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Environmental Studies: Lessons from a Quaternary Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Pam Gunnell  and
Ken Dyer
Pam Gunnell
Affiliation:
Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, University of Adelaide
Ken Dyer
Affiliation:
Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, University of Adelaide
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At the beginning of the last decade, Silver (1980, p.7) was able to write with assurance that ‘Behind our political and ideological disagreements…lies a crucial, common confidence in the educational process’, a confidence based on education's ability both to maintain the social, political and economic status quo and to change it. Over a decade later, and with our awareness of global environmental crises that those years have brought, the authors have become increasingly convinced of the practical fact that formal education in our society has functioned predominantly to maintain the social, political and economic conditions that have produced environmental crisis and is thereby severely hampered in its ability to make the changes necessary to stop the degradation of our planet, let alone improve its health.

Although we do not propose that the deteriorating state of the planet can be attributed to any single underlying cause, we would suggest that a generic term for many of these causes is the ‘culture of positivism’ (Giroux 1981, p.38) which, in Giroux's words, has a ‘limited focus on objectivity, efficiency, and technique …’. Gough too (1987, p.54) argues that Western industrial society's systems of education rest on ‘an epistemological paradigm’, a particular set of theories about how human beings gain knowledge of themselves and their world as well as the kinds of knowledge that are valued. According to Gough (1987, p.54), the kinds of knowledge which have dominated Western industrial education are those which have been structured by Western society's dominant form of theorising, namely: positivist, empirical science. The idea of a culture which is mechanistic and reductionist, which encourages human beings to dominate and control ‘nature’, and which looks for ever more sophisticated ‘technical fixes’ to overcome the tragic results of its own logic is reflected also throughout the ‘green’ literature. See, for instance, Bookchin (1986 and 1990), Fox (1990), Passmore (1980) and Young (1991). Ways in which this dominant culture adversely affects our relationship with our environment are documented in the same literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 9 , 1993 , pp. 33 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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