This paper begins with a recognition that questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and our relations to the natural world are increasingly significant and requiring of a response not only as philosophers of education but also as citizens of the planet. As such the paper explores five of the key journals in philosophy of education in order to identify the extent, range, and content of current discussions related to the environment. It then organizes and summaries the articles that were located (...) while seeking to identify the extent, possibilities, and limitations of current discussions relating to the environment in the philosophy of education community. The hope is that ultimately this work is an invitation to anyone, regardless of tradition, orientation, and expertise, to contribute to the expansion and deepening of both theory and practice in the face of this most serious of challenges. (shrink)

Preamble: Singers gathering on stage This is a paper for three voices. An attempt at a philosophic experience in the symphonic form. The first voice carries the tune and holds the shape of the paper as it focuses on Baudrillard and proposes that public education in Canada today is in fact a simulacra. The second voice has more room to roam, tracing some of the Western philosophical underpinnings of Baudrillard’s stages of the simulacra from Aristotle to Saussure’s centralization of human (...) language and out to the disappearance of the signified altogether. And the third voice, plays a parallel tune to the first two but focuses on the evolution of education for sustainable development. Eventually all three voices find harmonies around the challenges of their respective simulacrum and will, as a dramatic conclusion, seek to offer some important educational implications. We have employed, as seen above, different fonts for each voice and divided the paper along symphonic lines with each movement being accompanied by one stage of Baudrillard’s development of the simulacra. We encourage the reader to think of this paper as a philosophical score choosing to read each voice separately or all three together seeking resonances along the way. (shrink)