Kindergarten Through Twelfth Grade Education: Fragmentary Progress in Equipping Students to Think and Act in a Challenging World

• Author: Carmela Federico and Jaimie Cloud
• Pages: 109-127

Chapter 8

Kindergarten Through Twelfth Grade

Education: Fragmentary Progress in

Equipping Students to Think and Act in a

Challenging World

Carmela Federico and Jaimie Cloud

This chapter summarizes the development of education for sustain-

ability (EFS) over the last five years at the K-12 level—changes in

what children learn in classrooms from kindergarten through high

school graduation that affects their ability to contribute to a healthy

and abundant world. EFS includes the time-honored goals of environ-

mental education, such as knowledge of Earth’s systems and cycles

and imbuing students with an ethic of environmental stewardship, and

adds a few new goals:

•Comprehending the dynamic connections among econo-

mies, the values and practices of societies, and the ecosys-

tems that sustain human life;

•Thinking systemically, critically, and across disciplines

about issues, problems, and solutions;

•Valuingand seeking to nurture the well-being and special-

ness of home places;

•Gaining the skills and inclination to work in community

with others, on scales from the personal to the global, to

achieve a more sustainable world;

•Being able to learn continuously and to challenge assump-

tions and mental models in order to keep moving toward

sustainability in a complex and ever-changing world.

Why reform our K-12 educational system to attain these goals?

There is strong evidence that not only specific habitats but indeed our

entire planet is in serious environmental crisis,1and that “business as

usual”—continuing, around the globe, to grow our energy use, con-

sumption, and waste—is the cause, rather than a few easily correct-

able flaws in the practices of human societies. Comprehensively re-

forming our educational system can redefine business as usual as it

109

shapes the knowledge, attitudes, and values of every student in the

United States—every future voter and worker in a country whose de-

cisions disproportionately affect the state of the world. K-12 educa-

tion offers a crucial opportunity to equip people to evolve new, life-

sustaining modes of meeting human needs.

There has been remarkable success over the last five years in K-12

education for sustainability, although some threats and some serious

challenges remain. More mainstream institutions and school systems

(the Scarsdale, New York, system, for example) are embracing sus-

tainability paradigms with positive effects on K-12 education. More

educational efforts self-consciously and directly seek to imbue stu-

dents with sustainability-enhancing knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

A few new funding streams exist, and others promise to grow. Re-

search results increasingly support the benefits of pedagogies and

practices that support K-12 EFS, and both new and established educa-

tional materials that are attractive to teachers and useful in American

educational settings help to advance many facets of K-12 EFS.

A current snapshot of K-12 education for sustainability, however,

also has its shadows. Shorter-term trends in education pose some seri-

ous obstacles to advancing sustainability knowledge and practice, and

the recent heightened focus on testing in traditional subjects makes it

difficult for sustainability’s interdisciplinary approach to gain a foot-

hold. Needed changes in the K-12 teaching of many subjects, particu-

larly economics, are slow to come. Religious traditions increasingly

are elaborating and promulgating their particular understandings of

humankind’s relationship to nature, which has made some faith tradi-

tions active allies for EFS but others strenuous opponents. Progress

toward K-12 EFS will remain fragmentary and incomplete until all

positive trends fully flower and all these obstacles are overcome.

The National Zeitgeist

Americans increasingly acknowledge environmental problems and

seek solutions to them, which has provided essential support for prog-

ress in EFS. While there has always been substantial room for maver-

ick innovators in American education, the mainstream, in the United

States and elsewhere, is generally conservative and normative: edu-

cation serves to prepare students for success in a given society, as

imagined and conceived by established experts in existing fields and

as developed into training programs by educators. Progress in imbu-

110 AGENDA FOR A SUSTAINABLE AMERICA