Sustainability Education-A Challenge for South-East Asia and Europe
Abstract
Problem statement: South-East Asia and Europe face rapid changes in social, economical and political terms. Though starting points are different, both regions experience similar problems. We see a strong slowdown of economic growth; changing proportions of the population through migration, natural disasters, economic reasons and aging populations. Problems and conflicts occur in the first decade of the new millennium, as a lot of changes in the educational sector have been undertaken. This study deals with sustainability education in both regions. Approach: In particular, we compare issues of higher education in Malaysia and Germany. We explore current tendencies and changes from various perspectives and how they fit into a concept of sustainability education. (Or is it education to sustainability, respectively sustainable education?) Results: It is shown, that sustainability in the educational field is possible only, if related to a socio-cultural context that considers the disposition of the individual; instead of using assumptions gathered and subsequently transferred from a society distinct in its predominant descriptors, respectively from determinators of some abstract industrial process demands. Conclusion: Sustainable education is recognized as a not a priori transferable entity in the global context. It must rather be contextualized and suitably embedded into individual and divers societal environs.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2011.90.99
Copyright: © 2011 Renate Kärchner-Ober and Uwe Dippel. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Keywords
- Sustainability education
- curriculum development
- higher education
- global market
- Malaysian Qualifications Framework (MQF)
- sustainable learning
- economic growth