Promotion of Environmental Education in the Spanish Compulsory Education Curriculum. A Normative Analysis and Review

The environmental education and the promotion of the sustainability are two of the main axes in the international guidelines around the world. Education institutions must play an active role to achieve environment and sustainability awareness, and government educational policies should provide education institutions the necessary tools. This study tries to analyze the way in which these topics have been integrated in the Spanish compulsory curriculum through the normative review. Specifically, a content analysis has been used to quantify environmental and sustainability references, both in the subjects they integrate and the contents and standards which they relate with. The results show that: (1) there is not a transversal consideration of these terms; (2) the integration is greater in the Secondary Education; (3) environmental and sustainability treatment is mostly theoretical and focused on instrumental subjects; (4) when the approach is practical, it is often linked to reflections processes. Thus, we conclude on the need for governmental institutions to increase the presence of these terms in the educational curriculum and to integrate them in a transversal way and, through specific content, skills that contribute to build a collective social awareness of the importance of these phenomena in our society, including them as content as well as in the initial and continuous training.