Science Education: From an Ideology of Greed to an Ideology of Thriving

Life in the Anthropocene is heavily impacted by a small group of humans who, despite falling into a statistical anomaly, have an inordinate amount of influence and systematic control. Science and technology are often bent in the direction of those human interests with inordinate influence in the Anthropocene, resulting in global crisis. Science education tends to be controlled by a mainstream message that ideologically promotes the same value system via anthropocentric and techno-dominant thinking because it is driven by corporate interests and reinforced by educational leaders with similar mindsets. Today’s science education is an effort to make students into workers, which ultimately means that they are servants to corporate profit and limited in their abilities to be stewards of nature. Science education’s discursive “connective tissue” is in service to corporate competition and profit (an ideology of greed). However, science education can be reoriented around an ideology of thriving, where well-being, sociocultural solidarity, ecological restoration, and societal regeneration are intended outcomes. This chapter explores the internalized greed that drives science education at the level of higher education and counternarratives that aim to redesign science education toward a balanced, thriving planet where humans are a more responsible, sustainability-based species.