Functionality and Normativity as educational theoretical Perspectives on Education for Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is a central challenge of the 21st century. However, its social dimension in particular raises the question of whether and how it can be implemented consistently. Pedagogy has two options for dealing with the necessary transformation to a sustainable society: On the one hand, it can act on a functional level under the key question of how education can convey sustainability content and how successful it is. On the other hand, on a normative level, the central question can be addressed as to the conditions under which education and its sciences should be part of a sustainable society. In this article, the relationship between education and sustainability is analysed as a dialectic of the functional and the normative in order to outline the consequences of a current concentration on the subject matter of sustainable action. In a positive resolution, principles such as maturity or social justice as an educational-philosophical basis for sustainability can serve standardized education.