This book is a wake-up call for environmentalists who need to consider how current educational ideals and practices undermine efforts to create a more sustainable future. It is also a wake-up call for educators who continue to base their reform efforts on the primacy of the individual, while ignoring the fact that the individual is nested in culture, and culture is nested in (and thus dependent upon) natural ecosystems. Bowers argues that the modern way of understanding moral education, creativity, intelligence, and the role of direct experience in the learning process cannot be supported by evidence from such fields as anthropology, cultural linguistics, and the sociology of knowledge.

C. A. Bowers is Professor of Education in the School of Education at Portland State University and has written widely on education, modernity, and the ecological crisis. His most recent books include Elements of a Post-Liberal Theory of Education; The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing; Critical Essays on Education, Modernity, and the Recovery of the Ecological Imperative; and Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological Crisis: Toward Deep Changes, published by SUNY Press.