Respect and care for the common home: an itinerary of education for sustainability

Objectives The environmental issue in our time is more delicate than ever from a cultural and ethical-educational point of view. Never before has there been such a need for new consciences in the new declination of ethically relevant issues, orienting people towards lifestyles that respect the environment in which they live and safeguard the environment that surrounds us. Material and methods What is needed is an educational and training programme that begins at basic school level (Persi, 2012) and raises awareness of nature and leads to the consideration that it is not just a resource, but a space of existence in which we can live with responsibility, convinced that the Earth is our common 'home' (oikos), in need of care because, after all, it is the conditio sine qua non of our own existence lived with dignity. Results Education is certainly an essential tool in the pursuit of sustainable development, but it cannot be achieved, as S. Sterling argues, within a logic in which the educational paradigm is connoted as mechanistic and reductionist, increasingly managerial and oriented to a know-it-all. Conclusions Sustainable development as a horizon of truth allows us not to evade any question of meaning in the face of the protection of the environmental heritage, allows us to think of ecologically and ethically oriented educational processes, and therefore to conceive of the environmental issue as a cultural fact, fundamental and priority for the liveability of the person and the entire planet. The search for an "ecological conceptual background is the necessary prerequisite for the implementation of educational pathways capable of nurturing a differentiated and polyphonic way of thinking about nature, which is one of the essential factors in generating a new cultural attitude" (Mortari)