently told an international workshop on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The girl with cropped hair and glasses was one of 18 school children and university students from the city of Okayama who attended the workshop. They came to speak of their actions to keep their city clean and their concerns and hopes for its future.
Okayama is a city of 630,000 located halfway between Osaka and Hiroshima, Japan. The school children are members of the "Okayama Kyoyama ESD Environment Project" or Okayama KEEP. This is an extracurricular organisation consisting of youngsters from all school levels joining with members of the community. The aim is to turn Okayama into a sustainable community and they are starting in the classroom.
The phrase "sustainable development" was first coined in 1987. The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) defined it as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (from the Brundtland Report, 1987). It means having the ability to strike a balance between protecting the natural environment, maintaining economic and social well-being and ensuring equal opportunities for the present and succeeding generations.
The concept of sustainable development became more public thanks to the 1992 Earth Summit held at Rio de Janeiro, where nearly 200 heads of state convened in the Brazilian metropolis to commit themselves to a blueprint for sustainable development known as Agenda 21. In the more than a decade since Agenda 21, also known as the Rio Declaration, was signed, its record of success has been patchy.
Very few countries have actually met its challenging goals. It has been successful, however, in creating a consciousness among governments and civil society of the magnitude of the problems confronting the global population and in jumpstarting initiatives at the local level. Now even young children know that the planet is not in a sustainable condition and that they can do something to change this situation.
The students in Okayama are setting a very good example. "Sustainable development means to continue something from generation to generation, " says Maeda Tsukasa, a first year pupil at Kyoyama Junior High School. "It means opening our minds about environmental problems," Midori adds.
HOLISTIC INTEGRATION

In 2002, world leaders met again to discuss sustainable development in Johannesburg, South Africa. This time, they sought a more concrete, achievable and practical plan to realise the goals of Agenda 21 and the more recent United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Participants of the summit recognised that the world's problems, from urban decay and poverty to human rights violations and gender inequality, are interrelated and require holistic solutions.
In keeping with this recognition, education for sustainable development (ESD) is a complex concept comprising many different facets. It is not simply another term for environmental education. Although education about the environment is an integral component of ESD, ESD is more holistic in its approach and in the diversity of issues covered; gender equality, indigenous knowledge, corporate responsibility and HIV/AIDS are among the key cross-cutting issues.
"Apart from programmes that raise public awareness, there are also initiatives to reorient education into something beyond the current situation. Education is now being seen as a tool that can cultivate the culture of sustainable development across institutions, across countries and across ages", says Sheldon Shaeffer, director of the UNESCO Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education in Bangkok.
Helping teachers worldwide to integrate sustainable development into their lesson plans will bring the message literally home. This insight prompted UNESCO to produce a kit called Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future. Available online at www.unesco.org and also in CD-ROM form, this kit has 25 modules that enhance teachers' understanding of ESD themes and the links that exist between them.
For example, the modules explain the link between environmental degradation and the violation of human rights, and also suggest ways to incorporate topics such as sustainable tourism, agriculture, indigenous knowledge and gender into the regular curriculum. Methods of teaching include experiential learning, story-telling and values education, which covers notions such as justice, responsibility, peace, dialogue and respect for diversity.
Providing tools for implementation at the local level is important because this is where the impact of sustainable development is most noticeably felt. Community-based initiatives are more likely to be effective because they are often tailored to meet the specific learning needs of the communities, engage the participation of residents and address local issues of sustainable development directly.
ROONG ARUNDr Ampai Harakunarak, director of the Environmental Education and Human Resources Development Center, Thailand Environment Institute (TEI), believes that children should be provided with both intellectual and values education, which will allow them to grow up to be important catalysts for advancing the concept of sustainability.
A good example in Thailand is the Dawn Project (Roong Arun). It aims to raise children's environmental awareness through activities in schools and in their communities. The project, which was co-managed by the former National Energy Policy Office, the Ministry of Education and the Thailand Environment Institute, introduced a new approach in promoting education for sustainable development.
Implemented in five regions across the country, it includes 600 schools and communities in 30 provinces. The prospects for positive long-term impacts deriving from the teaching, learning materials and training methods developed under the Dawn Project are most encouraging.
In Okayama, there has been a perceptible increase in civic engagement towards sustainability in recent years. The city has forged many partnerships among private citizens and corporate enterprises towards voluntary conservation activities. The total number of participants registered in this effort has surpassed 30,000 and reaches 5% of the population.
Nevertheless, there is still much room for improvement. Japanese classrooms still place relatively little importance on environmental issues. Fujiwara Rika, Midori's science teacher at the Kyoyama Junior High School, says environmental studies remain just a small part of the science curriculum.
"The curriculum is normally large and arduous, and there is not enough time to teach everything. The environment component, therefore, is often dropped out," she says.
Unfortunately, there is an apparent dearth of discussion on environmental issues not only in Midori's school but in schools throughout the world. One of the aims of United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, to be launched in January 2005, is the reform and re-orientation of educational policies. The initiative will strive to ask policymakers to adopt programmes that are multidisciplinary, ones that incorporate social, economic, cultural and environmental issues. Youth-led initiatives such as KEEP in Japan and the city of Okayama itself are promising signs of change. They signal that communities are taking a look at themselves, measuring how sustainable they are, and looking for local solutions for very global problems. It would be desirable if all communities do the same.
Midori's and her friends' concern for the environment is encouraging and is not likely to diminish. "When you drop a glass vase and break it, you can never mend it again. It's the same with the environment," Midori says solemnly.