Education for the sustainable global citizen: what can we learn from Stoic philosophy and Freirean environmental pedagogies?

In support of sustainable development, the United Nations launched its Global Education First Initiative with the aims of accelerating progress towards universal access to education and good quality learning whilst fostering global citizenship. This paper explores how and to what extent Stoic virtue ethics and critical Freirean ecopedagogies can advance the UN’s vision for progressive educational systems with transformative societal effects. We propose an integrated solution that provides ecopedagogical concepts a more robust philosophical foundation whilst also offering Stoicism additional tools to tackle those 21st century problems, such as climate change and environmental degradation, that ancient Stoics could not have envisioned nor scientifically understood. The result of the paper is the preliminary theoretical underpinnings of an educational framework that facilitates progress towards both individual and collective wellbeing whilst also encompassing planetary level concerns so as to holistically promote and plan for a fuller expression of the terms “sustainable development” and “global citizen”.