JMVRI Issue Number 4
JMVRI Issue Number Four has three articles that separately cover topics from Yog, education, and management. The leading paper, referring to the Bhagavad-Gītā, discusses Maharishi’s teaching on Yoga—distinguishing Yoga as a practice and Yoga as the experience of higher states of consciousness. The following paper considers the concept of ‘support of nature’ as a management tool. Finally, the last article looks at the contribution of consciousness-based education in addressing the wicked problems of sustainability.
JMVRI Paper 4.3
Addressing the ‘Wicked Problems’ of Sustainability through Consciousness-Based Education
Authors: Christopher Jones and Gabriel Akura
Citation: Jones, C., & Akura, G. (2017). Addressing the ‘wicked problems’ of sustainability through consciousness-based education. Journal of Maharishi Vedic Research Institute, 4, 75-122.
Summary
In order to imagine and then create a sustainable future, education will have to be significantly rethought and redesigned. Starting from the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we tackle the competencies, and then the curricula and methods, that education will have to adopt in order to successfully pursue this agenda. After identifying outstanding issues in competencies, curricula and methods, we introduce a new agenda for education structured around developing the consciousness of the knower, or learner, as a basis for improved teaching and learning.
This new agenda, which addresses several of the issues of Education for Sustainability, is called Consciousness-Based Education, first introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the early 1970s. At the end of this paper, we present a model that integrates the development of consciousness into higher education for sustainability.