Shengmeng (Summer) Cui
Environmental education occupies a paradoxical position in contemporary schooling: proclaimed as urgent by policymakers, endorsed across international frameworks, yet persistently marginalised in practice. This paper argues that the intractability of this paradox cannot be resolved at the level of curriculum design, pedagogical method, or institutional policy, because its roots are ontological. Drawing on recent literature across environmental education research, philosophy of education, and environmental philosophy, the paper traces the problem through four interconnected dimensions. The first concerns the contradictions embedded in what environmental education teaches and for what purpose. The second is the mismatch between the abstract, universal learner presumed by dominant frameworks and the culturally embedded, place-specific persons who actually inhabit classrooms. The third is the marginalisation of non-Western knowledge traditions by frameworks that position Western science as the default mode of environmental knowing. The fourth is the structural incapacity of the modern school—itself a product of the modernity that generated ecological crisis—to house genuinely transformative environmental education. The paper concludes by sketching the contours of an ontological reorientation, drawing on diverse philosophical traditions including Anthropocosmism, ancient natural philosophy, Indigenous epistemologies, and contemplative approaches. It argues that environmental education requires not better implementation of existing frameworks but a more fundamental rethinking of what it means for human beings to know, inhabit, and be responsible to a living world.