When Businesses Go to School

This paper foregrounds education for sustainable development (ESD) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) as emergent discourses that need conscious efforts to align their ideals. While it explores the capacity of ESD to make significant contribution towards educational thinking and practice, it does so recognising that current neoliberalists’ and capitalists’ agenda, particularly as they relate to formal schooling, contradicts the ideals of education for sustainable development. Using the United States—a capitalist giant—as a focus, the paper employs critical discourse analysis to expose such conceptual and operational contradictions inherent in current business involvement in schools. In calling for a change, the paper draws attention to the need for a conscious alignment of CSR activities both in schools and in the wider community to current ESD agenda. The paper concludes that if CSR is a business’ contribution towards sustainable development, then its pedagogical imperatives must be critically explored.