Holistic education liberates potential
The human development challenges of the 21st century are complex and difficult to address because multiple phenomena must be taken into account in preparing for the future. Climate change effects, population growth, urbanisation, ecosystem degradation and resource scarcities all combine in different ways.
If the next generation is not being adequately prepared to deal with the real complexities they will face, they are being set up for failure. It is becoming clear that the way people are being educated to deal with these challenges is inadequate.
Traditional western educational systems typically operate within disciplinary silos and struggle to integrate between different disciplinary frameworks and methodologies.
They struggle with the complex, integrated nature of real-world challenges, and the implementation of policies and plans suffers as a result.
It is necessary to provide development practitioners with the tools that allow them to work across disciplines and to integrate across a broader range of criteria than previously.
But it is very difficult to find a university or tertiary institution that regards sustainability as a discipline. Rather, sustainability is taught as an add-on and is typically encountered in postgraduate degrees.
This is a poor approach, primarily because by the time students encounter the need for integration, they have already developed disciplinary “conditioning” that limits their ability to work across disciplines effectively.
The problem of dealing with real-world complexity is then passed on to decision makers, who are left overwhelmed and unable to plan effectively for sustainability.
John Holmberg, former vicepresident of Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, occupies Sweden’s first Unesco chair in education for sustainable development at Chalmers. At the university, the educational journey is reversed. Instead of starting by specialising in a single area or discipline, students begin learning through a systemsbased approach. They focus on whole systems instead of a particular part of the system. This allows them to tackle sustainability problems and challenges from a holistic perspective from the outset.
After a few years, students start specialising in a particular area in which they want to develop deeper expertise, such as permaculture, recycling or renewable energies.
When they leave Chalmers, the graduates often have a plan for the kind of business or nonprofit entity they would like to establish. They become job creators and not job seekers.
This way of educating inserts change agents into society. It is a significant departure from the traditional approach of training as a specialist with the aim of securing a job after graduating.
This simple but revolutionary approach to education has potentially great benefits for Africa.
Development practitioners should be educated in a way that empowers them to seed sustainable development in society through their own initiatives.
Their activities will have beneficial multiplier effects in terms of boosting sustainability, economic growth and employment.
Solutions developed in Africa are likely to have to stand up to greater adversity than elsewhere. There could be a time when the tag-line “tried and tested in Africa” becomes the hallmark for robust solutions on the global stage.
This needs to start by equipping the next few generations of development practitioners to be able to generate new, innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.