Umweltpädagogik in der Postmoderne : eine philosophische Studie über die Krise des Subjekts im umweltpädagogischen Diskurs

Abstract

Already thirty years ago the worldwide project Environmental Education was drawn up with the goal of formulating extensive programmes of instruction that would bring about a change in people's thinking and behaviour in the face of continuous environmental destruction. The accelerated exploitation of nature and existing empirical impact research studies confirm, however, that environmental education has largely been a failure. This philosophical study pursues the question of why enlightenment in the sphere of environmental education has had such little effect. In doing so Germany and Finland hold good as national case examples. Critical examination is given to theory models and institutionalized conditions of environmental education which are supposed to sensitize the subject to modified behaviour with respect to nature and the environment. The traces of an instrumental thinking vis-a-vis nature are searched after in a philosophical-historical discourse. In the process the investigation orientates itself on the culture-critical theses of earlier Critical Theory within the scope of the late capitalist Modern. In a further analytical step the study concerns itself with selected subject-philosophical deconstructions of the Postmodem. The recognized problems of the environmental-pedagogical subject in the Postmodern have a fundamental significance where the analyses of paradoxes in environmental education are concerned. The immanent impediments of environmental education lie not only in its ambivalent concept of nature and scanty criticism of society and capitalism but above all in the crisis of the pedagogical subject. The perception of the ecological crisis and nature-indebted behavior construct themselves as an individual decision, which, however, is constantly inhibited by pluralized models of interpreting the world and cultural-industrial simulations.