Gregory A. Smith

(SUNY Press, 1992)

In this stirring and eloquent book, Gregory Smith clearly describes the social and educational implications of the global environmental crisis. Applying a keen understanding of history as well as neglected sociological and anthropological interpretations of schooling, Smith shows how the development of public education in the modern age has been closely linked to the rise of industrial capitalism and its deeply ingrained assumptions about individualism, competition, progress, and unlimited economic growth. His central argument is that the inevitable exhaustion of the Earth’s resources and the impending devastation of its ecosystem will, before much longer, put an end to perpetual economic expansion and call all these assumptions into question.

As this economic and cultural crisis unfolds — and it is beginning to occur already — we will increasingly be forced to find our personal and collective security in communal values such as cooperation, compassion, and interdependence. Smith argues that it is now time to bring communal and ecological values into education, because young people who have been schooled for competition and personal economic gain will be poorly prepared to live in a more egalitarian and sustainable society. He describes how modern education alienates students from the natural world and from their families and communities as it molds them “into the detached social atoms of a competitive market society” (p. 32). There is a deep moral and spiritual dimension to Smith’s critique, as when he writes that “the glitter of the modem world distracts us from what in other cultures has been a primary human task: growth into maturity and wisdom in the face of the unknown” (p. 40).

Education and the Environment is a visionary, if not prophetic, response to the decline of industrial-age institutions and values. Smith clearly sees the human as well as ecological consequences of modem culture’s obsession with power and materialism, and warns of the suffering that will result if we do not now let go of these values. And yet the book is firmly grounded in the reality of today’s schools; Smith does not await some “paradigm shift” in the collective consciousness, but proposes that many established educational approaches — such as cooperative and experiential learning, community service projects, and student-centered alternative schools, to name a few — are models for the sustainable and compassionate society we must learn to create.

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