Discourses about the Censorship of the Environmental Education Manual for Teachers, in Argentina (2011)

In Argentina, in the last twenty years, several educational policies of inclusion and integration have been implemented. The main topics are sex education, information and communication technologies and environmental education. The latter is a slowly developed field. Among the sector's public policies, in 2011 the Argentine Ministry of Education and the Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development published the manual "Environmental Education. Ideas and proposals for teachers", which was censored due to pressure from business groups in the extractive production sector. The objective of this article is to address the opposition to the publication, in order to trace aspects that allow a dialogue with the political situation of the period 2007-2011, characterized by various environmental conflicts and the debate of new regulations in the legal field, that caused the entry of the environmental issue into the public agenda. The methodological strategy is based on the use of the techniques of content analysis and discourse analysis, which allowed the manual to be characterized as State discourse, and to address the main opposition discourses. The results show that the manual questioned the legitimacy achieved by the mining and soybean sector, by presenting the consequences of the extractive model from a social perspective.