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Essay about New Approaches in Environmental Education

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Education is very important aspect of our lives. It helps us grow and develop and shapes our ethics and morals. We carry these ethics and morals with us throughout life and are what molds us as characters. Our current school system is very superficial and training us for the industrial system. It enforces that we teach more math and science classes to use as tools for our future. With the main focus on these subjects, we overlook other subjects that also play an important role in how we shape our futures. Environmental education is a very important subject that is often overlooked in the education system. Modernization and industrialization has taken a heavy toll on the one thing that sustains our existence. Through our selfish acts, …show more content…

The economy we live in todays primary concern is making profit, whether or not the benefits outweigh detrimental effects of growth on the natural environment. Everything in the world is objectivized. When an object or an entity is objectivized, we take away from the being or self and is reduced to merely material, function, or feature. For example, a cow is a living creature that deserves just as much right to inhabit this planet along side us as anything else. From a objectivized stand point, the cow merely becomes an object of property, food. We only look at what the cow can provide for us. Instrumentalism is direct consequence society’s rational anthropocentrism. Humans believe that they are at the top of a value pyramid because of our intelligence and our ability to rationalize and reason everything. Intrinsic value becomes completely overruled by our own intelligence. To view something morally is to view it intrinsically. Unfortunately, humans only apply instrumental value to things. Beings and entities that are unable to reason, automatically fall under society and are reduced to mere instruments. One moral injustice in conjunction with our rationalized anthropocentric views is the extinction of species. Society identity of self image views our selves in this hierarchal worldview where we see ourselves as superior to other beings. This gives us the natural dominance over “lower

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