Emancipating learning for a sustainable future

Oleh Anindito Aditomo 

The abundance of misinformation on the pandemic and climate change underscores the importance of equipping students with the skills to systematically analyze arguments and evaluate the credibility of sources.

While educators are rightly occupied by the COVID-19 pandemic, the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development was a reminder of another formidable challenge: climate change. At first glance, the pandemic and climate change look unrelated. However, the two share many common features. Both are complex problems that reflect our fragile interdependence with the natural world. And both arose as a result of human behavior. Hence, addressing both will require profound changes to how we behave as individuals and a society. This is where education can and must play a role. Education needs to ensure that future generations of citizens, leaders and policymakers are willing to and are capable of, transforming societies and creating more sustainable ways of living. In the case of the pandemic and climate change, understanding the problem requires making sense of complex systems. This is no easy feat, because the causal relations between elements in a complex system are often counterintuitive.

The difficulty stems from the fact that elements of a complex system exist at different locations, different time scales and also different levels. Hence, an event can have effects that occur in a different place are delayed or seem entirely unrelated. For instance, the link between not wearing a mask and the collapse of an entire healthcare system may not be obvious. An asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier not wearing a mask in Mumbai can influence the rate of infection in Jakarta, weeks later from the initial act. Understanding climate change is even more challenging. The link between our behavior (what we eat, for instance) and the earth’s temperature is not at all straightforward. It is also difficult to see how seemingly small increases in the earth’s temperature can contribute to the destruction of ecosystems, prolong droughts, and induce extreme weather events such as the recent tropical cyclone in East Nusa Tenggara. If we are to tackle problems such as the pandemic and climate change, then we need to help our students develop the cognitive skills required to understand complex systems. Another similarity between the pandemic and climate change is that public understanding of both issues has been clouded by misinformation and outright hoaxes. In the case of COVID-19, these include conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, to misinformation about the safety of vaccines and the promotion of dubious “alternative” treatments.

It is also easy to find well-designed websites that offer false claims about climate change, while discrediting the actual science and scientists. These claims range from “the earth is actually getting colder”, “global warming is just a natural cycle”, to more absurd claims about conspiracies by governments to raise taxes. The abundance of misinformation on the pandemic and climate change underscores the importance of equipping students with the skills to systematically analyze arguments and evaluate the credibility of sources. Educators also need to help students develop intellectual dispositions, such as valuing scientific evidence and willing to admit mistakes and correct one’s prior opinions. Yet another parallel between the pandemic and climate change is that both are global issues. Neither the coronavirus nor global warming recognizes any ideological and political boundaries. Neither can be addressed by any single country on its own. Regarding the pandemic, controlling infections within one’s own borders will mean only a temporary relief if the virus overruns another country and thus mutates into a new variant. For climate change, reducing fossil fuels in rich countries will mean little if other parts of the world are still dependent on those sources of energy to lift themselves out of poverty. Thus, addressing the pandemic and climate change will require global solidarity. Vaccines and vaccine technology will need to be shared. More resources will need to be devoted to help lift societies out of poverty without relying on cheap but dirty sources of energy.

At the individual level, global solidarity rests on a sense of empathy and civic responsibility that transcends primordial and national identities. It requires an awareness that we are not just members of a cultural group or citizens of a country, but also citizens of the world, with responsibilities to address global issues. This is what education needs to cultivate among future generations. How can education be better organized to empower our youth to tackle complex, global issues? The answer cannot just be introducing more content in the curriculum. Simply knowing more about the coronavirus or about greenhouse effects is not enough to empower students to tackle these problems. First and foremost, we need to commit the whole education system to developing the competencies necessary essential to understand and address complex, global problems such as climate change. In Indonesia, the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry is doing just this as part of a comprehensive reform called Merdeka Belajar (emancipated learning). The ultimate goal of Merdeka Belajar is to cultivate of a set of competencies called the Profil Pelajar Pancasila (Pancasila Student Profile). It is a formulation of competencies required to become lifelong learners and responsible citizens of Indonesia and the world, founded upon the values of our national philosophy Pancasila. Among these are competencies of critical reasoning and creative problem solving which are necessary to understand complex issues such as climate change. Another relevant competency is social collaboration, defined as the willingness and ability to work together towards a common good. Other competencies incorporate dispositions such as connectedness to the natural world and awareness and responsibility toward global issues. Collectively, the competencies in the Pancasila Student Profile will empower young people to take individual and collective action to tackle the climate crisis. In line with UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development framework, these competencies are integrated into the Ministry’s strategic plan. As such, the Pancasila Student Profile serves as a guiding post to orient national policies on assessment, curriculum, and pedagogy. Thus, the incoming national assessment will evaluate schools’ ability to create the kind of learning environments which foster critical reasoning, creative problem solving, and other dispositions described by the Pancasila Student Profile. In terms of pedagogy, the ministry is trialing a new model which allocates a significant amount of instructional time for collaborative, project-based learning. These projects will revolve around key themes extracted from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. While these are first steps in a long journey, we are heading in the right direction. 

The writer is head of Research, Development and Book Affairs at the Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry. A short version of this article was delivered on behalf of the education minister at the UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development in May

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