It's almost time once again for the World’s Largest Lesson which sets out to introduce "the Sustainable Development Goals to children and young people everywhere and unites them in action". The WLL website says "17 Global Goals to achieve these 3 extraordinary things by 2030". This struck me as odd, given that there are 17 goals but only 3 things. These turn out to be:
END EXTREME POVERTY
FIGHT INEQUALITY AND INJUSTICE
TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE
However, not all of these will be achievements, as "fight" and "tackle" are what we might term 'on-going verbs'. Only "end" seems to be achievement-oriented, and then it's only 'extreme' poverty that's being ended.
All this simplicity is an attempt to make the complex goals more understandable to a young audience. The website goes along with the usual practice by representing the statements of goal by slogans. Thus:
- "End poverty in all its forms everywhere" [1] becomes "No poverty"
- "Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages" [3] becomes "Good health and wellbeing"
- "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls" [5] becomes "Gender equality"
- "Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation" [9] becomes "Industry, innovation and infrastructure", and
- "Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss"[15] becomes "Life on land"
... and so on.
The first and second of these might be thought reasonable. although adding "for all" to [2] would have helped. The third is much less so as the crucial qualifier: "empower all women and girls" is lost. The fourth and fifth, however, are just nonsense as no attempt has been made to represent the goal in a meaningful way. Goal 15 doesn't even say "Protect life on land" which would have been much more to the point.
Whilst part of the problem lies with the way the goals are written (or over-written), there's also a problem with the way that they have been turned into slogans by organisations that ought to know better, and so here's my suggestion for a lesson:
Ask students to think about the goals and create their own meaningful précis of about 6 words. There would then be a discussion of which are seen as the most effective and why.
Respond