The Role of Education in Building a Sustainable World

I have been intesenly busy lately, so here's a quick series of posts for good measure.

This week, my school had its annual International Week. I attended two global talks: the first a talk by Dr. Charles Hopkins, of UNESCO, on the role of education in building a sustainable world. His main point was that individual educators should think in terms of what they can do in their discipline to teach to the greater good. It all tied into the problems of over-specialization, and reconnecting the disciplines to grow the common pool of understanding. He talked about the problem of single-hulled ships, which were "phased out" after several oil spills in favor of double-hulled ships. He showed us pictures of men dragging these abandoned ships up onto land and taking them apart with their bare hands for pennies a day. He also talked about Language Arts teachers in Bermuda who, in order to address problems of violence, began reading books about violence in class to bring up the issue safely.

I think we can extrapolate these ideas outside of education, although they're certainly important there. We should have a "take a big, scary global issue to work day" and all think about how we use water, what we design, what plans we implement, what we throw away, etc.