Education and Bildung in the Anthropocene: cartography of a field in tension

Abstract

This paper develops a theoretical framework for navigating tensions between education, Bildung, and the Anthropocene. Formal education faces a paradox: embedded in cultural traditions and power structures, it must reorient itself towards planetary crises. We introduce a descriptive, didactically grounded model that extends the didactical triangle to map relations among the Anthropocene, formal education, and Bildung. Drawing on Chakrabarty’s distinctions between the global and the planetary, and between Homo and Anthropos, together with Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, we construct an onto-epistemic–anthropological map structured along vertical (planetary–glocal) and horizontal (lifeworld–symbolic) axes. The framework identifies six curriculum tensions concerning knowledge, scale, agency, responsibility, world-centredness, and openness. Rather than resolving these tensions through holistic or transdisci-plinary synthesis, the model seeks to keep them visible and productive. Education in the Anthropocene requires a renewed Bildung capable of moving between scales and symbolic forms while preserving disciplinary rigour, epistemic diversity, and openness to uncertainty.