In Sweden, there is a saying that“ the future begins in the classroom”. This is, in fact, true. Schools are responsible for giving the future citizen, life-long education so that they can become selfsufficient, manage to improve the quality of their lives and be able to make the right decision thereby helping in the development of the society. This is why it ´ s important and extremely essential that schools make the Education of Sustainable Development, a part of their teaching curriculum.
Unfortunately, Education for Sustainable Development( ESD) is still just a notion in many European schools. In Europe, people still treat education of sustainable development superficially, especially children and youngsters. Therefore school, which are the main supplier of education, in cooperation with the respective community must issue adequate, attractive, accessible and efficient strategies so that they may acquire and manifest an environmentally conscious behaviour.
According to the Swedish Council of Education, education should provide opportunities to develop pupils ' ability to evaluate solutions to environmental and developmental issues on the basis of ethics and sustainable development. Education should illuminate on how the functions of the society and our life style can be adapted to attain sustainable development. 7
The Education curriculums in the other countries too, have some specific ideas how environmental issues and sustainable development should be incorporated into the education.
In spite of that, not all educators are equally enthusiastic or willing to commit to sustainability education. Those educators wishing to incorporate sustainability concepts into their classrooms often face resistance from other teachers or administrators in their educational setting. The obstacle, often mentioned by educators, is lack of time – time to learn something new, or the time to introduce an idea external to the curriculum. This is summed up in the following quote from a department head in a medium-sized public school:“ We’ d love to integrate sustainability into our classrooms, but there is little to no room in the curriculum for add-ons. 8
Most teachers will agree that, we educators are often forced to keep to the mandated syllabus due to the fact that we have to maintain the deadlines for National Exams, etc. This leaves us with very little time to even consider adding new ideas into our planning. But we will all have to also agree that irrespective of which country we belong to or which level of students we have or what National exams we have to prepare our students for, the National Education Curriculum of all our eight
7 Curriculum for the upper secondary school, Skolverket, Stockholm 2013, ISBN: 978-91-7559-022-6. Any reference to this publication will be within brackets and as( GY11).
8 Wendy Church and Laura Skelton, Sustainability Education in K-12 Classrooms https:// www. facingthefuture. org / Portals / 0 / Documents / Articles / Informational % 20Papers / Sustainability % 20Educatio n % 20in % 20K-12 % 20Classrooms. pdf( assessed January 4 th 2016) Any reference to this publication will be as Church and Skelton.
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