Towards a Sustainable Future: An Analysis of the Role of Education in the Contemporary Era

The current educational system has exposed a crisis in education as it has mainly adopted two approaches to deal with education. Firstly, education has been considered as a means to approach a specific end and second, education has been viewed as means to respond to a given situation in the future. This makes the role of education as narrow, and shapeable. This paper tries to highlight that the goal of education can be conceived of as more than qualification in order to be sustainable in the future. The principles of openness, self- determination and freedom shape the values that are integral for a transformative vision of sustainability which forges to look beyond the notions of certainty in pursuing academic careers. It requires us to think of the future as open and encourages students, researchers to opt for alternative futures to pursue. The paper delves into the integration of non- traditional aspects of sustainability in the educational discourse- such as ethics, aesthetics and culture and also points out the significance of the non-material values such as mutual help, solidarity and compassion in institutional learning systems. Sustainable development has been considered as a process in which citizens need to take active part to promote critical thinking and self-reflection. The paper has generated data from in depth content analysis. The findings of the paper suggested that to transform education for a sustainable future, the current educational system requires to develop a collaborative approach to mitigate the theory-action gap via working groups and faculty learning communities, with open discussions about how to redesign courses and foster a multicultural vision in teaching and learning.