نمی توان چوب را برای درختان دید، نمی توان درختان را برای اعداد دید؟ آموزش حسابداری، پایداری و منافع عمومی

This paper is an attempt to explore the question “what do accountants need to know about the environment?" with a subsidiary question “how are they to acquire this knowledge?". These questions prove to be more complex than they appear and raise questions about the meaning of “environment", the purpose and role of accountants, the structure of the UK accounting profession and the role of education. Central to the paper is the belief that accounting is supposed to serve the public interest and that the pursuit of sustainability is central to that public interest. It is contended that only through, what we call, “transcendent" education can this notion be understood, let alone acted upon. The paper calls for a clearer expression of the relationship between education and training, and argues that the only way in which accounting can remain a profession, serve the public interest and respond to the exigencies of sustainability is through a major revision of accounting degrees and a relevant graduate only profession. The paper is predicated upon the belief that a profession with no real education (as opposed to training) in the subject matter of its profession is a contradiction in terms.

With the steady growth in the awareness of—and importance attached to— environmental issues during the 1990s, it was inevitable that attention would turn to educational processes and how these could contribute to changes in both envi- ronmental attitudes and environmental stewardship. One major source of impetus for educators, professionals and other groupings to start to give serious attention to the place of environmental issues in education and training was the recognition,throughout all organizations, that few functional activities could afford—for eco- nomic or moral reasons—to ignore environmental issues. Such an awareness led, in turn, to a recognition that new entrants to the workplace (in particular) required some significant environmental awareness. This awareness could, most obviously, be supplied through the education and training system. To this general concern, two specific initiatives in the UK brought matters into focus. The first of these was the Toyne Report ( DfE , 1993 ) which sought to encourage universities (in particular) to integrate environmental issues throughout all subject curricula. More recently, the UK government has sponsored the HE2I project with Forum for the Future to investigate and encourage the integration of environmental issues into the heart of (especially) professional education and training (see Forum for the Future , 1999 ). In such a climate, it is highly appropriate for all professional bodies and institutions to start the process of examining how environmental matters might most efficiently and effectively be embedded into their educational and training structures. This paper is an exploration of how the accounting profession and accounting education might begin to rise to this challenge. This paper is first and foremost a polemical essay. Its central contention is that there are a number of fundamental questions that need to be asked— about accounting, about education and about environmental issues—before the apparently simpler question of how environmental issues may be integrated into the discipline can be properly answered. The essay draws from both published argument and published research—in accounting and elsewhere—but also draws heavily from new research undertaken for a larger project into accounting education and the environment ( Gray et al . , 2001 ). That research is not formally reported here but is drawn from as appropriate. Consequently, this paper is structured as follows. The next section addresses the central contention of the paper—in essence seeking to identify the research problem. Section 3 then addresses methodological and research design issues which arise form the nature of this essay and its employment of the prior research undertaken for the larger project. The body of the paper then comprises: a brief exploration of accounting, the environment and sustainability (Section 4 ); a brief review of some of the key issues for education which arise from the environmental debate (Section 5 ); a review of the state of accounting education in universities and the current place of environmental issues within that education (Section 6); and areview of practitioner and professional views and attitudes to accounting educationin general and environmental education in particular (Section7). An attempt is madeto pull together the key themes and to briefly suggest future developments in the final section of the paper.

Accounting education continues to be a matter of acute concern to accounting aca- demics, practitioners and professional bodies alike. Not just matters of educational delivery and levels of expertise expected of student accountants but fundamental questions concerning the content, the objectives and the central intellectual and moral values needed in accounting education remain profoundly unresolved. Whilst the professional bodies in, for example, the US, the UK and Australia seek—almost perpetually it seems—to re-invent themselves through their education and training syllabi the evidence of the failures of accounting education to meet either aspira- tional educational or practical, work-orientated objectives continues to mount. That such a situation can continue to remain is, quite properly it seems to us, a matter of gravest concern and one deserving of our most careful attention. Our concerns might stem from a number of sources. We might, for example, have a moral concern that educators are guilty of indoctrination; a professional concern over a failure to inculcate the highest standards of scholarship and critical reasoning into the young minds we have in our charge; a pragmatic or economic concern that the considerable resources consumed by education are not being effectively deployed; or a (possibly naive) concern that the accountancy profession is failing to fulfil its duty to maintain the educational foundation of its professional claims. Whatever its source, it is difficult to find any coherent argument as to why such a situation is other than undesirable or, more especially, how such a situation can arise and can fail, for so long, to achieve any resolution. What commends this situation so forcefully to us in this paper, is the growing realization that the continuing “debates” over accounting education are rarely debates at all. Not only are the discussions failing to achieve any sort of intellectual engagement between (for example) the utterances of the big firms and the more educationally motivated scholars but there seems a widespread inability to recognize that such failures to engage probably lie in the failure to address fundamental questions about education, the profession and accounting. The “debates” thus entirely miss the point (if, indeed, the point is to resolve conflict and not just to serve a rather crude set of self-interests). Little illustrates this more clearly than the whole debate in and around the US’s AECC which, despite massive resources and very detailed debate, research and experimentation, seems no further forward in resolving the central questions about accounting education. The essential root of the problem is, however, equally illustrated when a “new” issue presents itself to the collective accounting consciousness and begins to claim attention for the accounting agenda. As Gambling and Zeff amongst others have argued, each new issue must be treated ab initio as accountants are, collectively ill-equipped to derive the principles of their practice from decided, core theory. One such matter which illustrates this is the rapidly increasing consciousness concerning the importance of environmental issues to business, society and, indeed, to accounting. This paper, whilst it has drawn its primary motivation from the challenge that environmental issues pose for the profession in general and accounting education in particular, has been principally directed towards the wider educational debates in accounting. That is, we have been concerned to explore the philosophical and moral case for placing the environment at the heart of every aspect of human endeavour, to explore the implications of the widespread pressure for accountants, inter alia , to become environmentally literate and to seek ways in which to advance the range of initiatives which have been designed to give environmental issues a much greater profile in, in particular, professional and business education. (In the UK, the key such initiatives are the Toyne Report and the HE21 project.) However, the paper has been more especially concerned to employ the environmental debate to ask questions about accounting and about education and, in doing so, to recognize that the sort of analysis we have attempted here could have been equally undertaken from the starting point of other emerging and challenging points of view. Only when it is possible to carefully consider such profound challenges as that offered by sustainability in our teaching, research and, most especially, in our dialogue about the nature of the profession and accounting education can we begin to believe that accounting is an informed, educated and “learned” profession. Our analysis suggests that whilst there are some few to whom such concerns are both apparent and understood, we have a very long way to go indeed before such capacity is an integral part of what it is to be an “accountant”.