Education

The Sustainable Development Goal on quality education aims to ensure that everyone learns the knowledge and skills necessary for promoting sustainable development and lifestyles, and global citizenship (UN 2015). This chapter begins with an introduction to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), Global Citizenship Education (GCED), and Education for Sustainability (EfS). The chapter then discusses how sustainability is framed locally within national educational policies in two different contexts. First, it examines the buen vivir (good living) principle in the context of Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Latin American plurinational, pluricultural, and multiethnic state of Ecuador. Second, it discusses how global issues and sustainability are included in the national curriculum in the Northern European welfare state of Finland. Based on these two examples, the article claims that both in Ecuador and in Finland, education is seen as a vehicle for social transformation toward more sustainable futures while the understanding of sustainability is shaped rather differently in these two contexts. Moreover, both cases exemplify the need for more critical perspectives toward global inequalities and power relations within education to foster alternative development paths.