Social change and education for sustainable living

This article focuses on the ways in which environmental education can be used to promote education for sustainable living. In doing so it deliberately draws upon an eclectic framework for analysis and suggests a focus on the primacy of action. Recent research concerning environmental education points to a gap between the knowledge which young people have about the environment and the degree to which they expect to be able to contribute to protecting the future of the environment. This paper proposes that one way to begin to overcome this problem is to conceive of a form of environmental education which is holistic, community oriented and aimed at supporting a sustainable future. The nature of community focused, holistic education for sustainable living is explored. This is followed by a proposed theory of social change based on an understanding of individuals' actions as pragmatically rational in order to identify how education for sustainable living might begin to promote behavioural change. The purpose of this is to elaborate a view of social reality and political change which includes a theory of social action. The implications for educational action are explored. In order to do this we have deliberately employed a modernist device of constructing a narrative based on posing paradoxes. The article accepts that there are significant barriers to this proposed development and concludes by suggesting the direction in which environmental education might develop through a fusion of socially critical models and deep ecology in order to propose a theoretical manifesto for education for sustainable living.