Education for Sustainable Development: Imperative, Realistic, or Chimera?

Charl C. Wolhuter

Summary:  Sustainable development has become the mantra seized upon by the global community as a catch-all phrase for its vision of the world by 2030, and education has been selected as the vehicle to achieve that goal. This schema calls two questions to the fore. Firstly, how valid is the concept of sustainable development as an index subsuming the full panoply of challenges facing humanity? Secondly, how well does education lend itself to the mission of ensuring sustainable development? Education, at least in its present form in the world, has been criticised from many angles, including neo-institutionalism, neo-colonial and post-colonial studies, world system analysis, dependency theories, and reproduction theories, as not being an unqualifiedly benevolent force. This article attempts to come to an answer to these two questions, from the vantage point of the scholarly field of comparative and international education. The article concludes (1) that sustainable development is, at least in its current definition, a somewhat reductionistic conceptualisation to serve as common denominator for the full raft of challenges facing humanity and (2) that apart from deficiencies in the current figuring of education as one of the Sustainable Development Goals, the leverage of education is contingent on a host of other, extra-education factors in society. However, education is indispensable in pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals, and in employing education for these goals, humanity should appreciate the value of the scholarly field of comparative and international education.