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The UN Sustainability Goals recognise the important efforts of organisations to meet global commitments to the terms of the Paris Agreement. This paper argues that the UN Sustainability Goals are deeply embedded in neoliberal goals for sustainable development. The result is that the goals require commitment to contradictory ends: achieving climate goals, while also working to continue economic growth. Education is the focus of SDG4, which features an emphasis on STEM subjects, and the same nod to sustainable development that underpins many of the other 17 goals. Philosophy of education remains one of the most powerful tools available to rethink societal and educational futures.

Teleological progress is the underlying motif of modern culture, and informs education, innovation, and economic development. Progress includes a gradual increase in consumerism. Since the 1940s, the Keynesian Settlement and its embedded belief in progress is legislated in exponential 2-3% economic growth. Unfortunately, climate change is a direct result of the increasing amounts of CO2e byproduct that gets expelled in the production of plastic consumer items, and this production increases exponentially year on year. We are now hearing serious concerns from scientists about the sixth great extinction, the Anthropocene epoch, and the end of modernity in ecological collapse. In this article I argue that climate change is an outcome of our dedication to progress and consumerism and I try and unravel the mechanics of exponential economic growth in contrast to an alternative model of economics and debt, first developed in Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago. The contrast may not be operationalisable in modern times, but it does offer a significant counter-argument to the concept of progress and shows that Steady State economics has been successfully implemented by a continuous civilization for thousands of years. The depth of the philosophical shift is illuminated in the understanding of Mesopotamian theology, astronomy, astrology, and understanding of cyclic, rather than linear, time. This type of critical account highlights the need for education to fundamentally challenge some key norms in modernity, from "progress" to the sense of entitlement that consumerism and economic growth provide. Education is a key site for cultural transition, and as the constraints of climate change are making ever more clear, the moment to mobilise the educational sector is here.

Education is increasingly vocational and structured to serve the ongoing exponential increase in economic growth. Climate change is an outcome of these same economic values and praxes. Attempts to shift these values and our approach to technology are continually absorbed and overcome by the pressing motif of economic growth. In this article, Ruth Irwin uses Martin Heidegger's concept of the technological enframing of modernity to view economic growth. John Maynard Keynes's notion of economic growth (which he called the "multiplier effect") has impacted the pace of consumerism that now permeates every aspect of knowing about the world we live in. Irwin asks us to think through technological enframing anew by looking to an early mechanical Greek artifact, the Antikythera mechanism, which depicts a cyclical notion of time used by ancient cultures to define the rhythm of economic productivity. The earth-centric cosmos embodied by this mechanism helped the Mesopotamian economy stay within the parameters of the local ecology and demonstrates that cyclical economic growth may enable a civilization to maintain a steady state over time and survive for millennia. An earth-centric cosmology creates a different set of values, one that emphasizes the need to regulate the pace of consumerism rather than allowing it free rein "as by an Invisible Hand." The role of education in this exploration is twofold: first, it is a pivotal site for cultural exploration and transformation; and second, the expectations of the state strictly limit the forms education can take, so that as long as promoting economic growth defines state expectations, education will remain subservient to these values. If we aim to overcome climate change, Irwin concludes, we need to transform the expectations for education from society as well as from teachers.