  A transformative approach to addressing complex social-environmental problems
warrants reexamining our most fundamental assumptions about sustainability and
progress, including the entrenched imperative for limitless economic growth.
Our global resource footprint has grown in lock-step with GDP since the
industrial revolution, spawning the climate and ecological crises. Faith that
technology will eventually decouple resource use from GDP growth is pervasive,
despite there being practically no empirical evidence of decoupling in any
country. We argue that complete long-term decoupling is, in fact, well-nigh
impossible for fundamental physical, mathematical, logical, pragmatic and
behavioural reasons. We suggest that a crucial first step toward a
transformative education is to acknowledge this incompatibility, and provide
examples of where and how our arguments may be incorporated in education. More
broadly, we propose that foregrounding SDG 12 with a functional definition of
sustainability, and educating and upskilling students to this end, must be a
necessary minimum goal of any transformative approach to sustainability
education. Our aim is to provide a conceptual scaffolding around which learning
frameworks may be developed to make room for diverse alternative paths to truly
sustainable social-ecological cultures.
