The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a significant marker in global efforts to universalise a conception of ecologically sustainable human development. SDG 4’s expanded vision of quality education for all extends to the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Agenda’s call for education that contributes to all of SDGs, and prepares students to ‘transform our world’. From a critical perspective, this paper considers the incompatibility of endless (compound) economic growth and capital accumulation, under capitalism, with the required CO₂ reductions that the climate emergency demands. The paper shows how the ESD proposals reflect the orthodoxy of education as human capital formation for economic development, albeit within a reformed ‘green growth’ model. At the same time, it argues that their distinctive ambitions and transformational language provide space for critical educators to simultaneously work with and against their contradictions and limitations, and to advance non-capitalist and degrowth alternatives.

World culture theory (WCT) offers an explanatory framework for macro-level comparative analyses of systems of mass education, including their structures, accompanying policies and their curricular and pedagogical practices. WCT has contributed to broader efforts to overcome methodological nationalism in comparative research. In this paper, we acknowledge the contributions of world culture theory in these terms, but develop the case for an alternative explanatory framework - world-systems analysis (WSA) - rooted in the historical development and contemporary crises of the capitalist world-economy. This case is built on two major points of critique of world culture theory: first, that its consensus orientation is inadequate for a macro-level accounting of social reality; and second, that its analysis of the economic functions of mass education, in isolation from the capitalist world-economy, further weakens its explanatory power. Working from this critique, we elaborate the capacity of world-systems analysis to overcome these shortcomings by providing a more comprehensive, historical perspective. This alternative approach incorporates the identification and analysis of shared cultural understandings underpinning policy and institutional practice, linked to the development of the capitalist world-economy. We conclude this paper by affirming the value of WSA as an alternative approach for comparative research, and its potential contribution to the development of more enlightened educational policy and a more just and democratic world-system

(2013). Education in/for socialism: historical, current and future perspectives. Globalisation, Societies and Education: Vol. 11, Education in/for socialism: historical, current and future perspectives, pp. 161-169.