EDUCATIONAL SUSTAINMENTS
Sustainability is the ability to learn. Sustainments are environments that can both teach and learn. They teach users about the relations that allow them to exist. Users can then use what they learn from those environments to ensure their sustainability. In the process, these environments might need to be modified. Sustainments are therefore designed for modifiability; in other words, all sustainments manifest an ability to learn.
One of the most important features of sustainments is that they embody judgements. A sustainment is an environment with the ability to sustain a predetermined set of conditions. A sustainment is only possible through a clear decision about what needs to be sustained. Unfortunately, the liberal pluralism that structures modern education often does not have the courage to make these sorts of judgements. Modern educational institutions need waste management policies to purge themselves of all unsustainable curricula. For example, in order to stop having the production of consumers as education's main outcome, all subjects that aim to promote students as autonomous, all-knowing, creative individuals need to be replaced by subjects that demonstrate instead everyone's situated interdependence.
EDF aims to be a model for a new type of educational and research institution that conducts high level theoretical thinking in applied settings requiring urgent action. The conservation of the ability to think through relational complexity is more important (though leads to) the conservation of biodiversity.
