From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life؟

تم النشر بتاريخ 03-11-2021

Etymologically, a disaster is a kind of misfortune, and so it is one of the great ironies and sorrows of the present age that disasters have become prime fodder for the sort of laissez-faire economic development that aims mainly at the creation of private fortunes for well-connected corporations and individuals (Klein, 2007). Of course if such fortunes were only epiphenomena of more peaceful, just, and balanced societies – in short, ecological societies – then perhaps critical tempers could be mollified to some degree. However, as numerous studies have revealed, ongoing economic reconstruction programs that seek to integrate regional economies into the global neoliberal framework appear not only to have generally failed to improve most people’s lives, but have disastrously grown the gaps between the rich and poor (Scott, 2001; Reuter, 2007; Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 2003). Hence, alter-globalization movements have arisen that seek to challenge the hegemony of this agenda (Kahn and Kellner, 2007), and indeed, philosophies that have stressed cultural empowerment for “less developed” nations, instead of their capital improvement, can now be traced back nearly fifty years. In educational circles, for instance, theories opposing the instrumental extension of global capital into the Third World date to at least the early texts of radical theorists such as Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, who promoted “cultural action for freedom” (Freire, 2000) and a founding form of post-development theory (Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997), respectively. -------------------------------- Richard Kahn is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota. He is the co-author or editor of four books of educational theory, as well as the forthcoming, Greening the Academy: Environmental Studies in the Liberal Arts (Syracuse University Press; co-edited with Anthony Nocella) and Systems of Domination: The Global Industrial Complex (Lexington Press; co-edited with Steven Best, Peter McLaren and Anthony Nocella). A critical theorist of education, his work (often with Douglas Kellner) has regularly appeared in major collections and journals on globalization, cultural studies, new media and critical pedagogy. Further information about him can be obtained at his website: http://richardkahn.org

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