A social ecological model of education: Economic problems, citizenship solutions

Abstract

This article develops a model of education from Murray Bookchin’s social ecology by demonstrating how “the economy,” specifically growth and employment, intervenes between the environment and education, impeding the goal of environmental education. By reformulating Bookchin’s central claim in terms of power, rather than domination, the argument for limits to growth is strengthened and gives rise to a necessary feature of ecological sustainability; namely, the collective imposition of limits on throughput, the technical term for resource use. To make such collective action effective, the model proposes that active citizenship become a more common aim of education, especially in relation to the increasingly narrow goal of education for employment.

Keywords:

• citizenship education
• ecological sustainability
• economic growth
• employment
• power
• social ecology

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Worth noting is that mainstream economics also tends to avoid the issue of power (Fix, 2021).

2 The joule is the standard scientific unit for energy.

3 See Daly (2014, pp. 70–71) for a critical evaluation of extraterrestrial growth.

4 See Appendix C for an elaboration of these technicalities.

5 The underemployed are those that have work and want more, but cannot find it (Mitchell et al., 2019, p. 74).

6 While van Tol (2020) is aimed at high school geography teachers, the principles and perspective should be easily transferrable to other educational contexts.

7 The documentary and the ecological footprint quiz I used can be found by scrolling down to Ecological Sustainability at: https://jasonvantol.com/social-sciences/

8 Worth noting is that Aboriginal peoples’ ‘literally pure democracy’ and land management practices sustained the Australian continent for at least 65,000 years (Clarkson et al., 2017). See Yunkaporta (2019, esp. pp. 202, 223–224) for an explanation of how the equitable distribution of power made this possible.