ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question of how schools and educators can make the shift towards a sustainable future. It argues that mass schooling emerged in the midst of industrialisation and urbanisation, but emphasise that this was the moment of the rise of what environmental historians increasingly call 'fossil capitalism'. The chapter describes the dramatic transformation that occurred in people's relationship to the natural world in the period after 1945. It suggests that the key tension that has arisen in the work is that between idealist and materialist views of the causes and possible ways out of the crisis. To put it sharply, the tension is between 'green' and 'red' versions of environmentalism. The chapter shows this in terms of a choice between 'green capitalism' and 'ecosocialism', and outlines a series a concepts that will be useful in developing the 'post-carbon curriculum'.
