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Philosophy and environmental education
ECODIALOGO seeks to offer resources to promote cooperative,
meaningful, critical, creative and thoughtful in-class dialogue within
the context of environmental education.
In order to address environmental questions in schools, specific knowledge
of the environment and its dynamics is essential. In this respect, the
sciences are indispensable for introducing students to a knowledge of
nature. But, in addition, children can be invited to reflect upon and
reason about the foundations and conditions of this knowledge, as well
as its ethical, social, logical, metaphysical, epistemological and aesthetic
dimensions.
Philosophy helps to clarify questions which have no single,
definitive answer. Some of these questions derive from major
concepts of the philosophical tradition, for example: nature
and culture, life and death, permanence and change, reality
and appearance, truth and beauty, knowledge and language, free
will and determinism, freedom and responsibility, etc. These
concepts should be constantly revised in light of the changes
and needs which come up on a day-to-day basis. These are controversial
and generic questions that no scientific discipline is capable
of addressing. They are transcendental in human life because
we live within them; that is, the meaning of our lives depends
upon the meaning we afford these concepts.
At the same time, philosophy invites us to question ideas that we tend
to accept as true, stressing the need for us to give attention to aspects
which heretofore we had found adequate or simply had not thought about.
Environmental education, in our view, requires ethical reflection. It
must address the need for values and limits in a world in which almost
anything is possible. It is also the realm in which the vulnerability
of our conceptions of the world manifests itself. In this respect, ethical
reflection is philosophical reflection. It is the desire for a rational
model to look to and to refer to when dealing with the fragmented issues
we are obliged to confront.
The relationship that humans maintain with the environment is
measured by ideas, by conceptions of the world, either absorbed
or personally constructed. In this sense, ideas constitute the
human environment. Thinking in a specific way about the environment
and our relationship to it forces us to act in accordingly.
To work with the environment is, then, to work with ideas.
Therefore we propose to interrelate philosophical dialogue and
environmental education. To promote dialogue in education implies
creating the conditions under which children participate in
discussions that take the form of investigation disciplined
by logic and metacognitive considerations. Some examples of
the latter are: What is our relationship with nature?; How do
we know that a statement is true?; What makes one reason better
than another?; Is it possible for certain behaviour to be at
the same time legal and wrong?; On the basis of what criteria
is A better than B?; etc.
Primary education might seem too early an age to bring up these fundamental
questions. But it is by this age that children have built up their own
extensive network of hypotheses and theories by which they explain to
themselves how the world works. They use terms such as truth, good,
fair, beautiful and respect, but rarely in school do they reflect
on the meaning and use of those terms.
Moreover, at this stage of development students should experience
for themselves what it is like to explore through dialogue in
an atmosphere of intellectual cooperation and mutual respect.
We feel that this practice is a necessary condition for the
education of future citizens who will be capable of cooperation,
inquiry and dialogue with regard to the relationship they want
and which is possible to maintain with the natural environment.
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