How do we educate new generations to live in the post-sustainability era?

What does life look like in a post-sustainable era? And how should our education system prepare younger generations for a fundamentally new worldview? Doctoral researcher Pasi Takkinen has conducted the first literature review of the concept of post-sustainability and reflects on what this interdisciplinary theme might mean in practice — particularly in relation to our relationship with technology.

Text: Pasi Takkinen
Photo: Jonne Renvall / University of Tampere

Through education, society reveals what kind of future it truly believes in. Contemporary educational philosophy and research clearly recognise and articulate that we are standing at the threshold of worsening ecological crises. Yet many educational theorists argue that educational institutions, such as schools, are still configured to serve an unsustainable growth economy and to reproduce the worldview that underpins it. This debate may go unnoticed by those outside the field, but education is currently under intense discussions over the kind of future for which young generations should be prepared. Will the coming decades resemble the twentieth-century narrative of progress — or something entirely different?

According to philosopher Veli-Matti Värri, the entire era of ecological crises and the sustainability transition it requires should be understood primarily as an educational challenge. Our whole culture and every citizen is facing a profound learning task. Perhaps the greatest challenge is unlearning: learning to abandon mistaken assumptions, such as the idea that sustainability can be purchased with money or manufactured in factories. From the perspective of sustainability research, no single miracle solution can deliver sustainability. What lies ahead is therefore a challenge of learning a whole new worldview, one that requires humility and a reassessment of humanity’s world-relation.

I hope that the deep and courageous themes emerging in educational thought will also enter broader cultural awareness. The recent climate strike movement of students was a reminder that it is not children who should be educated, but rather the stubborn adults who refuse to acknowledge the cracks that have appeared in the old picture of reality.

What does post-sustainability mean?

Post-sustainability refers to the idea that sustainability is no longer something that lies ahead of us; instead, we must now learn to live with unsustainability. This diagnosis is gaining traction across disciplinary boundaries. For fields such as education, it represents a significant paradigm shift. Post-sustainability thinking in education may, for example, ask what constitutes a good life in an era of ecological crises and how this differs from earlier conceptions. It may also question how we should relate to digital educational technologies that are structurally intertwined with overconsumption and with globally unjust ecological and social systems. Many assumptions once taken for granted — such as ideas about the conditions of a good life or the inherent usefulness of technology — are now problematic.

In this sense, post-sustainability is fundamentally about unlearning. If sustainability once meant, for many, that recent decades of development could continue — only more “sustainably” or “greenly” — post-sustainability instead signals discontinuity. In other words, the future is not necessarily a linear continuation of the past decades, and the narrative of progress may give way to more tragic tones.

Although post-sustainability is a shared diagnosis across many disciplines, my review article (Takkinen 2025) shows that it is theorised most commonly within the field of education. From this perspective, educational and philosophical frameworks may also be needed within sustainability research itself, as few fields provide researchers with the existential resources required to confront and process worldview shifts as profound as those posed by ecological crises.

Our relationship with technology is not sustainable

Shortly after I began my doctoral research in 2020, Nature published an article stating that there is now more technology than life in the known universe. More precisely, the total mass of Earth’s technosphere has already surpassed that of the biosphere. Human technological activity — due to its uncontrolled and unpredictable side effects — has become a planet-shaping force comparable to natural forces, and a central driver of ecological crises. This technology-driven transformation is known as the Anthropocene, the age of humans.

Despite this, environmental discourse and education have largely focused on the human–nature relationship, while our relationship with technology has received little attention. Addressing this imbalance is a central aim of my doctoral research. Technology has functioned as a taken-for-granted background condition, rarely subjected to critical reflection. The prevailing assumption is that technology will continue to advance and solve the problems humanity faces. However, both the philosophy of technology and contemporary sustainability research urge us to examine this assumption critically. Many technologies today actively contribute to unsustainable and eco-socially unjust cultural structures. Encouragingly, this is increasingly acknowledged among educational theorists: the digital hype is being followed by a hangover.

Our relationship with technology must be addressed both in education and more broadly across society. In a co-authored article with educational philosopher Jani Pulkki, we ask: with which kinds of technologies can human habitation of Earth continue over the coming centuries and millennia? The technologies we build today shape the world in which future generations will live. According to technology scholar Steven Jackson, the technological world we are currently constructing is on the verge of becoming a broken world — both technologically and ecologically.

I argue that responsible and sustainable education requires a clear understanding of what constitutes a sustainable relationship with technology.