Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a rather new field of education. We can see it as an innovative kind of future education for schools linking the child’s development with the future challenges of society.

I don’t think that education for sustainable development is just another buzzword forgotten in a few years. From a global perspective as well as a local perspective we have to direct education toward what will be truly useful for each child and for each society in the future.

To have a fulfilling life should be within reach for all children whereever they are born. In too many parts of society and of the world children grow up in hazardous environments with very poor conditions for basic requirements and bleak prospects for their future.

Education for Sustainable Development is derived from the Brundtland report’s focus on Sustainable Development (SD). The Brundtland report requires fundamental changes in the society and its institutions, in politics and in our individual family life styles. Economic development cannot be separated from social development and a concern for the environment.

ESD for child development Educational research can tell us a lot of how to make use of education for sustainable development for child development.

The most important fact might be that ESD is an excellent frame for the empowerment of children. When we respect each individual child for its ideas and opinion, and at the same time bring the child into challenging learning situations we facilitate empowerment of the child.

Developing self esteem and empowerment goes hand in hand in education for sustainable development. A proper self esteem is such an important part of successful child development.

Another important fact is that ESD is a productive frame for meaningful learning. Opposite to rote learning and the acquisition of facts without much understanding meaningful learning situations help the child to engage fully in the teaching. By working with real problems the child can develop much better understanding of concepts and skills from the schools core curriculum in a meaningful context. The key to that is the opportunity to use and reflect on these ‘traditional’ ingredients of classic schooling in the meaningful contexts derived from the focus on sustainable development.

Education for sustainable development and schools Some schools have focused on the beautification of their school environment. This might help the school’s prestige in the local society but it isn’t helpful for education for sustainable development unless it happens as the students’ project.

Similarly some schools have put a lot of emphasis in making the school buildings more ‘green’ with solar power panels, recycling systems, water conservation measures and tree planting around the school. Again, such initiatives are only valuable for the learning of the students if they are planned as student projects. You cannot evaluate the quality of a school’s work with education for sustainable development from a picture of the school.

Concerning a better approach to ESD, headmaster and teachers should ask questions like: – How can we challenge students’ thinking on the future and how to make use of parts of the core curriculum in a meaningful way in combination? – How can we teachers cooperate to create stimulating activities and plan the teaching in such a way that the self-esteem of the students will benefit from it? – How can we help students to investigate local people’s concern for the future and how to make sense of such results? – How can we help students to try to make a difference according to their wishes and visions?

Education for sustainable development will gain increasing publicity as the picture of environmental degradation, energy shortage, climate change, increasing poverty mixed with increasing wealth and the overall picture of globalization becomes more evident.

We cannot blame our children for these issues but it is our duty to educate them to be able to cope with such complex and controversial issues and to live a decent life with a belief that it is possible for everybody to make a difference to the better.

Most parents consider investing for their children’s education to be as important as planning for their retirement years. What about you?

These days, the costs charged by most universities and colleges for tuition fees are forever rising to unheard of new highs. Add to that fees for study materials, and worse, the rent paid in order to keep your child in a suitable residential place for students, and you get an increasing number of high school graduates who start working for a living even before they’re properly prepared — educationally, that is.

But what would you say if I told you that most caring parents regard this as a nightmare because they’re finding it very hard to cope with the high fees required to put their youngsters in a good university or college? What’s more discouraging is the fact that most parents earn much less in household combined income than what the majority of these higher learning institutions are asking them to pay even for registration purposes only.

So where do you go from there?

Do you just shrug your helpless shoulders and start giving up on your child’s dreams of becoming the next president of your country, doctor, nurse, or ballerina, and put every blame on the education system and those who are currently representing you in parliament for failing you?

Or is there another solution around this nightmare?

Fortunately for you, there is a solution that can absolutely help you as caring parent to help you make your child’s dreams come true…

And the solution is the college education plan for children from as young as one day old!

The college education plan – available at most financial services providers in your area – is an investment or savings plan that can be personalized to cover for your child’s future education needs when she’s ready to start her higher learning. Investing in a college education fund is also within reach or most parents because you can start investing from a very low monthly contribution that is guaranteed to make sure your child will enter a higher learning institution of her choice when she’s ready.

Perhaps you’re worried that you won’t be able to keep up with the monthly contributions because the money might somehow get into your greedy little hands. Relax! Contributions to your investment are paid via your employer’s automatic stop order system or debit order from your bank account. All that’s left for you is to just sit back, relax, and watch your college investment grow side by side with your child.

And not only will your investment be protected against the threat of inflation reducing your money’s spending power, the money will be paid back to you tax-free! But the cherry on top is that your child’s dreams of becoming the next president of your country, doctor, nurse, or ballerina, can definitely come true — no matter what happens to you!

2010 Andrew Molobetsi. All rights reserved

It was once thought that only the wealthy could save enough to afford a good college education for their children. That just is not true. There are plenty of ways for the middle-class and lower-income households to save for their children’s futures, as well.

Consider the Coverdell Education Savings Account, which allows you to save up to $2000 annually for your child’s future education. You can make deposits into the account until its beneficiary reaches the age of eighteen. The contributions are not tax-deductible, but the distribution withdrawals are not taxed. This is a classic way to grow wealth and you will be able to use the money for most school-related expenses.

You may also want to consider a College Savings Plan, one of two 529 plans available for college education savings. Under this plan, you can choose from a variety of investment options and you will not pay taxes when the funds are withdrawn to use for education.

The second 529 plan is the Prepaid Tuition Plan. It basically allows you to pay today’s prices for tomorrow’s tuition. By pre-purchasing your child’s education, you lock in his or her future tuition at today’s prices.

If you invest early in Savings Bonds for Education, they can work well to help finance your children’s future education. The plus to this investment is that the money can be pulled at any time to use in case of a financial emergency.

If your child is approaching college age now and you have no savings on hand for their education, there are still tax credits available to you. Right now the American Opportunity Tax Credit is the best of these options. You can also qualify for lifetime learning credits, classroom expenses deductions, and tax deductions for higher education fees and tuition.

The IRS usually does not allow a taxpayer to claim more than one large college savings plan on their income tax return, so you will want to be careful and deliberate in choosing the right option for you.

You would probably benefit from a conversation with a financial planner to discuss the best way to save for your child’s future education, and remember that it is never too soon to start.

To the federal legislators, U.S. Presidents, and appointed Executive Branch politicians who have succeeded in poking their noses into purely State matters, the process of public education is merely defined by what federal tax dollars given, with inflexible purse strings, to the States can buy. Conversely, to the many dedicated classroom teachers employed by the States’ numerous independent and dependent school districts to educate their millions of public school children, education is concerned far less with dollars and cents and more with the quality, and state, of the young minds coming from home to the classroom. Since the average normal eight-year-old American child is coming from a home with two working parents, a combined income of less than $35,000 per year, and is residing with caregivers in rented accommodations, it would be quite reasonable to presume that such a child is an impressionable complex person sensitively comprised of, both, cognitive (thinking and reasoning) and emotional components forming a cumulative dual human product based upon the daily occurrences and interactions in her family. Statistically, the average eight-year-old American child is a normal pre-adolescent female who leaves home every weekday morning for school, either, happy or unhappy, encouraged or discouraged, positively-minded or negatively-minded, ready to learn or not ready to learn. If such a child is not prepared to learn, and is emotionally distraught at the time she enters the classroom, the classroom teacher’s most congenial demeanor and best lesson plan will do little to alter the child’s dispositional deficit for the better throughout the day. This significantly impaired cognitive/emotional human being is the basic type of child, on the average, with which the best-prepared classroom teacher, in the most state-of-the-art public school infrastructure, has to deal on a day-to-day basis; and it has been that way since the inception of public education.

In a commentary on public education in “The Examiner,” dated December 2, 2009, Erica Jacobs, a professor at George Mason University, said a mouthful when she quipped, “…Money helps to improve salaries and school infrastructure, but there’s only one educational measure that matters: Are our own children happy and challenged…?” From there, Jacobs went on to talk only about teachers and the classroom-learning environment. In about a 300-word essay, she said nothing about parents and their responsibilities to their children in the home, and used the expression “our own” children as though they belong only to the teacher at the time they are in class. Parents were only mentioned once in the essay to describe a participating mother’s, or father’s, stern look at a misbehaving student at an off-campus activity at George Mason University Center for the Arts. Doesn’t Ms. Jacobs realize that the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught on a daily basis in the classroom by the classroom teacher and not at performances of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories? Sure, such cultural activities are quite entertaining, but are hardly considered as rudimentary learning experiences. Actually, what loving, nurturing, and innovative parents choose to do with their children on the weekends, and during the weekdays, to stimulate their desires to learn, is much more effective in fomenting curiosity, promoting intuition, and helping those children to leave home each day for school with a fervent desire to learn, than the extemporaneous songs and dances performed by teachers to get their students’ attention in lieu of carefully crafted curriculum lesson plans.

Who can force a mother or father to be a good parent? Actually, this very complex, yet cogent, question hasn’t been bantered about in philosophical circles for very long at all in terms of overall human history; but for only a little less than 150 years, when the ill cultural effects of poor parenting on communities, states, and nations were first mentioned in writing by wise and astute academicians, philosophers, and essayists. Even then, parenting, to any degree, was traditionally considered in the Western World an inherent God-given right of natural and adoptive mothers and fathers, for them to do with their children as they want or feel inclined. Then books like Orwell’s “1984,” and Huxley’s “Brave New World” became popular, casting unfavorable light upon state control of what goes on within a family. Hitler’s insane ambition of creating a German master race through eugenics and strict control of the education and development of Germany’s children also threw a considerable scare into people around the world, especially in America, regarding the awful effect of a nation’s government controlling the parenting of children.

From the late 1930s until around 1970, it seemed that American parents were doing a pretty good job of parenting in the home, as assessed from the prevailing learning curves in the public schools which definitely indicated that those, mostly white students, were happily learning the rudiments of a sound liberal education of reading, writing, and mathematics. This had meant that most, that is approximately 89 %, of the students during that time, were leaving home each day for their classes energized and ready to lean. Moreover, the public school dropout rate around the nation was surprisingly minimal during those years, averaging around 10 %, when communications and technology were so slow and primitive, as compared with an increased national dropout rate, of 12-15 %, during the computer-age, 1985-to-the present day. But along came the decade of the 70s, and the real entrance of the federal government into the arena of state education by application of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Commerce Clause to civil rights, which essentially made the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, of the U.S. Constitution, moot.

While corporal punishment used sparingly in the home, that is, periodic spanking, was pretty much an accepted rule and frequent productive practice of parents from the late-1930s until around 1970, new age pundits, decrying spanking as a cruel disciplinary tool in the home and in the public schools, made quite an impression on the new generation of mothers and fathers who were the progeny of the baby-boomers (the people born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1964). Thus, a generation of permissive parents evolved culturally, concerned much more with using baby-sitters and working long hours outside the home to earn money to provide their children with high-tech lifestyles, than spending quality time with their children in the home.

As one of the many baby-boomers, I was born, in 1951, to a father born in 1906 and a mother born in 1910, the distant third of three much older brothers. My next older brother had been born in 1931, which put him twenty years older than me. My dad was a self-employed, self-taught welder and my mom owned and operated a chicken, hog, and worm farm in East Texas. Yet, my dear mother taught me how to read by the time I was four, and assisted me in my elementary school years to master the multiplication tables, long division, ratio and proportion, and biographical U.S. Presidential history by the time I was ten. How was this done? Well, my mother spent quality time with me every school-day evening and on weekends in practical learning activities. She made learning fun. And you know what? My mother had only a 6th grade education, six years spent with a very good, but strict, teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a very rural farming community in Henderson County, Texas. By the time I was born, she had used the reading, writing, and mathematical skills gained in those six formal years of education to develop the educational skill equivalence of a person with a genuine high school diploma with a high grade-point average, not a certificate of attendance for merely occupying a classroom desk during 12 years of public schooling. As a consequence of my mother’s love of learning, I also developed a love of learning and acquiring knowledge. This is why I adamantly insist that parents remain the foremost teachers, of both good and bad knowledge, in child’s life. In a nutshell, parents, good or bad, are a child’s prime role models in the home, and directly determine the habits of their children outside the home, especially in the school classroom. As an idealist, and not a pragmatist, I want to believe that most parents around the country, especially those of the Fairfax County, Virginia and DC School Systems, love their children and want to practice effective parenting; but the current statistics don’t support my continuing hope.

Perhaps Professor Erica Jacobs is neither a parent, nor a former classroom teacher; but I cannot believe that she honestly considers a teacher’s role in the classroom, or at an infrequent off-campus cultural activity, as more important than a nurturing parent’s continuing role in the home. Perhaps Professor Jacobs is a proponent of federalizing the nation’s schools, in order to standardize curriculums and include parenting as an additional role of the classroom teacher (Arkansas schools have already done it). As a former classroom teacher certified in two states, I can tell you with authority that each year many of the newly hired teachers around the nation, fresh out of university teacher education, discover, to their chagrin, that teaching their chosen discipline in the classroom is not at all what they thought it would be. And this is not the fault of these enthusiastic highly educated and trained professionals. Heavens no! Teachers, over time, sadly discover that most public school parents are sending their children to school totally unprepared, and unwilling, to learn. Thus, the forty-five minutes of a typical class period is much more an experiment in babysitting than of teaching and learning.

Such an awful problem deserves a wise suitable solution, but federal, state, and local politicians have, for a long time, been more concerned about their voters, American’s parents, electing and reelecting them, than about solving such a serious ongoing problem. Though constructively chastising the majority of the nation’s parents for not doing their jobs at home will certainly cost federal, state, and local politicians’ votes, it seems to be the only right thing to do. If I am behaving in a manner that will eventually cause my children to suffer sad experience in life from less than a proper education, I would hope that someone much wiser than me would let me know my problem and help me to change. What is currently right and wrong in our diverse society is ultimately much more important than what is politically correct and convenient.

As parents we want what is best for our children; the best health, the best neighborhoods, happiness, high self-esteem, and the best education. A good education starts with the type of schooling the child is exposed to and how high the quality is of this schooling. Also taken into account is the preference of the child’s parents. After all, different parents look for different things in their child’s education. Some want socialization or special services while others are looking for small class size and high quality educational materials. Still other parents are most concerned with creative thinking and child-directed learning. Following is a comparison between four main types of schooling; public, private, home and lastly unschooling.

Public Schools There is much criticism about the public school system – its poor quality, low teacher standards, lack of art and music education, etc. But it should be noted that without public education many children would have no exposure to education at all. Public schools were started to ensure equal educational opportunity. Unfortunately between poor financial management and disorganized educational goals, that equal education is pretty pathetic.

With all the cons of public schooling it doesn’t seem to make sense to send your (or any) child there. However, there are some good points to public education and it serves important functions in society. Since the beginning of public schooling, literacy has increased to nearly 95% in the last 150 years. Basic math skills is a proficiency that most people have in America now as well as the ability to write well enough to fill out an employment application and express an opinion to an elected official. Additionally, the work force benefits from public education, not only as a pool of future employees but also as a place to keep kids watched while parents work.

As a parent you can do a lot to increase the effectiveness of your child’s public education. Insist on conferences with teachers. Many teachers now provide students and their parents with an email address. Stay in contact with them this way. Join the PTA and attend as many meetings as possible. Attend school board and city meetings. If you have any concern, talk to your child’s guidance counselor and the principal. Public school takes work, effort and commitment but quality education can be found there.

Private Schools Private schools have long been associated with wealth, privilege and better quality education. Children of high status people go to private school. But is it really better than public school? In many ways, probably. Class size is usually smaller which provides for a lower teacher-student ratio. The educational materials are usually better quality. Students in private schools are often held to higher standards than the pupils in public schools. Of course, when parents are paying big bucks for their kids to go to a school they expect that school to perform. It is important to note that socially speaking private schools don’t seem to be that much different. Kids are just as judgmental and cliquey in private schools.

Homeschooling At one time homeschooling was associated with strictly religious parents who did not want their children corrupted by conventional education or families who lived so far away from any school that homeschooling just makes more sense. More recently, however, homeschoolers are just looking to have more input into their children’s education. Thanks to the Internet, schooling your children at home has never been easier. There are dozens of sites offering material (both for free and for sale) to help homeschool your child.

There is some concern and criticism that kids who are homeschooled don’t get the socialization that other children get from school. This may have been more of an issue in the past but modern homeschoolers make it a priority to ensure that their children take part in sports and other group activities so that socialization can take place.

While homeschooling can be the best type of schooling for some children, it takes a huge commitment from the parents in time, energy, and money. One parent has to stay home and spend a good portion of the day schooling. Although you can find some inexpensive or free homeschooling sources for education supplies, the loss of an income can be daunting for many families.

Unschooling Unschooling is similar to homeschooling in that the child stays home to learn. The difference with unschooling is that there is no set curriculum. Instead the child directs the curriculum according to their personal interests. By allowing the child to direct the path of education, the child is more interested and motivated. The theory is that a child’s natural curiosity will drive them to learn everything they need to know anyway. It is important to note that unschooling is not legal in all states.Choosing the type of schooling that your child receives is an important decision that is based on many different factors including income, personal beliefs, location, and child’s best interest. Hopefully the information in this article will help you make an informed decision.

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