Education, sustainable or otherwise, as simulacra: A symphony of Baudrillard

Preamble: Singers gathering on stageThis is a paper for three voices. An attempt at a philosophic experience in the symphonic form. The first voice carries the tune and holds the shape of the paper as it focuses on Baudrillard and proposes that public education in Canada today is in fact a simulacra. The second voice has more room to roam, tracing some of the Western philosophical underpinnings of Baudrillard’s stages of the simulacra from Aristotle to Saussure’s centralization of human language and out to the disappearance of the signified altogether. And the third voice, plays a parallel tune to the first two but focuses on the evolution of education for sustainable development. Eventually all three voices find harmonies around the challenges of their respective simulacrum (i.e. public education, human language, and education for sustainable development) and will, as a dramatic conclusion, seek to offer some important educational implications. We have employed, as seen above, different fonts for each voice and divided the paper along symphonic lines (i.e. sonata, adagio, scherzo, and rondo) with each movement being accompanied by one stage of Baudrillard’s development of the simulacra. We encourage the reader to think of this paper as a philosophical score choosing to read each voice separately or all three together seeking resonances along the way.