Does education for sustainable development have its own object of cognition?

The difficulties of formation education for sustainable development in Russian school arise from blur perceptions of its content, in particular, minimum knowledge requirements, specific methods of cognition, value-expressive attitudes. Without definite criteria the varied forms of education for sustainable development don’t allow identifying both national and international indicators and leave a large field for imitation of the process. UNESCO provides only general, above all, socio-political educational guidelines for sustainable development and gives countries the right to form its content, taking into account national systems of education and culture. The article describes the approaches to defining the structure and content of education for sustainable development on the basis of classical, non-classical and post-nonclassical types of scientific rationality.