The Curriculum After Growth

The World Inequality Lab’s Global Justice Report is not an education report. It is a major intervention into debates about climate, inequality, public investment, global taxation, democratic reform and the future of the global economy. Yet it should be read carefully by educators, because it asks a question education can no longer avoid: what kind of future are young people actually being prepared for?

The report’s central claim is both hopeful and demanding. It argues that a decent material life for all people is possible within planetary boundaries, but only if rapid decarbonisation is combined with a major reduction in inequality, a shift toward sufficiency, and new forms of public and international investment (Chancel et al., 2026). In other words, the future cannot be secured through cleaner technology alone. It requires a different account of prosperity.

That matters for education because schools do not only transmit knowledge. They also carry a story about the future. They communicate, often implicitly, what counts as success, what kinds of lives are worth aspiring to, and what sort of world young people are expected to enter. Much of that story remains tied to a growth-dependent model of society: work hard, get the grades, build the CV, compete successfully, secure your place.

There is truth in this story. Education should expand opportunity. Qualifications matter. Social mobility matters. For many young people, education remains one of the few routes into security, confidence and agency. But when individual mobility becomes the dominant moral horizon of education, something important is lost. A society cannot educate its way out of ecological breakdown simply by helping some individuals climb higher within the same system. Nor can it address inequality merely by creating better escape routes from unequal conditions.

Is Growth a Single Good?

This is where the Global Justice Report becomes educationally significant. It asks us to distinguish between different kinds of growth, rather than treating growth as a single good or a single problem. Some things clearly need to grow: public health, education, care, clean infrastructure, ecological restoration, democratic capacity and meaningful participation. Other things need to contract: fossil dependence, extreme wealth concentration, destructive consumption, extractive business models and the assumption that progress means endless material expansion.

The educational question, then, is not simply whether we are “for” or “against” growth. It is what should grow, what should end, who benefits, who pays, and what kind of life the economy is meant to serve.

If young people are to engage seriously with the future, they need more than climate awareness or green skills. These matter, but they are insufficient on their own. They need to understand how economies are designed, how inequalities are produced, how climate vulnerability is distributed, and how political choices shape what appears possible. Sustainability education cannot remain only about carbon footprints, recycling, renewable energy or responsible consumption. It must also become education in justice, systems, power and democratic imagination.

This is also why the current turn toward flourishing in education is so important, and why it needs to be handled carefully. Across schools, systems and international organisations, flourishing is moving closer to the centre of the conversation. That is welcome. For too long, education has been dominated by narrow accounts of attainment, employability, productivity and performance. But flourishing can also become a soft word that changes very little. It can be reduced to wellbeing, resilience or personal fulfilment while the wider system remains organised around competition, overwork and individual advancement.

There are encouraging signs that this conversation is becoming more serious. The OECD’s recent work on Education for Human Flourishing, led by Michael Stevenson, argues that education needs to move beyond a narrow human capital model and attend more fully to meaning, agency, relationships and the wider purposes of learning (OECD, 2025). The International Baccalaureate is also moving into this space through its wider work on flourishing and through developments such as the Systems Transformation Pathway, which opens up questions of sustained real-world engagement, systems thinking, alternative assessment and the relationship between learning and impact.

Moving Beyond a Narrow Human Capital Model

These developments matter because they suggest that flourishing, systems change and educational purpose are no longer peripheral concerns. They are beginning to shape the architecture of curriculum, assessment and recognition. The question, however, is whether this emerging agenda can be linked strongly enough to equity, sustainability and political economy, so that flourishing does not become a refined language for individual wellbeing while the deeper structures of growth, extraction and inequality remain largely untouched.

The Global Justice Report helps expose the limits of that narrower view. A young person cannot flourish in abstraction from the ecological, economic and social conditions that shape their life. A school cannot meaningfully promote flourishing while leaving unexamined the structures that produce anxiety, precarity, exclusion and ecological harm. Flourishing is not only psychological. It is relational, material, institutional and ecological.

This is one of the questions we are beginning to explore through The Flourish Project and the Flourish Learning Lab. Through the Flourish Project’s Eco-Systemic Flourishing framework, we are interested in how schools, researchers and partners might work with a more integrated account of human and planetary flourishing. The framework asks us to hold together the natural environment, circular and regenerative economies, cultural values and identity, and human capacities and potential (Ellyatt, 2025).

Viewed through this lens, the Global Justice Report is exceptionally strong on structural flourishing. It offers a serious account of redistribution, public investment, ecological constraint, democratic reform and the reorganisation of prosperity. But it is less developed in relation to meaning, belonging, identity, relational wellbeing, inner development and the cultural conditions that make transformation possible.

That is not a criticism so much as a recognition of the next educational task. Structural change can create the conditions of possibility for flourishing, but it does not determine how people inhabit those conditions. Redistribution and public investment may make a more just future materially possible, but they do not by themselves cultivate the values, relationships and forms of attention needed to sustain it.

This is where schools matter.

What Schools Can Do

Schools cannot create global wealth taxes. They cannot redesign international finance. They cannot decarbonise the economy alone. But they are among the places where societies still make deliberate claims about what matters. They are places where young people learn what is valuable, what is possible and what kind of future they are expected to serve.

The point is not to add “flourishing” as another initiative. Teachers are already overloaded, and schools are too often asked to solve problems created elsewhere. The deeper question is whether the underlying purposes of education remain adequate to the world young people are inheriting.

If the future requires sufficiency, solidarity and planetary repair, then schools need space to ask different questions. What would we assess if flourishing were taken seriously? What would we stop overvaluing? How would we design school cultures that model belonging, responsibility and agency rather than only performance and compliance? How would we teach economics, geography, science, politics, philosophy, literature and the arts if the purpose were not simply individual advancement, but shared life on a damaged planet?

These questions are not abstract. They shape curriculum, assessment, leadership, school culture and the forms of learning young people experience. They also shape whether education helps students adapt to the world as it is, or equips them to participate in imagining and building something different.

This is why the Flourish Learning Lab is interested in the relationship between research, school practice and systems change. The challenge is not to offer another packaged solution, but to create a space where schools, researchers and partners can explore what human and planetary flourishing requires in different contexts. That means taking wellbeing seriously, but refusing to separate it from equity, ecology, culture, purpose and institutional design.

The Global Justice Report does not give educators a curriculum. It does not tell schools what to do on Monday morning. But it makes one thing harder to ignore: if the future depends on decarbonisation, redistribution, sufficiency and democratic transformation, then education cannot remain organised around the old story of endless growth and individual competition.

Flourishing must not become a softer language for adapting to that old story. It must help us ask what kind of world education is preparing young people to inherit, question and remake.

Key Takeaways

1. The Global Justice Report matters for education because it challenges the story of prosperity. Its argument is not only about economics or climate policy. It raises a deeper educational question: what kind of future are young people being prepared to enter?

2. Education still carries a hidden curriculum of growth. Schools often communicate that success means individual mobility, competition and advancement within the existing system. That story is increasingly inadequate to the ecological and social realities young people face.

3. The issue is not simply growth versus degrowth. Some things need to grow, including care, education, health, clean infrastructure, democratic participation and ecological restoration. Other things need to contract, including fossil dependence, extreme inequality and destructive consumption.

4. Flourishing must be more than wellbeing. A serious account of flourishing must include ecological, economic, cultural and relational conditions, not only individual resilience or personal fulfilment.

5. Important shifts are already underway. The OECD’s work on human flourishing, the IB’s work on flourishing and the Systems Transformation Pathway all suggest that education systems are beginning to rethink curriculum, assessment and purpose.

6. Schools cannot solve structural crises alone, but they are not irrelevant. They are among the places where young people learn what is valuable, what is possible and what kinds of futures are worth working towards.

7. The next phase of flourishing needs equity, research and practice. If flourishing is becoming central to education, it needs to be conceptually rigorous, practically grounded and attentive to different contexts. Otherwise, it risks becoming another attractive language layered onto systems that remain largely unchanged.

Simon Lightman is Director of the Flourish Project Learning Lab. You can find out more about The Flourish Project here

References

Biesta, G. (2010). Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Paradigm Publishers.

Chancel, L., Mohren, C., Moshrif, R., Odersky, M., Piketty, T., Somanchi, A. et al. (2026). The Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality and Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. World Inequality Lab.

Ellyatt, W. (2025). Eco-Systemic Flourishing: Expanding the Meta-Framework for 21st-Century Education. Challenges, 16(2), 21.

OECD. (2025). Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework. OECD Publishing.

Sterling, S. (2001). Sustainable Education: Re-Visioning Learning and Change. Green Books.