Can Market Capitalism Be Greened? Environmental Education Revisited

• In Event: The Reemergence of Curriculum Theory

Abstract

This paper takes as its focus an Education for Sustainability (EfS) curriculum. The argument presented here is that the assumption that meaningful change can take place within the context of a capitalist market economy is problematic. The market has a distinct inability to solve environmental crises. Instead of environmental awareness transforming the way business is done, market thinking has more often than not been involved in the creation of further ecological problems in an effort to eliminate others.

The paper reveals the way in which the New Zealand environmental education curriculum—proposed in 1997 as a response to the United Nation’s document Agenda 21—condones the continuance of neoliberal market practices whilst all the while professing the value-neutrality of the proposals it endoreses. A brief history of the introduction of environmental awareness and action proposals into school curricula world-wide is given. Here, the dominant ‘crisis’ discourse of the 1960s and 70s is seen as making way for a discourse of ‘sustainability’ initiated through Agenda 21. ‘Sustainability’ is given a very particular meaning in the curriculum documents, linked as it is to the ability of people to engage in a livelihood that ensures their long-term economic survival.

The closest the literature comes to suggesting that the workings of the economic system itself may actually contribute to unsustainable practices is with reference to the notion of “fair trade”; that people are paid appropriately for their goods and services. Further discussion suggesting ways in which aspects of a capitalist economy—such as the drive for unfettered growth as a natural aspect of business confidence—remain conspicuous by their absence.

In examining how this sustainability discourse operates to mute inquiry into the role capitalism itself plays in environmental degradation, the authors examine the role of Cartesian thought in maintaining a way of thinking that masks hegemony, understood in the Gramscian sense of the subtle way in which our extra-economic sensibilities are impregnated with the economic discourse and valuations of our age. ‘Consent’ to the prevailing political economy is generated unwittingly because of the processes of socialization. This logic is one that privileges a neoliberal market model.

Cartesian thought allows this nexus to go undetected because of the manner in which ‘thought’ is developed, valued, and reproduced socially. Civil society is seen to be a discrete entity separate from political or economic society. The individual is seen as an entity capable of withholding his or her private biases and adopting a value-neutral position when required. Objective reasoning is championed as is the idea of ‘knowledge’ being value-neutral and untainted by its social context. Institutional structures such as those of schools operate upon this neutral ground called civil society. ‘Knowledge’ is taught/transmitted by means of a curriculum fashioned into manageable portions called ‘disciplines’.

This challenge to policy makers and educators alike is to understand how a political-economy based on the resource-focused, profit-driven logic of capitalism is itself instrumental in maintaining the status quo. It suggests that today’s problems cannot be changed with such a mindset.

Authors

• Deb J. Hill, The University of Liverpool

• Lynley Tulloch, University of Waikato