La educación moral ante el reto de la sostenibilidad

Abstract

Current indicators of environmental and social unsustainability point out the need of effective educational approaches that revert those trends. From this viewpoint, we propose a focus on moral education, which does not just aim to transmitting academic contents but to helping each student individually explore and acquire them, to originate personal commitments that concern personal behavior. To explain and illustrate this, we describe the example of a specific course. After introducing some sustainability indicators, we describe the planning, methodology and objective of the course. Afterwards, we analyze two obstacles for moral education: fragmented knowledge of the world, and the difficulty of helping the students link knowledge and personal, moral behavior. Finally, we explore two opportunities for helping students build such connection: using sustainability indicators to look for deep causes of current unsustainable behaviors, and using beauty to look for personal answers to such problems.