When handling issues of ESD, or Kogai education as it is referred to in Japanese, it is unavoidable to deal with capitalism. When it comes to environmental education, capitalism has been criticized, but much of the discussion has focused on individual ideas and ideologies rather than on the social structure itself. From an eco-Marxist point of view, however, ethical solutions do not make much sense without understanding and changing the capitalistic modes of production. The purpose of this paper is to examine environmental issues and the social structure of capitalism from the viewpoint of K. Marx's theory of value, and to draw out the issues of critical environmental education theory rooted in the criticism of capitalism.

  In capitalism based on the fundamental distinction between nature (means of production) and human beings, people depend on the exchange of means of life in the market. In doing so, various goods are exchanged based on value assessed by the socially necessary labor-time spent on individual goods. As a result, value controls the production and distribution of labor products in society. Capitalists follow this law of value, not only wasting nature that is not directly involved in value formation, but also using technology to exploit nature to gain more surplus value.

  Based on this theoretical consideration, the issue of critical environmental education as a critique of capitalism is to understand environmental issues as those rooted in the economic system of capitalism itself, and to place the object of educational change not in people's ideas, but in the actions of people governed by the laws of value.

  Although it is widely suggested that the beginning of environmental education in Japan is education conducted to teach about conservation and pollution, there are only a few historical details from the viewpoint school education. This focuses on Seijo Elementary School during the "Taisho New Education Movement" period, and seeks to examine the transition of the relationship between "nature studies", "lower-grade science" and "play time" utilizing the magazine "Studies On Educational Problems", published by Seijo Elementary School. Since its establishment, Seijo Elementary School has been conducting educational experiments incorporating "nature studies" to establish science as a subject for lower grades. However, after about ten years, the research on science for lower grades decreased, and "nature studies" continued as a research issue for "play time" together with integrated education. The research of "nature studies" at Seijo Elementary School has created not only the foundation of learning about nature in lower-grade science, which led to the introduction of environmental education, but has also shifted to the study of "play time" and the establishment of "Living Environment Studies", which is the main subject in current environmental education for lower grades in elementary school.

  Two approaches are commonly used in the evaluation of environmental education programs: internal evaluation conducted by practitioners responsible for implementing the programs, and external evaluation conducted by outside researchers or experts. However, a third approach utilizing both internal and external evaluation through collaborative research is also expected to have merit. In this study, two practitioners who were staff members of the Japan Environmental Education Forum (JEEF) responsible for executing the Kiyosato Meeting and two outside researchers collaborated to conduct action research to evaluate the meeting. This paper focuses on how their collaboration took place as well as the outcome of the process. An analysis of dialogue from several meetings revealed that there was a gap between what the practitioners and researchers talked about in the first meeting, but this gap narrowed in the following meeting and both sides began to discuss the program using similar words. The practitioners and researchers created a logic model illustrating the short-term and long-term goals of the Kiyosato Meeting, which was revised by the practitioners and other JEEF staff members and later used to promote the program. This collaborative action research led to changes in the goals and objectives of the Kiyosato Meeting in 2018. For example, the program no longer focuses solely on environmental education but has updated its mission as "education to establish a sustainable society".