The Handicapping «Forgetting» of Waste Workers in the Approach of Education to the Sustainable Development of Society

Among the problems of postmodernism, the article will make a reasoned plea for waste management education for sustainable development. While some academics criticize the term "development" as a paradigm of endless utopian capitalist evolution, there is a consensus on the need to change society's relationship to the world and to adopt more appropriate behaviours. Unfortunately, waste management is not "thought" as a cultural need for education, but as a stack of sensitization actions and the prescription of an ideal of cleanliness linked to the efficiency of the function. Waste abandoned in inappropriate spaces (litter) and made 'visible' by the abandonment of masks related to the health crisis is not taken into account in expectations of improvement, creating the 'dropping out' of a large part of the population according to Vygotsky's theory in the proximal development zone. In the same movement, the sensitization action for better waste management is carried out by invisibilisation and maintaining the segregation of waste workers, present in all living areas, in contact with actual behaviour. Workers in the waste sector are ignored and invisible, even in the recent information report presented to the national assembly on "precarious" jobs in the link. Taking into account the resources offered by the educational sciences, particularly the pedagogy of decision-making could help to change the role of these professionals to improve the relationship between citizens and their waste, as is already the case in some municipalities.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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