Abstract:

If, as E. Durkheim put it over a century ago, the aims of education are merely to prepare youth for being responsible citizens of their society on the one hand and providing them with the skills they need for their future occupation, universities -especially those that offer technical programs- have fulfilled their functions. However, if the aim of universities is not only to provide skills to future professionals and for their responsibilities as citizens, but also to respect the planet and to achieve sustainable development, most universities have failed in their mission.

Lautensach (2018) proposes a blueprint for a transformative education in the context of the sustainability imperative. This author points out that, in spite of more recurrent and more aggressive natural catastrophes that jeopardize the lives of millions of people -and not only in the developing world- the educational discourse continues to revolve around topics like enrolment figures, course curricula, program organization and didactics. He states that governments have systematically ignored the warnings of the scientific community in favor of short-term economic goals. Furthermore, he blames Professors for not taking their duty seriously of caring for and acting in the best interest of the learners and of the society at large. For Lautensach, education systems have failed in two ways: by teaching falsehoods, and by not teaching what is most important. Examples of this type of failure include teaching the false axiom that consumption and economic growth are the basis of human welfare; an anthropocentric attitude and the instrumentalization of nature for the benefit of humanity.

Lautensach criticizes university curricula whose aim is to prepare students for their integration into the capitalist economic system with special attention to their employability and proposes a new pedagogy. This new pedagogy will be attained by reinforcing the productive parts of the existing curricula and subverting those parts that are counterproductive. The curricula of the new pedagogy Lautensach (2018) proposes should include adaptive skills to live in a new planet which is constantly jeopardized by collapse. These adaptive skills would prepare students to make the personal choices which cause the least harm to the planet and to distinguish between those parts of students’ culture that help the planet and those that harm it. Furthermore, this researcher proposes a redefinition of progress as achieving sustainability instead of progress in terms of economic wealth, and to replace anthropocentric values with ecocentric values.

While the new pedagogy proposed by Lautensach makes sense in the context of the 21st century, which has been characterized by more natural catastrophes due to climate change, it is unrealistic to assume that employability will lose its preponderance as the most important aim of education, since employability is synonymous with survival. The student is a consumer of knowledge, and students usually, if not always, aim to acquire education as a credential that will enable them to enter the labour market and earn a living.

This paper reports on the increased attention on sustainability as a purpose of business in the 21st Century and its key implications for the 21st Century Higher Education. The paper builds upon a constructivist approach, combining a literature review and research on key publications and academic reports.

Keywords:

Transformative Education, Sustainability, Professors, Universities, Social change, Curriculum, Employability, Business.