Rethinking Global Education for Sustainability: Learning from East Asia's Relational Turn

Global development programs focused on addressing major challenges and achieving sustainability have revealed a systemic gap between the production of academic knowledge and real social transformation. This paper argues that the dominant twentieth-century model of higher education, rooted in disciplinary silos, objectivity, and linear knowledge transfer, cannot adequately address the complex, interdependent crises. A logical question arises: how are the education systems of leading countries today accumulating transformative potential to gain a real ability to contribute to universal prosperity? In response, the paper explores the educational paradigms of China, Japan, and South Korea, illustrating how East Asian philosophies, particularly Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhist humanism, offer alternative ontological and pedagogical foundations for transformation. These traditions emphasize relationality, ethical self-cultivation, and self-emptying as modes of transformative engagement. By integrating these cultural resources with the practical frameworks of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), the paper assesses how current East Asian reforms reflect different depths of change across structural, paradigmatic, and mythic layers. Ultimately, the study proposes that sustainable educational transformation requires more than policy reform; it demands a civilizational shift from mechanistic cognition toward metamorphic learning, wherein education fosters planetary wisdom, systemic awareness, and compassion as the basis for sustainable human futures.