Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals depends largely on SDG4 (quality education). The transformative skills, perspectives, behaviours and unsiloed knowledge that will help us address the challenges of sustainable development, well...they won't just appear from thin air. SDG4, however, also rests largely on one thing: technology.
Technology will provide access to the education we need for a climate resilient future in a circular economy. But technology is not just one amorphous blob that can be nudged in the direction we want it to go, but rather a complex web where the sharing economy comes up against competitive interests, ROI against glaring global inequality, public against private, innovation against adoption and scalability.
Compelling research has given us the "discourses of delay"; the reasons people give to avoid doing something substantial about climate change. Techno Optimism is one of those discourses; the idea that technology will save us all, and we should put our faith in it. In the case of education, however, this might actually be the reality.
