This chapter was a contribution to a book, Post-Sustainability and Environmental Education: Remaking Education for the Future, planned by myself and my co-editor, Bob Jickling. We both felt that attempts to “integrate sustainability into education” – a commonly advocated strategy – were blind to a far greater and inescapable challenge which was to “re-make” education. This view was in some ways pioneering – “re-thinking”, “re-imagining”, and “re-visioning” education are now frequently heard terms.

The chapter outlines and critiques the assumptions influencing current educational policy and practice, and particularly the influence of neoliberalism over older and more ethically defensible conceptions of education. The piece then looks at educational maladaptation, the Anthropocene, the possibility of socio-ecological breakdown, and the importance of repurposing education to be fit for our times. It is argued that this would allow attention to be brought to generating purposes and assumptions in education aligned to the possibilities of systemic breakdown and breakthrough in global and local systems. Such education is supportive of living in more creative, collaborative and explorative ways that help assure breakthrough trajectories as the century plays out.

It is not possible to work in environmental or sustainability education for very long before questions arise about the fundamental purpose of education. Particularly now, when educational policy and practice is being trammelled by an economically driven instrumentalism across the globe. After reviewing this trend, the chapter argues for a reimagination of educational purpose that is appropriate and aligned to the unprecedented nature of our times and collective futures.