Education Purposes for a Sustainable Future

This essay explains that periodic examination of the goals of education is essential for educational institutions to ensure they are adequately preparing students to address the challenges of the present and build a better future. It argues that education is an ethical enterprise, and that clear and shared goals provide education institutions with direction and coherence. Rapid societal changes challenge educational institutions to revisit whether their goals are supporting teaching students so they can develop the necessary knowledge, skills and dispositions to address them. The article discusses three accelerating existential challenges--challenges to human rights, democratic decline, and climate change--and argues that they require schools, universities, and systems to educate students to understand and be able and committed to address them. These three challenges also influence educational institutions, and the development of institutional strategies can help create synergies among functions and processes in schools and universities to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that can help understand and mitigate climate change and declines in human rights and democracy.