Education as the Key to Facing Today’s Challenges: How We Can Generate a More Resilient Environment and Promote a Paradigm Shift in Economics

Nowadays, we are still trapped in a paradigm whose guiding principle is to increase intensity: higher, faster, further. Therefore, many still think that an everstronger exploitation of natural resources and increasing monetary profits would bring us wealth and make us happy. For this very reason, we still teach students the values of an ‘elbow-society’, in which everyone seems to think only of themselves first. In this chapter, we show why it is important to shape a paradigm shift from a material to an ethical focus in order to construct a sustainable (in an economic, social, and ecological sense) and resilient society. From this perspective, we outline the importance of setting cornerstones in the field of education, describe concrete competency models, and recommend their implementation through teaching methods like Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and Project Based Learning (PBL). Moreover, we contrast the old paradigm and a possible new paradigm based on the values of love and respect that would foster resilience, as illustrated by the best practice example of Bhutan. The complexity of adaptive challenges results from the fact that people are part of both the problem and the solution and key factors such as habits, customs, and cultures come into play and have to be reconsidered.