Education and sustainability

Abstract

The first article of this issue of the Revista Boletín Redipe highlights the tension, which is increasingly shaking existence, between the world of consumption and the world of life; the erosion of the latter by consumerism. The culture of consumption that today gravitates, as never before, in the relations between human beings and of these with nature, is promoted by forces that seek to maximize profits, productivities and profitability that do not translate into well-being for all people, in equal rights and opportunities, in care of the planet, but on the contrary in inexorable minimization of access for all to the most elementary goods that are required to live with dignity. It translates into an imminent threat to the future of humanity and life, into a real possibility of self-extinction. The order of consumption imposes the belief that the world of the market constitutes the engine of the world of life. As we have put it at other times: the world of the market is not the world of life.

This is an insurmountable challenge for education, which imposes on it to redirect its course, its commitment to generate scenarios so that human being, instead of settling on top of the planet, of the world of life, develops a reflective and acting consciousness towards life, towards the fabric of nature and life, of the common world. To put it with Mínguez (2022), “it is necessary to reorient the meaning of education towards a sustainable way of life”, within the framework of an ethics and a practice others, from an ethics and educational activity based on business, to an ethics and education for life. An education that makes the activity of teaching, learning and forming a possibility of thinking feeling, to put it with Rodríguez (2022), in the context of mathematics, “the feeling as a mathematical way of expressing oneself in the light of the emotionality of the student”, or with Lopera (2022), “the need to have cheerful and empathetic teachers, surpassing the adult-centric gaze that has prevailed in pedagogical and social relations”. The most endearing sense of education requires an ethic of good living and taste of life, with a sense of the common world, instead of the ethics of business, of living well with a fragmentary sense that today dominates in schooling and in everyday life.