Environmental responsibility in educational research: the difficult combination of knowledge, power, doing, and duty

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze, based on the thinking of the German philosopher Hans Jonas, how environmental responsibility presents itself as a challenge for educational research and practice in the contemporary world. To this end, we will begin by analyzing how, according to the philosopher, the “new” has become a kind of recommendatory epithet and a central mark of modernity, mobilizing the efforts of education in the service of the permanent state of revolution founded by science and technology. We will show how this revolution begins with a change in the status of knowledge, which has been hijacked by the logic of power and doing, to the detriment of duty - so that technology is detached from ethics. We’ll explain below how this process has disfigured the role of education insofar as it has broken with the ideas and values of tradition in favor of the rise of the ideal of innovation, the consequences of which are revealed today in the depletion of natural resources, the extinction of species and the risk of the disappearance of the human species itself. In this scenario, education has a cosmic task: to educate a sense of belonging to humanity, rescuing values such as frugality and teaching fidelity to the Earth.