Connections Quarterly Spring 2016 - Environment | страница 4

Can Independent Schools
Remain Relevant?
A Guide to Reorienting Teaching and Learning
By Wynn Calder
The Challenge

H

ow do we teach students to be thoughtful and engaged citizens who
strive to improve the world? At its core, this is the intent of sustainability
education. While independent schools are making progress on greening
their campuses and modeling environmental behavior, are they doing enough to
educate students to build a healthier, more compassionate, more durable world?
Independent schools are perfectly positioned to take the lead in this critical challenge. Doing so, in fact, will help ensure their long-term viability as educational
institutions.
On September 25th, 2015, the 193-Member United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. “The new agenda is a promise by leaders
to all people everywhere. It is an agenda for people, to end poverty in all its forms – an agenda
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for the planet, our common home,” declared Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The 2030 Agenda
expands on the Millennium Development Goals of 2000, and includes everything from ending poverty and hunger to reducing inequality, building sustainable cities and communities,
protecting life on land and in water, and fighting climate change. Sustainable development is
the biggest vision we have for a lasting, thriving, peaceful world.
Every year the World Bank publishes a detailed World Development Report, a rigorous analysis of the social, economic and environmental state of the planet. Each report focuses on a
particular theme and makes a series of policy recommendations. This year’s report (released
in December 2014) is entitled: World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. 2 It
states that “development policies based on new insights into how people actually think and
make decisions will help governments and civil society more readily tackle such challenges as
increasing productivity, breaking the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next, and
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acting on climate change.”

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