Addressing the Wicked Problems of Sustainability Through Consciousness-Based Education

Abstract

In order to imagine and then create a sustainable future, education will have to be significantly rethought and redesigned. Starting from the UNO 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we tackle the competencies, and then the curricula and methods, that education will have to adopt in order to pursue this agenda. After identifying outstanding issues in competencies, curricula and methods, we introduce a new agenda for education structured around developing the consciousness of the knower, or learner, as a basis for improved teaching and learning. This new agenda, which addresses several of the issues of Education for Sustainability, is called Consciousness-Based Education, first introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the early 1970s. At the end we present a model that integrates the development of consciousness into higher education for sustainability.