In my vision, sustainability is a process that leads to a desired style of life. As I proceed, I approach a sustainable situation, probably without ever reaching it. So the question for students is: Can our world survive with fractions of sustainable life styles and for how long? In which broader subject area should I teach this concept: biology, philosophy, geography, engineering, economy?
In Hungary the sustainability is a short topic in the Geography subject at both elementary and high scool levels. In hungarian universities all Faculty of Sciences and most of Faculty of Engineerings organise special courses about sustainability (and enviromental risks), but it is not typical in other faculties.
According to my experiences students and puppils like practical approach ("what actually can i do now?", "what will happen within my locality?"). But the theoretical part is forgettable and boring for them. I think Geography provides excellent opportunity for the complex approach (soil, atmosphere, settlement & social geography, economic geography, waters and their influence on each other). Visual shocks can be useful too in order to raising their interests (eg. images about disasters/starvation/contaminated lands).
I think not as a subject but concept should be given at school level and better to give the concept of sustainability with practical examples so they could learn this from their early life and could practice throughout their life.
I think the concept of sustainability should be incorporated into all learning processes. It is definitely a concept which enables an individual persevere, to ensure that an activity yields results that can withstand the test of time
Sustainability should be fully incorporated into every aspect of learning from kindergarten all the way to post graduate work. This mess we are in right now on the planet is entirely due to the fact that we separated what we can build from how it should be built, how much of it we need and how we can recycle it. Almost every manufacturing process was divorced from sustainability since the industrial revolution. Only in the past decade are we really coming to grip with what this unrestricted growth of production in the service of economic expansion has done to the planet we live on. We can not even hope to reverse this unless we raise a generation of scientists, engineers and economists or any other proffession that never separate sustainibility from any and all aspects of their thinking. The teaching of sustainibility should become a priority in our education systems. We are well past the "consideration" stage. Time is short.
Thank you very much for your thoughts and suggestions. Paul, Philippa, Attab, Gábor, Yosef and Stefan. I specifically liked the idea of practical exposure as compared to theory.
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