Educating for an Ecologically Sustainable Culture: Rethinking Moral Education, Creativity, Intelligence, and Other Modern Orthodoxies

by Chet A. Bowers

This book is a wake-up call for environmentalists who need to consider how current educational ideals and practices undermine efforts to create a more sustainable future. It is also a wake-up call for educators who continue to base their reform efforts on the primacy of the individual, while ignoring the fact that the individual is nested in culture, and culture is nested in (and thus dependent upon) natural ecosystems. Bowers argues that the modern way of understanding moral education, creativity, intelligence, and the role of direct experience in the learning process cannot be supported by evidence from such fields as anthropology, cultural linguistics, and the sociology of knowledge.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Peaches · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, but you can really tell this is an earlier Bowers book. The same disregard of punctuation and formatting are there, plus disorganization for the reader. He definitely has more untempered fervor in this book, which isn't necessarily a good thing. While he offers some curriculum models for educators to look up, a great deal of this book goes off on a tangent about morality. Also, he clearly dislikes technology in general, and as tech wasn't even as prevalent in schools back then, it makes me wonder how he reconciled his feelings with the current trends in education. I guess I'll have to read more.