Can 'adjectives' define education?

In simple words, ‘Adjectival Education’ means adding adjectives like ‘Climate Change’, ’Gender’, ‘Environment’ with education to contextualize it. In our junior classes, we had subjects like Environmental Sciences, some chapters regarding pollution and global warming at the end of science books, and those little boxes stating facts like - ‘The yellowing of the Taj Mahal is due to acid rain’. Adding these “Did You Know?” boxes and a few chapters at the end never amounts to a lot of learning. The only reason we probably studied the pollution chapter at the end of the chemistry books was to score higher grades in the subject and I mostly neglected the little ‘Did You Know’ boxes because I didn’t expect questions from those in your tests or exams. 

Sometimes our Economics teacher used words like ‘poverty’ and ‘hunger’ to teach these concepts, but it usually has little to do with ‘hunger’ or ‘poverty’ and more to do with the concept itself. This is because the primary goal of the example was not to make us well-versed with the adjectives used in the subject. In the end, the use of poverty and hunger is just a method of helping us understand a concept instead of helping us understand poverty and hunger itself. 

Moreover, even if some teachers do help us understand problems regarding Sustainable Development, they can only provide their subject perspective on it. An economics teacher would only help us look at sustainability from an economic lens; a psychology teacher can help us look at it from a psychological lens. Studying sustainability differently with different subjects prevents us from looking at sustainability as a whole. 

Adjectival education helps us look at problems but it does not give us the incentive to devote ourselves to understanding them and implementing measures to solve these problems at a personal level. Hence we can safely conclude that even though adjectival education can be used to make students aware, it does little to drive and motivate them to take action against these problems.

Education for Sustainable Development is the answer that the world needs to explore right now. It equips individuals with the right set of knowledge, skills, and values that can enable them to contribute to achieving the SDGs by 2030.

Brainwiz is using Education for Sustainable Development as a tool to enhance 21st-century skills and socio-emotional learning competencies of students to make them better suited for work-life challenges of the future.