The Morrill Act of 1862 created institutions dedicated to useful learning to establish a “permanent” agriculture in the U.S. It was quickly followed by the creation of research universities such as Johns Hopkins University, modeled on German universities and those dedicated specifically to research that was useful for industrial development and technological advancement, such as Rensselaer Polytechnic, MIT, Drexel Institute, and Cal Tech.[1, 2 ]

The liberal arts college, however, continued to define liberal learning as John Henry Newman [3] (quoting Aristotle) once proposed, “where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.” Liberal learning, in his view, “gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman.”
“The intellect,” he thought, should be “disciplined for its own sake.” The model in each instance was adapted to the perceived needs of society and its various projects of settling the continent, saving souls, spreading the gospel, domination of nature, and economic growth.

Clearly, education does not occur in a vacuum but begins with varying assumptions about how, why, and what people learn and the kind of aptitudes and skills necessary to support and perpetuate a particular kind of society, whether theocratic, democratic, industrial, or what is now termed “sustainable.” The specific goals of education and the art and science of instruction (i.e., pedagogy) further depend a great deal on whether those to be educated are presumed to being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (what Paulo Friere called the “banking model” of education), or have pre-existing qualities that can be elicited and disciplined as others believe. In general, both pre-collegiate and collegiate education in the U.S. was modeled on the former belief that we are all born ignorant and so must be improved in order to increase public virtue, support democracy, provide the skills necessary to the industrial growth of the country, and more recently, to serve the information economy and the development of high and ever-higher technology.

It is now generally conceded, however, that something about the modern project of economic growth and domination of nature went badly awry, and the excesses built into the industrial system threatened the living systems of the planet, culminating in both biotic impoverishment and potentially catastrophic climate change. When John Locke developed his views on education in the seventeenth century, the world population was perhaps 800 million.  It is now approaching seven billion. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the design for his academy, the fastest mode of transport was a strong horse or a frigate in a good wind. Technology is now like a tsunami sweeping across the human landscape and overturning everything in its path. Some thinkers, such as Ray Kurzweil believe that we are approaching a “singularity,” meaning the merging of humans and machines. Supposedly, these devices will evolve to surpass human intelligence and attain consciousness, as well as the possible ability to self-replicate and ultimately dominate the human race. In short order, we are creating a different planet, arguably a different human nature, and a global culture evolving faster than we can comprehend and adapt to the changes. In other words, the challengesof conceiving and achieving a durable civilization are sweeping.  But the dialogue about sustainability has been almost exclusively focused on how to arrest environmental deterioration, as if the evolution of our machines and prosthetic devices is unrelated and unproblematic.

The question is, at this time and under these circumstances, what is education for? What kind of education is appropriate and useful for the rising generation to deal with increasingly portentous issues? What do they need to know and how should they learn it? And what is the role of professional educators and institutions of higher learning in equipping the young to live full and productive lives relevant to the larger topography of their time?

There is No Shortage of Ideas

At one extreme, there is the view once expressed by Kurt Vonnegut that the next time around, whoever is in charge of creation should omit the frontal lobe of whatever brains might exist. Slightly less imaginative, there are some such as John Taylor Gatto[4] who vigorously question the goals and methods of public schooling, who, like Ivan Illich, propose de-schooling society altogether. And there are even a few heretics[5], [6] who have pondered the relation among the ascending curve representing the rise of the modern university, the explosive growth of knowledge, the growing sophistication of learned societies, and the rapidly descending curve that one might draw depicting the human prospect.[7] At any rate, an important goal of education is to foster the capacity to hear an otherwise unfamiliar and perhaps disagreeable thought, mull it over, digest it, compare and contrast it, try it on for size, and think about its implications, all before leaping to an opinion—which is to say foster an informed but open and inquisitive mind.

The idea that education ought to be harnessed to advance the related causes of justice and sustainability has gathered considerable momentum. In the Tbilisi Declaration of 1977, organized by UNESCO and the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP), representatives from sixty-six countries called for the inclusion of environmental education in national educational programs. Among their recommendations were twelve guiding principles to make education interdisciplinary and a lifelong process that integrates the environmental science and issues across the entire curriculum. In hindsight, the principles from Tbilisi and similar documents over the next several decades were clearly stated, plausible, and well-intentioned, but did not lead to change commensurate with the scale of the problems they presumed to address. Virtually everything about the modern educational enterprise from teacher training programs to the stranglehold of disciplines, to the procedures for attaining tenure in the modern academy, conspired to undermine changes or render them marginal. The goals did not fit the organizational and professional structures accreted over many decades. The “pre-analytic” assumptions of pre-collegiate schooling and higher education in general included the unstated belief that the environment was both too vast to be significantly affected by human actions and was otherwise useful mostly as a resource to be exploited in service to human progress.

While significant progress has been made in the past three decades, the purposes of environmental education, to say the least, remain deeply controversial. This reflects much of the ambiguity inherent in attempts to define sustainability and chart a plausible course to a more durable, decent, and just human future.[8, 9]

For educators, these issues devolve into unresolved questions. For example, is it necessary to “love” nature or have what pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson called a “sense of wonder” in order to live in harmony with it? The experience of many indigenous peoples suggests that ecological competence may be more important than anything like love or affection. But speaking for the other side of the question, scientist Stephen Jay Gould once argued that “we won’t save what we do not love.

Will such things as “peak oil” significantly threaten the systems by which we provide ourselves with food, energy, and materials and thus require skills necessary to a greater degree of local self-reliance?  If so, how should practical skills be included in the modern curriculum?

To what extent does an adequate response to environmental deterioration require a revolution in human behavior and a paradigm shift at the cultural level? Stated differently, might a sustainable society evolve naturally from further evolution of the modern project and specifically the development of technologies that allow us to radically improve the efficiency with which we use energy, water, and resources; power civilization from sunlight; and mimic natural systems in both agriculture and industry in order to eliminate pollution? Can we indeed be “rich, numerous, and in control of the forces of nature,” as Herman Kahn once put it, and also be sustainable? If so, the curriculum would be mostly more of the same, with greater emphasis on science and technology.

To what extent is nature still “natural,” and not an artifact of human manipulation? If the answer is “not much” or “not at all,” what value are we to properly assign to it? Waiting in the wings but with one foot on the stage is the technology by which we might simulate a virtual nature and natural processes. Might our urge to affiliate with life and lifelike process[10] be met by biophilic design, artificial reality, and simulation? Is there something inherently wrong with “plastic trees,” which is to say, an increasingly contrived nature,[11]and if so, exactly what? What’s natural and what’s not, and what difference, if any, does that difference make?

What is the purpose of environmental education of any sort when nature is being radically mutilated by the twin forces of rapid climate change and the loss of species? It could be that teaching the young to love the declining nature around them is rather like encouraging them to love a friend dying of cancer!!!

When so much of the human future depends on the creativity and skills of commodity brokers, policy entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and businesses to devise and implement the means to track and eliminate carbon emissions, is there any place left for role models like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson? Might natural capitalists, carbon traders, and entrepreneurs making the big deals and big money suffice?

Searching for Answers

There are no definitive answers to such questions, but we know that the human presence in nature is both increasingly precarious and that we are coming uncomfortably close to the threshold of irreversible changes in Earth systems. But if we intend to hang around for a while, we have neither the luxury of asking small questions and tinkering at the margin of the status quo nor that of dreaming small dreams. Even so, there will be no early consensus on the meaning of loaded and complicated words like “sustainability” or agreement about what schools, colleges, and universities should do about it, however defined.[12]

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