The Earth by the Book: Anthropocentric and Productivistic Sustainability in School Texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7346/-fei-XXI-01-23_02Keywords:
Sustainable development, Agenda 2030, Foucault, Anthropocentrism, Productivistic performanceAbstract
The article reflects on the representation of the Earth, as it is expressed in school textbooks. The work explores, in particular, the categories of sustainable development and on the environment, present in four school textbooks, published between 2015 and 2022 and inspired by the 2030 Agenda, which have a great national diffusion in teaching geography. The analysis, which follows Michel Foucault's theory of discourse, highlights a compartmentalized language that delimits the idea of the Earth, corroborating an anthropocentric domination concern. This basic reasoning implicitly pushes to value the need for human performances whether it involves the environmental protection or the productivism. The suppression of the Earth's potential as "otherness" and the enhancement of the fully performing human subject can open up favourably to the functionalist-entrepreneurial domain of learning and strongly attenuate the ethical-relational educational development on which the democratic life is based.
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