The Role of Curriculum Documents in Youth’s Ideological Upbringing: Consuming or Loving the World?

Abstract

Canadian Geographic is one of the best-known environmentally-oriented magazines in Canada, widely used in schools across the country in geography and science classes. Recently, the magazine has partnered with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), which is portrayed as a non-partisan non-profit organization but is widely recognized as an advocate for the Canadian Oil and Natural Gas industry. Thus students may learn about the flows of rivers, patterns of species' migrations, and the natural world from the perspective of the oil and gas industry. In this chapter, we explore Ontario Grades 1 to 8 mathematics, science, and social studies, history, and geography curricula using sociocultural perspectives and summative content analysis research methodology. We conclude that the analysed curricula focus on using and changing the Earth to satisfy human needs rather than on loving the Earth and giving back to it; the curricula reinforce a consumerist approach to the world by accepting human needs as given, not inquiring into how these needs are constructed, how they are enacted, or how they impact the ecological world.