Systemic Basis in Education for Sustainable Development

Abstract

The paradigm of sustainable development (SD) is broader than discrete methods of resource conservation and environmental protection. The core of the SD concept is in maintaining a balance within changing socio-natural systems, which is determined by people’s behavior. Education for sustainable development (ESD) is not limited to explaining the foundations of SD, but must train the population to take into account the latent effects, i. e. long-term consequences of anthropogenic impacts. So far, the main attention in education is focused on the external causes of destabilization. We cannot limit ourselves to this, because internal causes of the transformation of systems (both natural and social), similar to succession, violate stability no less than external ones. By studying the environmental and social involuntary processes that determine the transformation of the corresponding systems, one can teach the population to live successfully in constantly changing conditions, counteracting unwanted changes, while maintaining the stability of society and ecosystems. The article details the tasks of ESD, a significant part of which is not sufficiently taken into account in the educational programs of secondary and higher schools. The systemic basis is a new concept that designates in the field of education the basis of the system analysis algorithm – the key to understanding the core of the system in dynamics, in other words, those main processes on which all the others depend, jointly forming the system as such: its structure and the area of possible changes. Methodically, the work is based on the principles and approaches of the General systems theory and personal teaching experience, which made it possible to identify four main goals of ESD, three of which have not been previously presented in the scientific literature.