Edited by Arjen E.J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran. Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2012. 550 pages. (€) 69.00 (hardback) ISBN: 978-90-8686-203-0.
I reviewed this massive book for the Journal of Education for Sustainable Development in 2012 and set it in the context of a prescient album by the Indie Group ILiKETRAiNS: “And we regret the process of our age: progress, stagnation and decay” (He who Saw the Deep ,2010).
The Epic of Gilgamesh’s existential themes made it particularly appealing to German authors in the years following World War two. Even Saddam Hussein, made much of the story of Gilgamesh during his autocratic reign over Iraq.
The epic tale tells of Gilgamesh undertaking a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He eventually learns that “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.
“I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, engraved on a stone the whole story.” (Sanders 1960)
Epic tales of floods (climate change), knowledge, wisdom and uncertainty set the context to this ambitious book published at a time not unlike the present impacts of the global pandemic. A time when the world’s leaders struggle to come to terms with the impact of Covid -19, widening global austerity, major conflict zones and catastrophic and unpredictable weather systems in virtually all parts of the globe. What does this mean for humanity and in particular the global education community? How do we respond to ‘tipping points’, when situations move from stability to instability as human activity crosses planetary boundaries, such as elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations leading to climate change? Is there a path towards more resilience, adaptation, and renewal in the face of such unprecedented and accelerating change around the world?
Arjen E.J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran(2006) have argued that sustainable development cannot be an end in itself but as part of a journey consisting of several inputs or drivers for transformative learning. While there is a wide range of ideas as to what sustainable development might entail, the lack of consensus about an exact meaning in variable contexts mitigates against global prescription. More importantly, to demand consensus about the perspective of an ill-defined issue such as sustainable development, is undesirable from a deep-and deliberative democracy perspective and is essentially ‘mis-educative’.
Deliberative democracy offers a way of thinking about difference, as opposed to consensus. Democracy, from this perspective, depends on difference, dissonance, conflict resolution, and antagonism, so that deliberation is fundamentally indeterminate. Any deliberative exploration of sustainable development raises inevitable tensions among the three P’s (People, Planet, Profit) or the three E’s (Efficiency, Environment, Equity). All of which are prerequisites for rather than barriers to higher and deep learning.
As I and many others have argued Universities have a responsibility to create space for alternative thinking. They have a profound moral and ethical role to play in developing students’ attributes and competencies. The acquisition of these qualities is essential to cope with uncertainty, poorly defined situations, and conflicting or at least diverging norms, values, interests, and reality constructs. The development of these dynamic qualities and related competencies sets higher education apart from training institutions and avoids prescription which stifles creativity, homogenizes thinking, narrows choices, limits autonomous thinking. It emphasises wisdom over knowledge acquisition-and prioritises the application of knowledge for the betterment of humanity and social progress.
Given this level of uncertainty and complexity there can be no universally applicable recipe for implementing sustainability in higher education. University governance systems cannot rely solely on limited structural use of economic incentives, rules, attainment standards, and regulations to enforce sustainability in higher education. Sustainability is an inchoate concept which can only derive democratic meaning with the involvement of multiple stakeholders in the university enterprise- both the academic and non-academic community within it but also the wider stakeholder community within which it sits. This can then resolve the “ wicked question” of what a university is for.
It ultimately needs a university stakeholder sustainability assembly-which invests in a transformative deliberative learning process and crucially deals with the inevitable tension among the divergence of interests, values, and worldviews on the one hand – and the need for the shared resolution of issues that arise in working on sustainability in higher education on the other.
“Plato’s division between well-educated, judicious leaders and the crazy and uproarious masses came to be so widely accepted that it’s easy to forget that he was writing as a contrarian in his time. Higher education in Greece then was often in the hands of the Sophists: private tutors, thinkers, and craft masters. Plato believed that engaging in higher thought for wages was corrupting and schlock-prone—the corporate lecture circuit of its day—and he rarely missed an opportunity to dump on those who did it. (His efforts succeeded: “sophistry” remains a sneer more than two thousand years later.) Yet the Sophists do seem to have believed that crowd wisdom was true wisdom. Aristotle, Plato’s student, ended up sharing this belief. “
Arjen E.J. Wals and Peter Blaze Corcoran(2006); Sustainability as an Outcome of Transformative Learning. In Drivers and barriers for Implementing Sustainable Development in Higher education. UNESCO Technical Paper no 3.
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