EPFO EO/AO 2023 • General Ability Test • Q.16

The world's life-supporting resources are being depleted at a faster rate than ever before! We have to change our practices and those of the world as a whole towards a more sustainable future. To give us an idea about the dimensions of change, the General Assembly of the United Nations has announced its 'Agenda 2030'. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals describe the framework of our common global efforts. Within each goal, education holds a key position. Of course education and learning do not function in isolation. In a traditional sense they help to understand the world one lives in and prepare all for a job market with both intrinsic and instrumental values. Its purpose is transformative in nature, in the sense that it should widen one's worldview, make one question 'unsustainability', and help one build competencies to address global challenges and be accommodated into a global system. Beyond this, education for sustainable development means integrating the 'future' as a specific dimension of our learning activities and teaching. How to build a sustainable future must play a central role in educational processes. Globalization, which is sometimes merely seen as global capitalism, has an inevitability about it. Whether we like it or not, we live in a highly interconnected and interdependent world. It is now well recognized that 21st century challenges are global in nature and require cooperation beyond national boundaries. In a sustainable development sense we have to see ourselves as 'citizens' of the world and respond accordingly to the global challenges in the present century. In fact, global challenges have expanded the very notion of citizenship itself. There is an increasing recognition of the importance of global citizenship.