Pedagogical heritage in education for sustainable development: psychological aspects

Abstract

Due to the high profile of education as a priority social institution, education for sustainable development (ESD) has been a successful ongoing international project. Throughout its history, ESD has seen continuous improvement embracing new content, mainly, various educational innovations. At the same time, the ESD ideology has shown that innovations in education are more effective when they are based on local and national traditions that manifest themselves as a pedagogical heritage (PH). However, PH has not still received a formal recognition either as intangible cultural heritage or a condition for building modern systems of quality education. As a result, it is poorly studied and in low demand. The most valuable ideas of the great educationalists and thinkers of the past — from Komensky and Pestalozzi to Makarenko and Sukhomlinsky — often fall into oblivion, while they could work for “the future we want.” All the more so as the formation of ESD ideology is still on. In this light, ESD can benefit from the relevant ideas from the legacy of the outstanding Russian educator K. Ushinsky. To him, education was underpinned by national identity, which has not yet been properly reflected in the corresponding discourse. The de facto cognitive dissonance that has developed between the objective interest of society in the development of quality education and low representation of PH in this process is largely explained by various kinds of psychological barriers between the old-time developers of PH and today’s administrators of educational policy. This issue requires much more attention to the psychological aspects of PH implementation in modern ESD systems, both from the educational community and from professional psychologists. The reported research examines such aspects as personality development, cognitive processes, and an individual’s emotional sphere. However, they far from exhaust all the psychology-related challenges to the implementation of PH as an indispensable support for ESD. To conclude, the article aims to draw the attention of the pedagogical community to the need for a more active use of the potential of psychology in practices of quality education.