Sustainability and improvement: a problem `of' education and `for' education

Abstract

In this short discussion article I develop some earlier writing on the theme of education, improvement and sustainability (see references). It builds upon my primary criticism of the school improvement movement that it is accustomed to thinking of education as good in and of itself. As David Orr suggests candidly in his essay in the early 1990s, `It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind (Orr, 1994/2004). My assertion is that the type of education that is being advanced through the school improvement movement is simply not the kind that we need to tackle some of the most pressing challenges we now face in the form of environmental change and the looming post-oil economy (Stern Review, 2006).