Regrettable Silences and Future Directions in Development Education
Development Education Silences
Abstract: This article suggests that regrettable silences in development education (DE) on key issues of social justice and sustainability largely result from four unresolved issues. First, there is ongoing conflation of different meanings of ‘development’, but the most common meaning of development conflicts with development toward critical consciousness, greater justice, and sustainability. Second, the dominant form of human development usually involves exploitation of other people, species, and ecosystems, and this may elicit uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for development educators. Third, DE is not well-grounded in the Earth’s biophysical limits or in what those limits imply for the directions future development must take. Specifically, modern civilisation is a self-terminating system that must be replaced. Fourth, much of DE is linked to the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which steer us away from sustainability and do not resolve vast and toxic inequality. Given these issues, it is understandable that DE often appears to be stuck tinkering around the margins of an unhealthy, unfair, and unsustainable civilisation. By merging time-tested Indigenous worldviews with science regarding the Earth’s limits and the basic needs of life, future directions for development education are proposed to help humanity create a healthy, just, and sustainable civilisation.
Key words: Development Education; Global Metacrisis; Ecological Overshoot; Social Justice; Educational Policy; Education for Sustainability.
Introduction
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” (Luther King Jr., 1968).
We live at the most consequential time in human history, a time in which the health of ecosystems and societies is unravelling at a terrifying rate, and leading scientists repeatedly warn that we must transform society or face catastrophic ecological and societal breakdown (Fletcher et al., 2024; IPCC, 2022). However, elected officials have proposed no plans that even come close to stabilising the climate or healing ecosystems and societies. Exasperated and scared by this situation, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon warned that our model for civilisation is a ‘global suicide pact’. Within that context, this issue of Policy and Practice was prompted by regrettable silences from development educators about urgent ecological and societal crises. This article proposes four possible reasons for those silences and suggests new directions for humanity and development education.
Issue one: conflicting meanings of development
Two sharply contrasting meanings of development pulled humanity and development education in contradictory directions. First, the ‘development-as-industrialisation’ connotation of development meant for countries to become more like wealthy industrialised capitalist nations. That entailed replacing the life-oriented and interdependent worldviews of Indigenous people with mechanistic and atomistic ideas from western civilisation, shifting from rural agrarian societies to industrialised, capitalist, and urban ones, disconnecting from nature, creating more man-made structures and objects, adopting factory-style farming, perpetual growth of populations and economies, and greater integration of national economies with the global economy. Second, the ‘development-as-moral-enlightenment-and-action’ connotation meant development in terms of critical consciousness, greater social justice, plus ecological awareness and sustainability.
Many development educators may assume that development as industrialisation will improve conditions for people in ‘developing’ countries because they have seen the remarkable improvements in living standards achieved by wealthy nations. However, some development educators may be unaware of the terrible injustices and staggering ecological destruction that made those developments possible. For example, Daly, Regan, and Regan (2015) outlined multiple definitions of DE, including some sharply critical of the developed world and others that emphasise more economic development, but saw no conflicts among them. They concluded, ‘what is obvious from [other] descriptions and those above is that there is very little disagreement’ (Daly, Regan, and Regan, 2015: n.p.). I respectfully disagree: across the various definitions of development education from 1975 onward are two totally incompatible visions for human civilisation.
Where does this leave development educators? For many, it produces confusion. On the one hand, they live in societies that loudly assert that development-as-industrialisation is the royal road to progress and poverty reduction. On the other hand, many can see or sense that such industrial development is pushing the world toward ecological and societal breakdown. Indeed, it is a tragic irony that industrial development and the spread of the western worldview steadily wiped out the cultures who practiced the sustainability and greater equality that development educators aim to promote. Because they work in a field that straddles flatly contradictory visions of development, development educators may understandably get tongue-tied when faced with issues like the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, fossil fuels were instrumental in creating modern civilisation, and they dramatically increased standards of living in wealthy nations, but burning them badly hurt other people, species, and ecosystems, and is putting the future of life on Earth at risk. So, what stand should a development educator take on fossil fuels? Clearly, curing problematic silences first requires sorting out what types of development we are for, against, and why. And until we do that, we also have no idea what type of global citizens DE should be developing.
Issue two: The dominant form of ‘development’ has always been exploitative
The dominant form of development over the last 300 years has been the expansion of industrialised capitalism. However, despite the benefits it provided to many people, industrialised capitalism has always and everywhere grown itself larger by exploiting people, exploiting nature, and looting from the future.
To get capitalism rolling, self-sufficient peasants were pushed off the land and into dependence on wage labour in cities by ‘land enclosure’ laws that were essentially rich people using their political clout to steal land from peasants then force them to work in dirty and dangerous factories or other wage labour jobs to survive (Hickel, 2018). Also, throughout its history, capitalism grew itself larger by using slave labour or very low-cost labour, often working under dreadful conditions. Of course, capitalism also arose during centuries of brutal colonialist exploitation, often occurring at gunpoint, as rich nations used their military power to dominate over one hundred poorer countries and milk their natural resources and labour to enrich themselves (Blum, 2008; Hobson, 2018; Hudson, 2021). Next, although the global South provides most of the raw materials and labour to run the global economy, the vast majority of profits go to global North nations (Ibid.). Even today, the rules of the global economy are written by wealthy nations of the global North, allowing them to use trade gimmicks to essentially loot the global South of $2.0 trillion a year or more (Ibid., 2018: 213). Even within wealthy nations, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and neoliberal politicians are rapidly squeezing as much money out of average families as they can by cutting jobs, reducing worker benefits, privatising government functions, plus buying up the things we need (housing, medicine) and jacking up prices on them (Baradaran, 2024).
Throughout the history of industrialised capitalism, more economic growth was also only made possible by plundering the Earth of its natural resources, killing off staggering numbers of sentient living beings, steadily poisoning the planet, degrading ecosystems, and now rapidly warming the Earth and disrupting its climate (Klein, 2015). Unfortunately, the degree of ecological destruction we caused is so extensive that the health and resilience of the ecosystems that all life depends on is rapidly deteriorating (Brondizio et al., 2019; Kolbert, 2014) and we are heading toward catastrophic ecological breakdown.
Overall, modern civilisation works like a giant looting mechanism that exploits people and the Earth while depleting the prospects for all future generations of our Earth family, and it mostly benefits the richest 20 percent of people living right now (WWF, 2010). Thus, regrettable silences in DE become more understandable once we realise that to speak out clearly about today’s crises, we must move beyond critiquing individual racists or greedy CEOs and instead suggest replacing an economic and political system that most of us benefitted from enormously. However, discovering that our own privilege was created through injustices and ecological harms that we strongly oppose leaves many people flummoxed and tongue-tied. Thus, to be able to speak out forcefully about the status quo without feeling like hypocrites, development educators in wealthy countries must simultaneously work to dismantle the systems and economic inequalities on which our own resource-intensive lifestyles depend.
Issue three: development education is divorced from the Earth’s biophysical limits
To speak wisely and assertively about justice, one must know what distribution of the Earth’s resources is fair but knowing that requires understanding sustainable levels of consumption and wastes. However, public policy, education, and development education are almost totally divorced from Earth’s biophysical limits. For example, how frequently do we read in DE or education more broadly of the Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity, ecological overshoot, or nine planetary boundaries? Critically, lacking knowledge of the Earth’s biophysical limits leaves DE in the dark about what is possible or fair for more than eight billion people and millions of species sharing one small planet.
The most dangerous silence in development education is almost total silence about humanity’s vast ecological overshoot – a topic that should be a cornerstone of all education in the future. All living things are kept alive by the ecosystems that sustain them. However, humanity’s collective ecological footprint is currently overshooting the Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity by more than 70 per cent per year (Global Footprint Network, 2024). Critically, the larger and more ‘developed’ our economies and societies grow, the faster we destroy the web of life that all our lives depend on. Fixing this ecological overshoot will require more than replacing neoliberalism or ending greenwashing; it will require a total metamorphosis of our civilisation and lives. Critically for DE, ending ecological overshoot requires abandoning the dominant form of ‘development’ in the world today.
Issue four: fatal flaws in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Despite containing inspiring goals and targets, the SDG framework (United Nations, 2015) isn’t grounded in the Earth’s biophysical limits or the social realities needed to achieve justice and sustainability. Let’s examine two fatal flaws of the SDGs.
Especially when used by those in power, ‘development’ usually means more industrialisation and economic growth, which requires more energy and more material throughput than would zero economic growth or de-growth. Thus, as typically used, economic development increases ecological overshoot, leaving us further from sustainability. Therefore, for a civilisation already overshooting the Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity by 70 per cent, ‘sustainable development’ is an unscientific oxymoron. This ticking time bomb at the heart of the UN framework has been noted by others (Kagawa and Selby, 2015), but much of DE is still linked to the SDGs. Even worse, the ecological damage caused by worsening ecological overshoot fall most heavily on the poor and disadvantaged (Robinson, 2019), so further development as economic expansion or industrialisation is not just ecologically destructive, it is arguably the main force increasing injustice globally.
Furthermore, although the SDGs aim to remediate extreme poverty, they ignore the fact that economic inequality is the central driver of a wide range of individual and social dysfunctions, plus political corruption (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). More broadly, because capitalism consistently creates toxic levels of inequality (Piketty, 2014) and increases ecological destruction, replacing industrialised capitalism would be a main feature of any policy that is serious about sustainability and social justice.
Because the SDGs don’t address the root causes of either injustice or ecological crises, development educators who organise their work around the SDGs can unwittingly get trapped in perpetuating a global system that is inherently unjust and unsustainable while trying to create laudable but modest benefits for people or the planet. To speak out forcefully and effectively about the crises and injustices we face, development educators must transcend the vision for a growing industrialised civilisation that the United Nations and its SDGs promote.
Development education is still trapped in the wrong world
Within this unhealthy, unfair, and unsustainable civilisation, DE engages in the heroic work of addressing injustice and exploitation while critiquing neoliberalism, fascism, and empire (Giroux, 2022). To a lesser extent, but still praiseworthy, DE has addressed the climate crisis (Mallon, 2015), educating for sustainability (Kirby, 2012; Liston and Devitt, 2020), plus calling out ‘greenwashing’ by corporations, nations, and NGOs (King, Regan and Roche, 2023). However, reflecting Audre Lorde’s (1984: 110) wisdom that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, development educators have been struggling to promote justice and sustainability from within a dominance- and exploitation-oriented civilisation that can never deliver either. Critically, because DE still embodies so much of the worldview of the society it critiques (i.e., anthropocentrism, the myth of sustainable growth), development educators generally stop short of calling for the fundamental transformation of modern civilisation that is needed for humans to have any decent future at all. We might call this a meta-silence about the global metacrisis, and it is illustrated well by the fact that none of twelve principles in IDEA’s 2023 Code of Conduct (Irish Development Education Association, 2024) focus squarely on sustainability. Although modern civilisation is doomed to end, the key question now is whether that will involve catastrophic, chaotic collapse or a planned and more orderly metamorphosis into new forms of human societies. That’s where development educators can really help.
Implications for development education
For development educators to ‘tackle the root causes of injustice and inequality, globally and locally to create a more just and sustainable future for everyone’ (Irish Development Education Association, 2024), DE must be re-oriented around a new vision for human civilisation, one grounded in the Earth’s limits and the laws of nature. Until DE embodies a scientifically plausible vision for humanity’s future, even its passionate and incisive critiques of the current world order (Giroux, 2022; McCloskey, 2022) can easily be dismissed as impractical because, in the infamous words of Margaret Thatcher, ‘there is no alternative’ to industrialised capitalist civilisation (Berlinski, 2011). Rather, it is only by demonstrating why a highly industrialised and capitalist civilisation cannot work – and what the alternative is – that we can convince people to make the changes needed to escape the injustices and ecocide of business-as-usual. I suggest below some needed changes in DE’s mission, curricula, and teaching methods, and describe some thorny challenges development educators will face.
Transforming education’s mission
Education in wealthy nations largely focuses on developing marketable jobs skills to expand the same industrialised capitalist economy that is pushing the world toward collapse. To heal societies and ecosystems and thus secure a decent future, education at every grade must shift toward teaching students about the nature and causes of this global metacrisis, and the profound changes needed to achieve the softest landing possible. Along the way, education must develop LifeGuards – graduates with the wisdom, love, values, skills, passion, courage, and persistence needed to heal societies and ecosystems (Wheatley, 2024).
Healthy whole child development, especially the consistent satisfaction of students’ basic physical and psychological needs
Promoting healthy whole child development is critical both because we value it highly and because unhealthy people cannot create a healthy society or protect the wellbeing of the global web of life. More specifically, research reveals that basic needs satisfaction has two profound benefits for healing societies and ecosystems. First, decades of research reveals that consistent satisfaction of basic needs is linked to better physical and mental health, deeper learning, better job performance, and more satisfying relationships (Ryan and Deci, 2017). Second, research reveals that children whose basic psychological needs were not consistently met in childhood tend to grow up to be adults who prioritise compensatory extrinsic life goals such as wealth, possessions, competitive status, and beauty (Kasser, 2002). In sharp contrast, children whose basic needs were consistently met in childhood are more likely to grow up to prioritise intrinsic life goals such as relationships, learning, caring for others or the environment (Ibid.). Thus, consistent basic needs satisfaction or thwarting in childhood primes people to either become the kind of adults who oppose or support the policies and practices needed to care well for other people and the planet (Ibid.).
The scope, scale, and causes of the global metacrisis
Students must learn that our economies, societies, and very lives are totally dependent on a stable climate, healthy ecosystems, and biodiversity, but humans are rapidly destroying the web of life in multiple ways simultaneously. Far beyond the climate crisis, humanity’s ecological overshoot is the root cause of all the ecological crises we face. Ecological overshoot means we are depleting natural resources faster than they can be regenerated, degrading ecosystems faster than they can regenerate, killing off living things faster than they can repopulate, polluting the planet faster than it can de-toxify itself, and emitting greenhouse gases much faster than they break down. The numbers are staggering: In addition to our 70 per cent ecological overshoot, humans are warming the planet more than 20 times faster than it usually warms when coming out of an ice age and increasing global carbon dioxide levels 9-10 times faster than before the worst mass extinction in the Earth’s history.
Our vast ecological overshoot has also pushed the world beyond the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ for six of the Earth’s nine major planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023): land system change, biosphere integrity, climate change, freshwater change, novel entities (e.g., pesticides), and biogeochemical flows (i.e., excess nitrogen and phosphorus). Because all life on Earth is dependent on ecosystems that support it, if we remain in such vast ecological overshoot, worsening deterioration of ecosystems and the societies and species they support is inevitable. There are thousands of ways in which ecological overshoot causes the web of life to unravel. For starters, rapid man-made global warming causes more intense and destructive heat waves, droughts, precipitation events, and forest fires (Büntgen, et al., 2021). These then cause more crop failures and livestock deaths which can trigger more civil unrest and cause refugee numbers to swell. Chemical and plastic pollution increase disease and infertility among humans and wildlife alike (Morrison et al., 2022). Global warming can aggravate over 270 human pathogenic diseases (Mora et al., 2022) and is causing roughly half of the Earth’s species to migrate to cooler environments (Pecl et al., 2017). Those migrations then disrupt the mix of species within ecosystems and the complex interdependencies that make ecosystems function well. Put bluntly, the longer we stay in overshoot, the more people will die prematurely, and the more species will become extinct.
The changes needed in our habits and systems to heal ecosystems and societies
As Raworth (2017) explained – and everyone must learn – to heal societies and ecosystems, we must meet everyone’s basic needs equitably while bringing humanity’s collective ecological footprint down to well within the Earth’s maximum sustainable carrying capacity. Achieving those goals requires almost unimaginable changes. We must teach students that to end ecological overshoot and thus prevent worsening breakdown of ecosystems, our food supply, and societies, we must dramatically shrink the global economy. Why? The size of the global economy is tightly connected to how much energy and materials we use, and those are in turn tightly tied to the amount of ecological destruction we cause (Rees, 2023). Thus, a larger Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increases overshoot but ending ecological overshoot requires shrinking GDP by roughly 55 per cent. Activities in which students compare personal and national ecological footprints to what is sustainable are not just eye-opening for students, they seem to be essential in helping students transcend single crisis thinking to realise the enormous scope of the needed transformation of society.
Students must learn that because the vast majority of ecological destruction was caused by the richest 20 per cent of people on Earth, right sizing the economy to end overshoot will require individuals in wealthy nations to shrink their consumption and wastes by a staggering 60-99 per cent. For example, the richest 10 per cent of people produce 50 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions while the poorest 50 per cent of people are just responsible for 8 per cent of global emissions (Oxfam, 2023). Similarly, the wealthiest 20 per cent of people are responsible for roughly 80 per cent of the world’s annual consumption of resources (and resulting wastes) while the poorest 20 per cent are only responsible for 1.3 per cent (WWF, 2010). Because the vast majority of humanity’s ecological footprint comes from just 1.6 billion people in highly industrialised nations, the only humane way to get out of ecological overshoot and thus prevent worsening ecological and societal breakdown is to shrink and de-industrialise wealthy economies (Dietz and O’Neill, 2013) while their citizens adopt much simpler lifestyles (Merkel, 2003).
To stop driving the web of life toward collapse via pollution, we also must sharply reduce use of man-made chemicals and plastics and shift toward making things using natural, biodegradable, or infinitely recyclable materials such as wood, glass, and aluminium. Humans have produced over 200,000 industrial, agricultural, and medical chemicals, almost none of which are ever tested for long-term safety. Among these are chemicals that promote obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, neurological diseases, and reproductive problems and genetic abnormalities (Bergman, et al., 2013). We also blanketed the planet with plastics and microplastics, including those linked to asthma, lung cancer, birth defects, and infertility (Swan, 2021). Disturbingly, many chemicals and microplastics now fall in the rain and snow and they are found in our food, drink, and even the bodies of newborn babies (Environmental Working Group, 2005). Thus, to avoid killing ourselves and the rest of our Earth family, we must phase out thousands of toxic chemicals and plastics and return to using natural materials and chemicals.
We also must teach students about the urgent need for smaller, less industrialised, more localised, circular, and agrarian economies oriented around caring for the whole web of life (Dietz and O’Neill, 2013; Norberg-Hodge, 2019); simpler and lower-tech lifestyles with more manual labour; diets dominated by whole plant foods (Poore and Nemecek, 2018); organic agroecology; mass transportation but far less travel; walkable cities; phasing out or replacing thousands of products, chemicals, and industrial processes that are simply too eco-destructive; dramatically-lower inequality; legal systems that prioritise the wellbeing of the web of life over private property (Boyd, 2017); a much smaller global population; and a return to more growing your own food plus mutual aid networks.
A more caring, holistic, and life-oriented worldview
To become LifeGuards, graduates need to develop a worldview that is profoundly different from that promoted by western civilisation (Wheatley, 2024). For example, the story of separation, anthropocentrism, radical individualism, competitive hedonism, narrow short-term thinking, and cold indifference to the plight of other people and species must be replaced with recognition of our deep interdependence, kinship, ‘me-and-we’ thinking, cooperation and self-restraint, long-term systems thinking, and empathy and love for other people and species. Critics may call such changes unrealistic. However, unless we want catastrophic collapse, there is no alternative to this ‘Life Mindset’ because this is the only worldview compatible with creating a healthy, just, and sustainable civilisation. Furthermore, just such a worldview has long guided many individuals and cultures, including Indigenous groups who lived in the same place sustainably for millennia (Mitchell, 2019; also see Alldred, 2016 and Haugen, 2022 for similar views of development among Africans).
Teaching methods
To heal ecosystems and societies, we need teaching methods that simultaneously meet children’s basic psychological needs while promoting healthy whole-child development, wisdom regarding the global metacrisis, and the values, skills, and character needed to help manage it. The research is clear that the teaching methods that are superior for meeting children’s basic psychological needs while promoting healthy whole-child development include play, project-based learning, free voluntary reading, place-based education, democratic education, and other transdisciplinary teaching methods (e.g. Wheatley, 2015). Also, our teaching should focus on studying concrete societal and ecological problems/crises and the healthiest responses humans can make to them.
Challenges in transforming DE to focus on healing the web of life
There are thorny intellectual, emotional, logistical, and political/financial obstacles to transforming DE to focus on the global metacrisis. Regarding intellectual obstacles, it can take years for teachers or their students to construct an adequate understanding of the global metacrisis. Also, it is difficult to grasp the urgency of the metacrisis when I can look out the window of my suburban home and things don’t look that different than they did last year or even thirty years ago. The human mind struggles to take seriously such a slowly unfolding emergency, so students need lots of experiences with analysing the trajectories of slowly worsening problems. Furthermore, students need to learn to debunk myths that downplay how bad things are or that wildly exaggerate the efficacy of available solutions. Another huge step in people’s developing understanding is getting beyond the point of thinking in terms of siloed solutions to isolated crises (e.g. renewable energy for the climate crisis) and realising that all the crises are just symptoms of one larger predicament, and the nature of that predicament means that only lower-tech societies and much simpler lives are sustainable. Practicing systems thinking from the earliest grades onward is needed to help students develop this big picture understanding of the world’s complex systems.
The biggest emotional obstacles are students and teachers not wanting to think about such tough issues (Bracken and Bryan, 2010) and especially not wanting to face the fact that modern civilisation is in its terminal phase (Afzaal, 2023). Even many leading climate experts and activists have failed to face the fact that even if we solved the climate crisis tomorrow, we would still be heading toward collapse because we are destroying the web of life in multiple ways simultaneously. Surveys show that large majorities of young people are incredibly worried about the future (Hickman et al., 2021), so this creates an opening to explore these challenging issues. However, many teachers often don’t want to teach this content because it is so sad and painful. Indeed, I have often felt that way. However, in my experience as a teacher educator, when teachers realise the severity and urgency of the global metacrisis and realise that we must face the bad news now to give students a brighter tomorrow, that makes them more willing to teach this content.
The logistical obstacles to teaching about the global metacrisis and the needed metamorphosis of civilisation include the need to train teachers in this content and teachers finding time to teach about this. Because our minds were colonised by the logic of factory-style schooling (Wheatley, 2015), many teachers don’t grasp that you can teach all the basic academics a 10-year-old needs while studying rainforests, inequality, or healthier farming methods. Nevertheless, to make space for what matters most, educators must review their bloated lists of educational objectives and discard most objectives that are not directly relevant to preventing catastrophic collapse or healing the web of life. This is what matters most.
The political and financial obstacles are enormous. Our elected leaders haven’t come close to admitting the true nature of the global metacrisis so there’s no political support for teaching students about the coming end of this civilisation or the changes we must make. As a result, there’s little funding for such education. This will change gradually, but development educators must realise that teaching students the real truth about what humanity faces must often be an unsanctioned activity for now. However, haven’t bending the rules, civil disobedience, and unsanctioned truth-telling always been critical for the success of significant social movements?
There is urgent and noble work for development educators to do: deconstructing the paradigm underlying modern civilisation, developing the critical consciousness DE has long been known for, and promoting the development of a different form of civilisation – a healthy, just, and sustainable one. Once they realise that this is the only path down which humanity can have a decent future, I am very hopeful that development educators will speak out loudly about caring well for all members of our wonderful Earth Family.
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Karl F. Wheatley lectures in the School of Education and Counseling, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States.