Education and Didactics

The Urgent Transition: from Anthropocentric Collapse to a Biocentric Educational Paradigm in the Climate Crisis

Authors: Thiago de Castro Nobre
Comments: 14 pages. Language: Portuguese. License: CC BY 4.0

The contemporary climate crisis requires an understanding that transcends the purely environmental perspective, configuring itself, in reality, as the ultimate expression of the saturation of an epistemological paradigm that has historically guided modernity. In this context, this theoretical-conceptual article defends the central hypothesis that the persistence of the anthropocentric paradigm — based on the profound division between society and nature — within modern education constitutes one of the structuring factors for the perpetuation and worsening of the global ecological crisis. Through qualitative research based on interdisciplinary hermeneutic analysis, the present study critically reconstructs the historical evolution of the main epistemological matrices: theocentrism, anthropocentrism, and biocentrism. The investigation analytically demonstrates how the current educational and curricular model still reproduces the logic of domination and human-nature separation, drastically limiting the capacity for a civilizational response to urgent climate challenges. Given this systemic diagnosis, it is argued that biocentrism, understood here as an ontology of systemic interdependence and the recognition of life as an intrinsic value, offers the necessary structural and ethical basis for the formulation of a new educational paradigm. It is concluded, therefore, that the transition to a biocentric educational model does not merely represent an innovative pedagogical alternative or an optional ethical choice, but an absolutely unavoidable structural condition for promoting civilizational sustainability, effective ecological literacy, and planetary health in the 21st century.
Category: Education and Didactics