Personalized education for sustainable development

Abstract

Progress in eradicating poverty, hunger and pollution by promoting better health, well-being and quality education has begun to weaken due to the pandemic, military conflicts and climate change. There is an urgent need to act decisively and efficiently in order to reduce the frightening dimension of the crisis and return sustainable development indicators to an upward trend. After examining sustainable development goals and indicators and their progress, this paper introduces four focal activity clusters. They can be fulfilled through effective learning, starting with local educational campaigns, well-designed educational initiatives, and even modifying curricula aimed at sustainable development. Several approaches can contribute to achieving the goals, primarily transformative and personalized learning. After comparing them in the light of sustainable development, preference is given to personalized learning. It faces many challenges related to the data collection and processing of, factionalism of, and impossibility of accessing differently abled people. These challenges are further amplified by remote teaching and learning. Recommendations on how to overcome them and how to organize educational interactions on a micro, mezzo and macro level are presented in the conclusion of the paper.