Life-long and life-wide education for our sustainable future

Children born in some countries today will live through the twenty-second century given the high average life expectancies exceeding 80 years in these places. Naturally, we wonder what twenty-second century skills and competencies our children will need to contribute to and create their sustainable future actively. While we cannot predict accurately what those skills and competencies will be, we can examine what children learn today. Indeed, this is aligned to the aspirations of sustaining sustainability through quality education for future generations. However, learning for our current and future generations is not limited to formal education but cuts across the individual’s entire lifespan and contexts. The notion of life-long learning has been discussed even before the report by Banks et al. (2007) titled “Learning in and out of school in diverse environments Life-long, Life-wide, Life Deep” was published. The concept of life-long learning refers to “learning that occurs across one’s lifespan, from infancy to adulthood. It is about what is retained, why such knowledge, skills and dispositions are usefully kept” (Kwek, Hung, Koh, & Tan, 2017 p. 8) and “most of the “learning that occurs across the life span takes places in informal environments” (Banks et al., 2007 p. 9). Life-wide learning refers to learning that does not just occur “within the boundaries of the school, but outside of school, in informal learning environments” (Kwek et al., 2017 p. 8). In considering what needs to be learnt in the context of life-long and life-wide learning for sustainability education, we need to examine a combination of knowledge, skills, behaviours and beliefs. Indeed, Chang, Kidman, and Wi (2020) argued that sustainability education can be framed around the Delors report’s ideas of ‘learning to know’, ‘learning to do’, ‘learning to be’ and ‘learning to live together’ (Chang et al., 2020). As we examine learning across the learner’s lifespan and within formal and informal contexts, we should also be examining the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours that are the intended or unintended outcomes of the learning. We feature a range of articles that cuts across these dimensions in this issue. Admittedly, these articles do not represent the potential range of contexts that we have outlined above. Still, it serves as a start point from which we can describe what other types of research we can encourage for submission to the journal to frame the discussion around the issue of life-long and life-wide education for our sustainable future. While we can argue for more research on the learning of sustainability knowledge, skills and attitudes in the pre-primary years, we do not have an article in this issue to illustrate what has already been done and what more can be done. Nevertheless, we can look to the issues in primary education as a start, bearing in mind that we can also develop the knowledge and understanding about sustainability in the early childhood years. The article on “The Challenge of Measuring Children’s Attitudes