Author: Owen Tyers. As the human population grows and Western models of capitalism and consumption spread around the globe, what should be the aim of education in North America? What, if anything, can make a curriculum worthwhile in our rapidly changing, market driven, increasingly technological society? To explore these questions, Owen is considering the vital relationships between intelligence, education, and our ability to sustain ourselves as a species. A central component of his research involves the introduction of an extended framework of intelligence, the Pentad Model, along with the associated concept of environmental intelligence (ENVI).

The challenge of increasing the sustainability of North American society will require two basic types of wide-ranging, interrelated social change: individual and institutional/collective. A slightly modified version of Imaginative Education that focuses on the process through which we develop and maximize the comprehensive form of intelligence presented by the Pentad Model and ENVI can play a key role in this process and offers a potentially useful guide for educational reform. This new conception of education provides a meaningful, achievable, and comprehensive educational aim that, although specific in its goal, is also compatible with the general objective of fostering sustainability as well as more traditional academic objectives.

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