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SCHOOL DECONTEXTUALIZATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN THE CURRICULUM OF GENERAL EDUCATION IN CROATIA

Sustainability of the economy and society is, today, due to the evident negative impact on scarce environmental resources, an important segment of every society, and therefore must be an indispensable part of everyone's education. In this sense, in Croatia, the problem is a long-standing approach to learning and teaching, which was based on prescribed content, taught outside the context of society, the economy and the pupils' own lives. Educational reform introduces changes in the curriculum that anticipate the contents of sustainable development through cross- curricular topics, but only from the point of view of the environmental, social and economic dimensions. This can include contents that provide students with an insight into the consequences, but does not give them a clear picture of the causes or the ways in which the contemporary world addresses the problems of sustainability and sustainable development, that is, in the context in which everything takes place. Given that technology, as a cause, as well as a need, but also a way of solving problems, is an important segment that gives students insight into the context of sustainable development, it is clear that it should be an indispensable part of this education. However, in the general education curriculum in Croatia, technology is represented with only 1.5% of total time, and only in primary education, which is completely insufficient to see the context of the sustainable development problem. In other words, if pupils are not given insight into the ways of meeting human and social needs addressed by technology but also in technologies that ensure sustainabil ity, the teaching process will be reduced to indoctrination of pupils and a complete misunderstanding of the sustainable development paradigm. The consequence is the banalization of local and global energy, environmental, production, engineering and genera l technological problems in the minds of pupils and the reduction of sustainable development problems to virtual lamentation of incompetent teachers and banal quasi-environmental actions with students. All this can only deepen the further de- contextualization of the school, and the development of pupils awareness of sustainable development reduce to the doctrine of environmental protection, which they cannot understand or apply in their own lives and future work. The solution to this problem is to intensify the contextually organized teaching of technology education and to integrate it into curriculum of the general education, which can only be carried out by competent teachers. Such upgrading of the general education curriculum can provide an understanding of the paradigm of sustainable development and the realization of the so-called school for life.

school de-contextualization, general education curriculum, sustainable development, technology education

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