Education for All and Sustainable Development: An Empirical Study on Family Cognition and Household Resource Using in China

Education for sustainable development has achieved a lot in the past decade. However, the extent to which sustainable development education can achieve sustainability is still unclear. This article uses the survey data of Chinese families and establishes an empirical analysis model. By using the transition of China’s sustainable development education mode as a recognition strategy and using DID method to analyze this issue, we found out that the sustainable education in schools can only help families correctly understand the status quo of sustainable development, but it cannot improve the household sustainability. After implementing the education for sustainable development for all (ESDFA), the average monthly electricity use of the affected Chinese households has decreased by 79.6124 kWh, which is a drop of 41.56%; household carbon dioxide emissions has decreased by 123.8958 kg, which is a drop of 49.16%. Among them, households with their heads aged 40-55 were the most significant. The mechanism analysis shows that the greater the scope of the population covered by ESDFA, the more obvious the effect of reducing family resource use, and there may be a mechanism similar to the herding effect.