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

Exposes the faulty assumptions that underlie modern education in the areas of moral education, creativity, and intelligence, showing how these assumptions must be changed in order to produce an ecologically sustainable culture.

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.