The Future of Education

Sustainable Development (SD) is one of the most important challenges of our time¹. The research question examined in this study is related with the skills that a public servant/officer should possess in order to cope with an administration that has as goal and is oriented towards SD. Although in the relevant literature one finds many categories of people/groups whose attitudes, beliefs and knowledge towards SD have been investigated, the relevant issue has rarely been examined among public servants, despite the fact that the employees of the public sector are often called to participate in the implementation of government policies related to SD. The results that will be presented were extracted from the context analysis of forty-four (44) interviews with active public servants in Greece of different educational levels and categories. The question posed was related to their personal views on the competencies/skills required in order to successfully handle professional issues related to SD. For the categorization of the competencies, the theoretical framework presented by Redman & Wiek² was employed. According to this categorization, there exists a set of eight key competencies in sustainability namely a) Systems-Thinking, b)Futures-Thinking, c) Values–Thinking, d) Strategies-Thinking, e) Implementation, f) Inter-personal, g) Intra-personal and h) Integration competences. Data analysis showed that two key competencies, namely Values-Thinking (24 participants) and Inter-personal (13 participants), are the most prevalent among the interviewees. The intra-personal and implementation competencies are also recognized quite frequently (8 participants each). The Futures, Strategies and Systems Thinking competencies are brought out more rarely (6, 5 and 4 participants respectively) while the Integration competence is mentioned by solely one participant. A small number, however non insignificant number of interviewees (5), did not seem to be in a position to mention any competence. These results may provide the basis for follow up actions and planning of educational interventions for the empowerement of Greek public servants in the field of sustainable development.