Critical Essays on Education, Modernity and the Recovery of the Ecological Imperative

This volume of essays represents 15 years of Chet Bowers's reflections on the culture of modernism. Bowers discusses shortcomings in the ideas of Paulo Freire, Richard Rorty and others who have formed the basis for our modern approach to thought and pedagogy. Arguing that we have been addressing local crises in education, all the while missing a global crisis, Bowers identifies the ecological imperative and how it impacts on our lives. His book is divided into three sections: "Rethinking the Foundations of Modernism", "Cultural Mediating Characteristics of Educational Computing", and "Recovering the Ecological Imperative in Educational and Social Thought".
In each section, Bowers introduces a number of themes that are not part of our current conversation about ecologically sustainable cultures, including: how the metaphors of emancipation reproduce a culturally specific set of values; the culturally specific form of individualism and rationality reinforced by Freire's pedagogy; how educational computing reinforces the Cartesian mindset and contributes to uses of language that reinforce an anthropocentric approach to moral values; the anthropocentric foundations of educational liberalism; the connections between addressing challenges of cultural diversity and the ecological crisis; and what urban teachers can learn from traditional civilisations about the nature of an ecologically sustainable culture. The scope and endurance of Bowers's arguments make this book appropriate for graduate courses in foundations, the philosophy of education, teacher education, curriculum theory, educational policy and environmental education.