Sustainable Education: Re-Visioning Learning and Change (Schumacher Briefings)

One of the best works on what our youngsters really need out of education; adaptability, curiosity, problem solving and the ability to work together.

Easy to read if you are interested in the topic, very informative and small enough to carry in your handbag.

This book was written in 2001 and so it includes lots of discussion about initiatives for developing sustainable education but in the last twelve years I do not think that we have seen very much progress. In some ways it is too idealistic and not sufficiently practical. The great hope is for transformative change but this will not happen unless there is either impending doom or a very strong ground-swell of opinion. Neither of these possibilities exist.The arguments are also slightly undermined by inclusion of too much "holistic" new age waffle. Fundamentally why is a student going to pay £9000 a year to a university? Because they want a job. So the capitalist, free-market education, targeting employment and wealth generation, rather than the development of students has triumphed and sustainable education has been vanquished at least for the foreseeable future.

This book has and will come in handy when writing essays for my Cert Ed course