Ecocentric Reflections on the Realization of Environmental Education

Abstract

Regarded as a revolutionary current, deep ecology predicted that a new environmental ethics will change the paradigms of Western philosophical thinking, anthropocentric par excellence, with a new perspective to treat the relationship between man and nature. In the light of this view, nature is endowed with intrinsic value which people must respect. Deep ecology is based on a concept of an eco-centric nature that includes both an anthropocentric, as well as a non-human perspective, extending it preoccupations across biodiversity, and being concerned with a process of deep problematization man's relationship with nature. Extending the concept of value on everything that is alive (people, animals, plants, all of which are worthy of moral consideration and respect, and even on non-living entities) can create misunderstanding and confusions at the level of the environmental attitudes and behaviour of children. Starting from the theoretical problems presented earlier, we will investigate in what measure they are found in the Romanian curricula, and the manner in which ecological education is being studied it in the Romanian school. It is true that education cannot solve the problems of the environment, but it can ameliorate them, because through an ecological education it is easier and more economic to prevent, than to repair and to ameliorate the damages brought to nature by the adult generations. In the pedagogical literature, there are four types of intercessions of implementing the ecological education in the process of study. Even though the Romanian curricula has created all the premises for the approach of the ecological education through all the four types of intercessions, to reach the objectives of this education remain still at the preference and judgment of the teaching staff. The problems are: “How well prepared are the teachers to put into practice the ecological education at an intellective and attitudinal level through the intercessions mentioned above, with efficient results?”, and “How much do they see in it a foreground problem in the building up and development of the young's generation personality?”.