Education and the Environment: Learning to Live with Limits

Argues that modern schools reinforce an unsustainable worldview and offers a framework for reshaping education to support ecological awareness, interdependence, and a more sustainable society.

In Education and the Environment, Gregory A. Smith offers a clear and urgent rethinking of modern education. Rather than treating environmental crisis and school reform as separate problems, Smith reveals how deeply they are connected. Our educational systems, he argues, often reflect and reinforce a worldview rooted in endless growth, competition, and consumption―precisely the mindset that has contributed to today's environmental and social challenges.

With careful analysis and practical vision, Smith traces how this worldview took hold in education and shows how schools unintentionally prepare students for a society that may no longer be sustainable. He then turns toward possibility: what it would mean to reshape teaching and learning around interdependence, ecological awareness, and long-term responsibility.

Blending critique with constructive pathways forward, Education and the Environment, invites educators, policymakers, and concerned readers to reconsider what schools are for―and what kind of future they are helping to create.

A powerful contribution to the conversation on education, sustainability, and social change, Education and the Environment challenges us to rethink not only what we teach, but how, and why.

Gregory A. Smith teaches in the Education Department at the College of Rural Alaska, University of Alaska.