Abstract

GONZALEZ GAUDIANO, Edgar  and  ARIAS ORTEGA, Miguel Ángel. Institutionalized environmental education: Vain attemps and open horizons. Perfiles educativos [online]. 2009, vol.31, n.124, pp.58-68. ISSN 0185-2698.

This article proposes a qualitative analysis of the implications of the International Environmental Education Programm (Programa Internacional de Educación Ambiental, PIEA) for the setting-up of the field of environmental education. This program was promoted by the UNESCO and the PNUMA between 1975 and 1995 and represented the institutional answer to the need to define an educational proposal to the already foreseeable global environmental crisis. The authorlooks through the context in which the program was launched and the main initial features of profile that gradually evolved during the following phases. From that point of view, the field of environmental education was marked by some kind of emphasis on schooling, and most of all in basic education, and by focusing on the teaching of sciences, an orientation that seems more appropriate to the developed world and a excessively optimistic exaltation of the possibilities of science and technology as solutions to the environmental issues, to mention only some of the main features. This analysis intends to enlighten this process in order to understand the resemblance with regard to the advices given by the UNESCO within the framework of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) and to encourage a critical discourse about the relation between education and environment in the era of neoliberal globalization.

Keywords : Environmental education; Institutionalization; Environment; International organizations; Environmental educators; Sustainability.

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