Curricular innovation has been a hot topic on the Green Schools List (email "subscribe grnsch-l" to listserv@listserv.brown.edu) the past week or two. And no wonder -- getting colleges and universities to operate sustainably is hard, but not nearly as hard as getting them to teach sustainability in all its variety and complexity.

State universities probably have an easier time when it comes to curricular innovation. (Note: I didn't say "easy", I just said "easier". Everything is relative.) At private universities, there's little in the way of effective central authority, so academic freedom (read: "don't tell me what to teach") tends to dominate. Change can still happen, but it isn't fast and it usually isn't pretty.

Probably the most enlightening item, however, wasn't about universities, nor colleges. It was about high schools in Washington state, and about the sustainability learning standards which have been adopted. They're pretty detailed, and comprehensive, and impressive. Students are expected to be able to:

• Create realistic models with feedback loops, and recognize that all models are limited in their predictive power.
• Analyze relationships between national interests and international issues; evaluate impacts of international agreements on contemporary global issues.
• Analyze how economic choices by groups and individuals impose costs and provide benefits.
• Analyze and evaluate (dis)advantages of different economic systems, and the effects of specialization on global trade.
• Analyze and evaluate effects of distribution of resources on sustainability.
• Evaluate the ethics of technology use based on historic patterns.
• Understand and analyze the causal factors that have shaped major events in history.
• Evaluate how human interaction with the environment has affected economic growth and sustainability.

The full set of standards is available here. Given that they're addressing high school students, the true content of terms like "analyze", "evaluate" and "understand" probably gets moderated somewhat, but still ...

... I'll be honest. If I had reason to believe that the typical Greenback graduate had as complete an understanding of sustainability, and as comprehensive a perspective on why it's an issue, why it's important, what we need to do about it, how we can do that as this set of high school learning standards would seem to imply, I could die happy.

(Not that I'm in any rush, you understand!)