The current global environmental crisis manifests in pollution with its effects on climate and human health, in the depletion of natural resources, and in a loss of biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. It is caused by the collective ecological impact of humanity overshooting beyond the systemic limits of the biosphere. Education at all levels and in all subjects would be in a prime position to enable learners to mitigate, cope with, and adapt to this crisis. Yet education is often complicit in the failure of societies to empower young people for the transition to sustainability. This paper contends that the reasons lie mainly in the hidden curriculum - implicit messages contained in learning materials, teacher behaviour, and school rules, as well as in the values, assumptions and beliefs that are communicated to the learner through the media and entertainment industry and through the influences of wider society. The hidden curriculum exerts a powerful influence on the learner, at times masking intended learning outcomes. It promotes counterproductive learning outcomes and it interferes with appropriate learning outcomes that would enable the learner to abandon business and consumption as usual. Based on six general learning goals developed previously, this paper offers suggestions how educators can counteract the negative influence of the hidden curriculum in their classrooms. This begins with the identification of counterproductive implicit messages in the curriculum consisting of values and guiding myths. After those messages are rendered explicit, the teacher and students as a community of learners then strive to discuss, modify, redirect and substitute those messages according to sound scientific models, moral reasoning, and explicit moral norms. This ongoing process, which is not an environmentalist project but a security imperative for all countries, allows the learners to develop the necessary knowledge, skills and dispositions to work towards the transition to sustainable living.