ABSTRACT
While children in the U.S. in the 1930s were listening to Jack Benny and Charlie McCarthy every Sunday evening, radio was turning young boys in Germany into Hitler Youth who could hardly wait to die for their Fuhrer. In 375BC Plato wrote that the well being of a state depends on the education of the people who inhabit it. Plato’s insight is all but forgotten today. The memory lapse is due to what U.S. historian of education Lawrence Cremin called “the grand jeté” of 20th century educational theory—the huge leap from the broad societal sense of education that Plato had in mind and that this book is about to a direct instruction or school-related sense. The reduction of education to schooling has made its way into the 21st century and has rendered our daily doses of miseducation invisible. The educational campaign on the environment’s behalf has a difficult job: it needs to figure out how to keep environmental miseducation from doing harm without adopting Plato’s solution of wide-scale censorship.
