What if more education isn’t the answer?
Silova, Rappleye and Komatsu are rethinking leadership beyond SDG business-as-usual - and how wonderful it is...
15-minute read
Writing a whole book about this can feel lonely at times, as if you are arguing against the grain while the policy machine keeps repeating ‘more’. As if the general consensus is like an impenetrable castle, which everyone admires, but knows is completely out of date, a memory, an adornment - but central to how we understand our modern world and our future. So… finally, this is why it is a relief and a joy to see work like this beginning to gather pace. Silova and colleagues add momentum to an argument that now feels obvious: quantity without purpose is not progress, and education needs a different horizon.
We are five years from the 2030 horizon and the scoreboard is sobering. The world is not on track for the Sustainable Development Goals; on many fronts we are sliding backwards. Yet the dominant refrain in global policy remains strangely unchanged: more education. More access, more credentials, more STEM, more skills. The trouble, as Iveta Silova, Jeremy Rappleye, and Hikaru Komatsu argue with bracing clarity, is that “more education” has become a reflex that shields a deeper problem: a growth-centric, technocratic paradigm that treats environmental limits as a footnote while celebrating performance and quantity as ends in themselves. Their call is not to do the same thing harder, but to ask whether our very way of responding has become part of the crisis.
This essay takes Silova and colleagues’ provocation and connects it to a leadership agenda. Their piece diagnoses the “more” reflex shaping global education discourse; my book focuses on how leaders can exit that reflex in practice: moving from control and performance towards stewardship, collaboration, and ecological responsibility. In short: Silova et al. show why “more” is the wrong horizon; leadership must organise the “otherwise.”
The ‘more’ reflex
Silova, Rappleye, and Komatsu scrutinise how UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank continue to script education as the lever for poverty, health, misinformation, and even biodiversity loss: always by producing more of it. In their reading, the global agenda idolises economic growth and liberal individualism, relegating environmental concerns to the margins. Progress stalls, planetary boundaries are crossed, yet the policy story doubles down: educate our way out, at scale, at speed, by 2030. The authors’ counter is stark: the saviour narrative is itself a cultural artefact that must be unlearned.
This unlearning matters because quantity displaces quality. When we fetishise enrolment, credentials, and test gains, we strip education of the slower, relational work that forms judgement, care, and civic courage. In that narrow ledger, children are units, teachers are inputs, and leadership is throughput. It is not accidental that the environment keeps losing in this calculus. The spreadsheet has no column for a liveable future.
How we got here: the leadership problem behind the policy problem
In my work I trace how leadership knowledge was shaped by Enlightenment and later neoliberal assumptions that privilege efficiency, competition, and control. This lineage saturates today’s improvement scripts, binding leaders to a cycle of performativity that is ill-suited to planetary crisis. We recruit leaders to raise numbers while the numbers themselves naturalise the wrong ends.
The result is familiar in schools and universities: teachers under escalating workloads, students calibrated to external metrics, and communities estranged from the slow labour of public life. We train for speed and scale, then wonder why depth and solidarity wither. Leadership, framed as tactical delivery, gets trapped managing symptoms rather than re-organising aims.
This is not just a policy misstep; it is an epistemic one. Who defines valuable knowledge? How do measures come to rule? I argue that leadership must recover its intellectual vocation and become able to read the genealogies of the measures that now govern us, and to refuse the false inevitability of “what counts.” Leaders are custodians of ends, not merely executors of means.
Why ‘doing more’ can make things worse
Silova and colleagues surface a hard truth: doing more of the same education can intensify the very dynamics driving ecological breakdown. When “learning” is harnessed to growth and technocratic optimisation, education becomes a cultural engine for extraction. Their proposal (to pair learning with unlearning), is not rhetorical flourish; it is a concrete invitation to loosen the mental infrastructures of economism and human exceptionalism.
In parallel, my work (and Anna Kliampa’s chapter in the book) draws on degrowth and political ecology to show why better technology and faster skills pipelines do not rescue us if the underlying telos remains expansion. Jevons’ paradox is alive in schooling: efficiencies expand throughput, rebound effects multiply consumption, and performance cultures displace ethical purpose. Without a shift in ends (towards sufficiency, care, and shared limits), “innovation” quietly entrenches the problem.
From management to stewardship: the leadership turn
If the reflex is “more,” leadership’s task is to cultivate different:
Ends before metrics. Make your aims explicit and ecological: thriving people in thriving places within planetary limits. Then audit every metric against those ends. If a measure undermines the end (for example, a data regime that accelerates pace and anxiety, eroding deliberation), change the measure, not the mission.
Slow down to go deep. Protect unhurried time in timetables for inquiry, outdoor learning, craft, and community dialogue. Slowness is not nostalgic; it is the condition for perception, care, and ethical discernment. This is the lifeworld education needs to re-enter.
Relational authority. Replace compliance-through-targets with authority-through-relationships. Rebuild staffrooms as thinking communities; engage parents and young people as co-authors of purpose, not consumers of services.
Re-politicise the public. Create structured civic learning: pupils meeting local decision makers; student assemblies on land use and energy; staff reading groups on democracy and climate. We do not get ecological transition without democratic muscles.
Material choices speak. Procurement, catering, travel, and energy tell the truth about your values. Local, plant-forward, repair over replace—these are leadership decisions, not bolt-ons.
Name the harms of datafication. Push back on surveillance-style analytics that treat children as risk profiles and teachers as productivity units. Not all efficiencies are good; some erase the very qualities we claim to cultivate.
What “unlearning” looks like in a school
Silova et al. call for unlearning as a companion to learning. In leadership terms, that means de-programming certain habits:
Unlearning “growth = success.” Celebrate smaller cohorts in vocational or arts pathways if they produce richer civic and ecological outcomes. Stop apologising for choosing depth.
Unlearning “pace = progress.” Stage longer projects (gardens, restoration of local habitats, intergenerational oral histories) that cultivate patience and responsibility. Protect them from the test calendar.
Unlearning “STEM will save us.” Science matters, but without ethics, history, and deliberation it becomes a runaway train. Re-centre the arts and humanities as lenses for meaning, mourning, and imagination.
Unlearning “leader as fixer.” Lead as host, convener, and steward. Your job is to hold a space where competing goods are negotiated in public, not to perfect a dashboard.
A micro–meso–macro map for leaders
Micro (classroom):
Replace weekly grades for participation with narrative feedback cycles that prize curiosity, listening, and care.
Institute regular “field attention” walks: pupils learn to notice species, water lines, soil, and soundscapes; assessment is a journal, not a number.
Meso (school/college):
Establish a Purpose and Measures Forum where staff, students, and families review what you measure and why; retire two metrics each term that do not serve your stated ends.
Redirect a portion of tech spend to place-based projects with local groups; publish the reallocation and its rationale.
Macro (system):
Join or build a network of institutions experimenting with degrowth-aligned governance (e.g., shared resource libraries, commoning of facilities, regional curriculum on land and labour).
Lobby openly for inspection and accountability reform: fewer audits, more peer review; fewer league tables, more public learning exhibitions.
Common objections (and why they do not hold)
“But the labour market demands skills.”
It does. It also demands a liveable planet, social trust, and the capacity for collective action. Educating for those goods is a skills agenda: just not the narrow one.
“We cannot ignore targets; funding depends on them.”
True. Start by declaring your ends in public and aligning internal recognition to those ends. Change what you celebrate; change what you protect time for. You will find room to move.
“Technology can solve much of this.”
Technologies can help, but efficiencies tend to rebound into more consumption unless the goalpost moves. Without a different horizon, we sprint faster in the wrong direction.
Five moves to start next term
Publish a one-page purpose statement that places ecological limits and human dignity at the centre. Invite critique; revise annually.
Create a weekly two-hour ‘slow block’—no bells, no tests—dedicated to place-based inquiry and making.
De-scale one thing. Smaller tutor groups; fewer assessments; shorter data cycles. Explain the trade-off and what you hope to gain.
Set up a dashboard fast. Not the one you think. Three dials only: care, community, climate. Decide together how you’ll read them.
Reallocate 10% of discretionary spend from shiny tools to relationships and the local commons. Publish where it went.
The wager
Silova, Rappleye, and Komatsu ask whether more education, as presently conceived, deepens our bind. My wager is that leadership - reclaimed as stewardship of ends and relationships - can help us unlearn the reflex and re-learn how to live well within limits. The point is not to be anti-education; it is to re-imagine education as a public practice of attention, repair, and care. Fewer numbers. More qualities. Less speed. More life.
In my own work I have tried to show how leaders can turn this recognition into practice: ends before metrics, stewardship over delivery, slowness and care as conditions for judgement and public life. What Silova, Rappleye and Komatsu contribute is a clear diagnosis of the reflex that keeps us trapped, and a language of learning and unlearning that helps us step out of it. Taken together, their analysis and my leadership focus point to the same task: to remake education as a relational, place-aware practice within planetary limits. That is not less education; it is education reoriented towards life.
(Me, despairing at COP 28 in Dubai
)
References:
Silova, I., Rappleye, J., & Komatsu, H. (2025). What If More Education Is Not the Answer? Beyond the Business-as-Usual Approach to SDGs. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development.
Gardner-McTaggart, A. (2025). Sustainable Educational Leadership and the Climate Crisis; Knowledge Power and Positive Futures. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003355649
This is a really good read. Like the practical suggestions (solutions).