Ecologically and Socially Sustainable Education: Creating a Sustainable World

Abstract

The purpose of ecologically and socially sustainable education is to teach the skills and to impart knowledge necessary for the establishment and perpetuation of ecologically and socially sustainable society. The first step, for the purposes of ecologically and socially sustainable education, is to determine what an "ecologically and socially sustainable society" is. This is achieved by reconciling and unifying of all individual ideas that there ever might exist of what should constitute an "ecologically and socially sustainable society" into a unified model -- a model acceptable to all because it is based on all knowledge and data pertinent to the subject, and because everyone can participate in the modeling process. This unification in a model is necessary in order to avoid costly resolving ("costly" in terms of time, energy, resources, and, not infrequently, lives) of differences among those ideas in real life. This ongoing process of "reconciling and unifying of all individual ideas" into a unified model in itself would be the "ecologically and socially sustainable education" to the participants, because this unification process of all the diverse ideas would show what ideas would be more sustainable than others (or not), and why this should be so; in order to design a world that they would like to live in the participants would learn everything necessary for this while participating in the designing process. They would have an active interest in doing so -- they would be designing a life for themselves that they would like to have.

Keywords: ecologically and socially sustainable education, ecological and social sustainability, sustainable, sustainability, education, The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz, Mahayana philosophy

JEL Classification: I20, Q20, Z00