Critical assumptions of environmental education for emancipation

Abstract

This work deals with theoretical reflections on how environmental education can bring emancipation to the subjects involved in their educational practices. It aimed to reflect on what assumptions are necessary for an environmental education that is intended to be critical, in order to promote human emancipation. For that, it used a bibliographic research methodology of qualitative and theoretical character. As a result, it was possible to observe the need to insert discussions on: the ontological bases of environmental education; the categories present in the critical theories that subsidize environmental educational practices; dialectics as a theoretical, epistemological and methodological assumption; and emancipation itself as a teleology of critical environmental education. It was concluded that for an environmental educational practice based on critical assumptions in order to achieve human emancipation and balance between humanity and the human being and nature, as an alternative to the reductionist, conservative and naturalistic approaches, it is necessary to consider theoretical, methodological and epistemologically that environmental problems are closely linked to social ones. And, for that, it is necessary a critical apprehension of reality from the present ideologies and utopias and by the ability, by itself, to find the ways that promote their subjective changes in front of themselves, the world and the other, accompanied by changes collective agreements.