ChatGPT is an AI tool that has sparked debates about its potential implications for education. We used the SWOT analysis framework to outline ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses and to discuss its opportunities for and threats to education. The strengths include using a sophisticated natural language model to generate plausible answers, self-improving capability, and providing personalised and real-time responses. As such, ChatGPT can increase access to information, facilitate personalised and complex learning, and decrease teaching workload, thereby making key processes and tasks more efficient. The weaknesses are a lack of deep understanding, difficulty in evaluating the quality of responses, a risk of bias and discrimination, and a lack of higher-order thinking skills. Threats to education include a lack of understanding of the context, threatening academic integrity, perpetuating discrimination in education, democratising plagiarism, and declining high-order cognitive skills. We provide agenda for educational practice and research in times of ChatGPT.

This study contends that environmental education is being significantly altered by globalizing forces, witnessing the effort to convert environmental education into education for sustainable development. This internationally propagated conversion can be challenged from many vantage points. This study identifies anomalies that have arisen as international organizations such as UNESCO have championed this conversion, and discusses issues arising from these anomalies in light of the nature and purposes of education. This study presents a heuristic that has helped one to support a better understanding of the relationships between sustainable development, environmental thought, democracy, and education.

It is higher education’s responsibility to continuously challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio‐scientific disputes. The ill‐defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and reality constructions meet. This makes sustainability – its need for contextualization and the debate surrounding it – pivotal for higher education. It offers an opportunity for reflection on the mission of our universities and colleges, but also a chance to enhance the quality of the learning process. This paper explores both the overarching goals and process of higher education from an emancipatory view and with regard to sustainability.

An analysis of the literature supporting the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development and a sample of its key products suggests that it failed to acknowledge or challenge neoliberalism as a hegemonic force blocking transitions towards genuine sustainability. The authors argue that the rationale for the Decade was idealistic and that global education for sustainability citizenship provides a more realistic focus for such an initiative. They anchor such education in appropriate social theory, outline its four dimensions and use these to review four key products from the Decade, before suggesting remedial measures to render ESD a more effective vehicle for promoting democratic global governance and sustainability.