The purpose of education has always been to everyone, in essence, the same: to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society. This was the purpose of the education given to a little aboriginal in the Australian bush before the coming of the white man. It was the purpose of the education of youth in the golden age of Athens. It is the purpose of education today, whether this education goes on in a one-room school in the mountains of Tennessee or in the most advanced, progressive school in a radical community. But to develop into a member of society in the Australian bush had nothing in common with developing into a member of society in ancient Greece, and still less with what is needed today. Any education is, in its forms and methods, an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists. (Dewey, 1934)
Activity | Details | Time |
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1 | Read the Education in numbers infographic and consider reflection points. | 30 minutes |
2 | Watch the video RSA Animate: Changing Education Paradigms and contribute to the working wall. | 45 minutes |
3 | Watch the United Nations’ Numbers in Action video and consider the reflection points. | 20 minutes |
4 | Read the extract from The Healer and consider the reflection points. | 15 minutes |
5 | Browse the National Geographic Kids collection Syrian Refugees: Children Living in Exile and consider the reflection points. | 15 minutes |
6 | Watch the video Did you know, in 2028… and consider the reflection points. | 15 minutes |
7 | Create a mind map; interact with the working wall; take a screenshot. | 45 minutes |
The metro tunnel was closed from Sörnäinen to Keilaniemi because of flooding. … I went back to watching the news on the screen attached to the back of the driver’s bulletproof glass compartment. The southern regions of Spain and Italy had been officially left to their own devices. Bangladesh, sinking into the sea, had erupted in a plague that threatened to spread to the rest of Asia. The dispute between India and China over Himalayan water supplies was driving the two countries to war. … The forest fires in the Amazon had not been extinguished even by blasting new river channels to surround the blaze. … Estimated number of climate refugees planet-wide: 650–800 million people. Pandemic warnings: H3N3, malaria, tuberculosis, ebola, plague. … I turned my gaze back to the rain which had been falling for months, a continuous flow of water that had started in September and paused only momentarily since. At least five waterfront neighbourhoods [named] had been continuously flooded, and many residents had finally given up and abandoned their homes. Their apartments didn’t stay empty for long. Even damp, mouldy and partially underwater, they were good enough for the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in the country. In the evenings, cooking fires and campfires shone from flooded neighbourhoods where the power was out. (Tuomainen, 2014, pp. 4–5)
Activity | Details | Time |
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1 | Interactive task: read and prioritise quotations. | 30 minutes |
2 | Watch the human capital model animation and consider the reflection point. | 30 minutes |
3 | Watch the rights-based model animation and consider the reflection point. | 30 minutes |
4 | Watch the capabilities-based model animation and consider the reflection point. | 30 minutes |
5a | Interactive task: assign quotations to the correct models for education. | 30 minutes |
5b | Write a 200 word response to reflection points and post on the course forum. | 30 minutes |
Quiz | Answer five questions. This will form part of the assessment for the badge. | 10 minutes |
‘Through hard work and education, we can deliver a strong economy and opportunity for all.’ – Julia Gillard. (Sydney Morning Herald, 2011)
‘The accumulation of cultural capital – the acquisition of knowledge – is the key to social mobility.’ – Michael Gove. (Walker, 2013)
‘It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.’ – President William J. Clinton. (New York Times, 2012)
‘Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.’ – Kofi Annan. (United Nations, 1997)
‘In schools giving students a full education, not to create great artists but about the right to have full expression and imagination and creativity, along with an acknowledgement that everybody learns differently. You try and you fail and you try again. All those skills are useful in the workplace, too.’ – Damian Woetzel. (Whitman, 2014)
‘I don’t know why people have divided the whole world into two groups, west and east. Education is neither eastern nor western. Education is education and it’s the right of every human being.’ – Malala Yousafzai. (Meikle, 2013)
‘Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life.’ – Abhijit Naskar. (Naskar, 2016, p143)
‘The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.’ – Martin Luther King, Jr. (King, 1947)
‘The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.’ – Jean Piaget. (Hanley-Maxwell, and Collet-Klingenberg, 2011)
The success of these goals is driven by the education goal. The SDGs reflect the important role of education by encapsulating targets in a stand-alone goal (Goal 4). (Unesco, n.d.)
Activity | Details | Time |
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1 | Listen to a five-minute audio extract from the BBC’s Fragile Planet series and find out from the WMO report which climate records were broken in 2016. Then consider the reflection points. Discover a relevant news article and post it to the course forum. Then consider some reflection points. | 90 minutes |
2 | Watch the video Climate Change: Professor Brian Cox clashes with sceptic Malcolm Roberts and skim read/scan a New York Times article about climate change denial. Then consider the reflection points. | 45 minutes |
3 | Listen to the extract from the BBC Radio 4 programme Shared Planet about alternative views of sustainability, consider a reflection point and then two illustrative scenarios. | 45 minutes |
4a/4b | Make notes based on ONE of the scenarios from Activity 3, and write a 200-word response for the course forum. Read other posts on the forum. | 30 minutes |
‘the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level’ – usually applied to economic growth and sometimes referred to as sustainable development
‘the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance’ – when used to talk about dealing with environmental issues. (English Oxford Living Dictionaries, n.d.)
Economic drivers | Environmental drivers | Tension | Synergy |
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Need for individuals to earn money for food, housing, other living costs. | Need for employment to minimise impact on the environment e.g. minimise travel, clean industries. | Jobs aren’t always where housing is available or families want to live. | Jobs can be related to increasing the efficiency and environmental credentials of processes and industries. |
Need for society to make money e.g. for exports, taxes, profits, tariffs on imports. | Having a global market means goods travel long distances and this involves carbon emissions and energy use. | Goods traded are often not made where they are needed or are made more cheaply elsewhere, when local products might be sufficient. | The money saved by buying more cheaply from other countries could be spent on mitigating against the environmental travel costs e.g. carbon offsetting. |
Need for society to have sufficient money to use e.g. for housing, education, infrastructure. | The environment does not necessarily create money and when resources must be conserved or areas protected, this may appear as a net drain on a community’s funding. | Wealth is not evenly distributed globally as shown by differences in countries’ Gross Domestic Product, which is usually expressed per head of its population. Money needed and wealth produced are not spread equitably. | The environment can be a source of income such as eco-tourism and could be responsibly used locally. |
Need for society to provide for its citizens e.g. food, consumer goods etc. | There are cultures who are self-sustaining and movements within other countries advocating local production to meet needs but this can be viewed as quite extreme and backwards looking. | If all countries only made what they needed, there would be no trade between countries and income would be only internally changing hands. This would be a radical shift in trading expectations from the world we currently know. | Some feel there can and should be a better balance between local and global production and consumption. |
Activity | Details | Time |
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1 | Browse the International Migration Statistics and consider some reflection points. | 45 minutes |
2 | Read selected parts of the article World Report 2017 – The Lost Years. Post a news item relevant to demographic change affecting your setting to the course forum; then read posts from other contributors. | 45 minutes |
3a | Read the BBC article How many people can our planet really support? and then add to posts to the working wall. | 45 minutes |
3b | Read the article Policies to Address Population Growth Nationally and Internationally, then consider some reflection points. | 60 minutes |
Activity | Details | Time |
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1 | Watch the seven-minute ‘Did you know’ video and consider the reflection points. | 45 minutes |
2 | Watch the first couple of minutes of the video Humans need not apply and consider the reflection points. | 30 minutes |
3 | Listen to the first five minutes of the BBC radio programme The Public Philosopher. Then find a relevant image to share on OpenStudio. | 60 minutes |
4 | Read the blog post Creativity vs robots and consider the reflection points for both those providing and receiving education. | 45 minutes |
5 | Consider some reflection points about what life would be like without the need for employment. | 15 minutes |
6 | Construct a 200 word summary of your notes, then share it on the course forum. Read others’ contributions also. | 45 minutes |
Quiz | Answer ten questions. This will form part of the assessment for the badge. | 20 minutes |
If you don’t have a job, you don’t have an income. It could be a utopian outcome if you had an income independently from a job. You wouldn’t have to work at something you didn’t enjoy, but you would still have income to participate in the economy and help drive economic growth and all those things that we need people to do. (Ford, 2016)
Activity | Details | Time |
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1 | Consider the reflection points, and then write three different posts for the course forum. Read some of the other posts. | 60 minutes |
2 | Review your learning from the past three weeks and consider the reflection points. | 60 minutes |
3 | Read through a resource about the Alternative Basic Education for Karamoja-ABEK Program and then consider the reflection point. | 60 minutes |
4 | Create a detailed mind map summarising your learning from the course. | 60 minutes |
5 | Write a 200-word course forum post. | 60 minutes |
Failing to meet these goals will have a serious impact upon children – and on all our futures. When children do not have access to adequate education, societies suffer and a country’s development is impeded. Children who miss out on education will not have the chance to develop the skills they need to become better citizens, parents and community members nationally and globally. (Save the Children, 2011)
One example [of a capabilities-based approach to education] is that of the Toronto (Canada) Board of Education which recently undertook a reform of its curriculum through a massive community consultation. Thousands of parents, students, staff and members of the public contributed to full-day community consultations aimed at exploring how education should respond to the demands of a changing world. The focus of the inquiry was the question ‘What should students know, do and value by the time they graduate from school?’ Although the notion of ‘sustainability’ was not imposed, it emerged as an essential requirement in the course of the consultation. The education that parents and the community wanted for their children was in many respects hardly revolutionary or even surprising. The six graduation outcomes specified were: literacy; aesthetic appreciation and creativity; communication and collaboration; information management; responsible citizenship; and personal life skills, values and actions. These differ from most traditional curricular objectives in that they are broader and more closely related to the needs and organisation of life than to the requirements and structures of schooling. The essence of the Toronto reform is that the curriculum is no longer focused exclusively on the traditional core subjects of language, mathematics, history, etc. Informed by the new vision of what the community felt tomorrow’s students would need to know and be able to do, these disciplines underwent major revision. Mathematics, for example, now includes the skill of comprehending extremely large and extremely small numbers – which are essential to being environmentally literate and capable of understanding relative risk factors, both in personal life and at work. Health now includes environmental issues including cancer, allergies and food additives as well as ‘consumerism’. In the Toronto reforms, the curriculum that the community wanted for its children can be interpreted as ‘capabilities’ based. This case study presents a compelling argument for thinking about education in this way. Much of the success of the Toronto reform is due to the fact that it was not – and was not seen to be – an effort to change education to meet goals set by an elite, or unduly influenced by outside pressures. The impetus to change came from within. The new curriculum had equal or greater academic rigour but far greater relevance to life outside school walls. Education designed around sustainable development makes children aware of the growing interdependence of life on Earth – interdependence among peoples and among natural systems – in order to prepare them for the future (UNESCO, 1997)