It’s such a thing with sustainability. Actually, everyone agrees that more ecological and social sustainability is needed in order to find appropriate answers to challenges such as climate change, scarcity of resources, globalization, population growth or automation. On the other hand, as soon as you are concerned, you find it difficult to live more consistently sustainably when the latest technology feature is being advertised like ipad vs kindle.
In addition to this private side, the question of sustainability in the education system is a little different. This is about the question of how sustainable learning processes work. At this point, you may be concerned with the ecological and social sustainability goals that the education system is committed to and how these are compatible with the digital education that is required everywhere.
Many politicians, IT industry representatives, teachers, school principals and media educators agree across the board that schools need to be better equipped technically. They say that fast Wi-Fi is needed, the most up-to-date devices possible, ideally as 1: 1 class sets and projectors in the classrooms. Otherwise, the students may not be able to acquire the skills that they would need in a digitized world. IPads, tablets and notebooks are bought in rows and classrooms are equipped with projectors and whiteboards. The price is an important if not the most important selection criterion, which is why all well-known device manufacturers offer inexpensive products designed for schools.
In this digital hype, questions about the ecological and social sustainability of the purchased devices are far too seldom asked. Of course, they should last a long time and be robust, so that they still function reasonably well even after two years of children’s hands – most will certainly agree on that. But what about the repairability of the devices? How big are the emissions during production, how toxic are the components and how sustainably are the necessary resources extracted? What about recycling? What are the working conditions like in the globally distributed production facilities?
These are all very uncomfortable moral questions, after all, it would be much easier to fade them out and just enjoy them if a school even manages to go a bit with digitization. The schools and also the individual teachers who use the devices in the classroom need answers to these far-reaching questions if only for moral reasons.
