Teaching Life Skills based on Malaysian Ethnic & Indigenous Knowledge of Sustainable Development to Counter-balance Globalization

Since its beginnings in the mid- s, Globalization as a phenomenon has been growing, and come to mean different things to different people and nations. At the turn of this st century, however, in tandem with Globalization, the issue and themeof ‘Sustainable Development’ (SD) has come to the forefront, both at international and nation-state levels, with the United Nations Organization (UN) leading the way.This new concern for SD is firstly an unforeseen side-effect of unbridledGlobalization efforts by the highly industrialized nations of the world; and secondly, it is a UN-engendered ‘reawakening of Environmentalists’, including those in the‘less-industrialized nations’, on the need to conserve whatever indigenous resources there are, for the benefit of future generations and for the health of our ailing planetEarth. In light of the afore-mentioned issues – i.e. Globalization and Sustainable Development – Malaysia in general has promulgated policies, and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in particular has developed research designs, to incorporate SDstrategies into Education in general and the Teaching of Life Skills in particular. Taking off from the issues delineated above, this paper will describe one of the mostrecentresearch efforts at USM to incorporate the Teaching of Life Skills that is based on Malaysian Ethnic & Indigenous Knowledge of Sustainable Development, as a means of Counter-balancing some of the known negative effects of Globalization.