In this contemporary era marked by the globalization of capitalism, it is no longer conceivable to imagine a society that exists independently of capitalism. Consequently, any theory of social transformation that lacks an explicit understanding of capitalism has lost its significance. From this perspective, current debates surrounding sustainability and education are problematic in that they often exhibit limited engagement with capitalism and tend to advance theories of social change while maintaining an ambiguous attitude towards it. In contrast, Huckle’s discourse, which played a pioneering role in the development of Critical Environmental Education (CEE) in the 1990s, and offered a critique of capitalism, holds potential for analyzing the relationship between environmental education and the transformation of capitalism from a Marxist standpoint. The aim of this paper is to critically examine Huckle’s CEE and explore the role of CEE as a critique of capitalism.

  The key characteristics of his approach are as follows: (1) advocating an understanding of capitalism from the perspective of the real domain, (2) emphasizing the importance of democratic consensus-building based on open argument, and (3) highlighting the significance of ideological critique in environmental education from the standpoint of green socialism. However, the theoretical challenge in Huckle’s CEE lies in the fact that the third claim contradicts the preceding two.

  Therefore, this paper proposes a CEE that aims to understand environmental issues from the real domain of capitalism rather than focusing on ideological critique. This form of CEE emphasizes theoretical learning aimed at understanding environmental issues within the real domain of capitalism. Such education will promote an understanding of the relationship between people's daily lives and environmental issues and enable solidarity with those who, through their awareness of the problems of capitalism, address various social challenges beyond environmental issues.

  In recent years, research and practice were conducted on educational programs that aimed to set the scene for decision-making and consensus-building in science and technology. However, these aspects lacked sufficient examination from the evaluation viewpoint. Therefore, the current study developed a psychometric scale that divides the sense of values of students in decision-making and consensus-building in school education. To this end, we first extracted scales from existing literature, collected items, and established a configuration proposal by independently creating a few items. After making significant revisions to the items based on expert advice and preliminary research, we recruited 466 junior high school students to select scales and determine factors. Furthermore, we classified the sense of values of the students into two factors and confirmed high reliability for each factor. The result suggested that qualitative differences exist in the decision-making and consensus-building processes of students.