Editorial

[Extract] This special issue of Environmental Education Research revisits arguments offered twenty years ago about the then‐documented gap between the rhetoric and philosophy of environmental education and the reality of practices in K–12 schooling. In Stevenson (1987), which is reproduced here as the first article, I argued that this gap should be expected given the traditional purposes and structures of schooling in western industrialised societies. In particular, I pointed out that the ideals expressed in international policy documents at the time for the practice of environmental education conflicted with the dominant curriculum and pedagogical practices of information transmission and the assimilation of unproblematic factual knowledge in schools. I offered an explanation of the dominant practices in terms of the historical purpose of schools, their structural organisation, the primacy of demands on teachers to maintain order and control, and teachers' ideological suppositions about knowledge, teaching and learning