'Getting and Spending, We Lay Waste Our Powers': environmental education and the culture of the school
FORUM - ISSN 0963-8253
Volume 52 Number 1 (2010)
'Getting and Spending, We Lay Waste Our Powers': environmental education and the culture of the school
MICHAEL BONNETT pages 87-92
DOI: 10.2304/forum.2010.52.1.87
Abstract
This article sketches some implications for education of interpreting a key orientating idea of environmental education - sustainability - as a receptive-responsive frame of mind. It argues that, so interpreted, sustainability has extensive implications for the life of schools as places of learning, particularly with regard to the implicit scientism that is detected as a continuing pervasive influence and that is understood as an expression of an underlying 'metaphysics of mastery' in respect of both the human and the natural world. This posture is criticised in terms of its enervating effect on the ability of individuals to engage with the school environment and its destructive effect on the milieu of the school. It concludes that a central ambition of environmental education must be to work towards a school culture that recognizes that non-instrumental caring is an authentic way of knowing and that celebrates poetic responsiveness as a fundamental condition of education.
To cite this article
MICHAEL BONNETT (2010) 'Getting and Spending, We Lay Waste Our Powers': environmental education and the culture of the school, FORUM, 52(1), 87-92. https://doi.org/10.2304/forum.2010.52.1.87