| Summary: | The need to ameliorate the effects of unsustainable human actions and to implement an effective plan for the future of society has led UNESCO to focus on education as a crucial vehicle for this endeavour. The consensus amongst sustain ability 'thinkers' and practitioners is that education needs to be re-oriented toward a holistic, interdisciplinary, systems approach in order to precipitate the profound change in mindset required. Such change involves an understanding and action competence around the interdependence of all four pillars of sustainability: environmental, political, economic and social/cultural. This has tremendous implications for the educational system. There is a gap between the kind of thinking and action that is required to move towards a more sustainable future and the way schools currently operate. To develop future learners who have the knowledge, skills and capacity to address the root causes of unsustainability requires a wholesale transformation of the foci of curriculum and teacher pedagogy. This paper discusses the implications education for sustainability will have on what, and how, our teachers teach and students learn.
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