The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). Charles Saylan
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be accomplished by the annual yearly progress requirement, which mandates that test scores must continue to increase over those of preceding periods, promoting and assuring better institutional performance. In theory, schools that failed to make annual yearly progress would be placed on a “failing schools” list and eventually would either improve or close. In practice this has not been the case.
While there is much ongoing debate on whether the NCLB Act is worthwhile, its negative impact on environmental education has been substantial. Teachers, under the NCLB Act, have been constrained to “teach to the tests,” which means there is increased emphasis in the classroom on making sure students prepare primarily for the subjects on which they will be tested. This has led to an effective decrease in environmental education because it is not a subject that the architects of the NCLB Act care much about. As a result, environmental literacy has suffered at the precise moment when society stands to benefit most from increased awareness of environmental issues and causes.4
For the coming environmental challenges to our ways of life, we need to abandon the current definition of environmentalism with all its connotations. We must realize we all breathe the same air, drink the same water, need to eat, and need shelter from the elements. We must accept that we are each individually responsible for making sure we do no irrevocable harm to the natural systems that support us.
This collective responsibility has nothing to do with liberal or conservative values. In no way does it conflict with religious or lifestyle choices. It is not a political issue and should not be treated as such. Without a habitable planet, political inclination won't matter much anyway. In fact, one could go so far as to say protecting the ecosystem, and our place in it, is the necessary first step for promoting any given political or religious beliefs to future generations.
It is critical that environmental education teach the concept of individual responsibility, just as traditional education teaches respect for law and order or as religious education teaches its respective version of morality. This must become a fundamental aspect of the environmental educational approach if we are to fix the environment we teach about. Educators will need to overcome the idea one can simply opt out if one chooses not to acknowledge that environmental problems exist.
Some may see this approach as one that incorporates activism in the educational agenda and, thus, oversteps the traditional boundaries of public education. We have been told education must provide the evaluative tools necessary for students to make informed decisions and become productive members of our society—impartial tools that students can use to find their own way in the world. But strict adherence to an impartial approach to public education design does not consider the peril that an increasing rate of environmental degradation creates. This fundamental educational principle is urgently in need of modification.
It is also a common opinion among educators and policy makers that education should not include any attempt to change or influence behavior, because doing so might constitute some form of political advocacy. But there is really no difference between the widespread practice of teaching people to follow the laws of our societies (an action or behavior generally accepted as cultural knowledge) and teaching respect and responsibility for the finite resources of earth on which our lives collectively depend. Learning about our life support system is a civic responsibility.
In California, we take pride in being at the forefront of the country in environmental awareness. The current Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, written in 1998,5 does not, however, specifically mention important environmental issues like pollution, CO2 and methane emissions, energy consumption, oil dependency, or loss of biodiversity. There is almost no mention of the linkages between anthropogenic impacts and environmental change.
The content standards are divided into several broad categories, including physical science, life science, and earth science, each of which is further divided into subcategories to accommodate additional information as students progress through the educational process. Environmental science is mentioned only in general terms and is certainly not emphasized or integrated in a meaningful way. The standards do not provide enough of the tools necessary for students to practically understand the environmental processes that will likely change their world and their lives.
This does not mean that environmental education is not taught to California students. It is, but selectively, where individual teachers or charter school boards have recognized the need, allocated the time, and provided the money. Where environmental education resources exist, they tend to exist outside the system, either as elective teacher-enrichment opportunities or curricula sources, or in the form of student outdoor education programs. These, however, often require that teachers dedicate time for which they are not compensated, and many of the programs are not readily available to all students. The point here is that environmental education is not yet a significant part of the public education system, but it should be.
The No Child Left Inside Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives in September of 2008 by a margin of almost two to one.6 This legislation sought to integrate environmental education into the federal guidelines established by the NCLB Act, create incentives at state level for development of environmental literacy plans, and provide funding for teacher training in environmental education that would be conducted primarily outside the classroom in natural surroundings. The bill was the result of a grassroots coalition of conservation and education groups. Its passage sent a strong message to government that any educational reform must include a substantial environmental component. The 2008 version of the bill never became law, but the bill was reintroduced in 2009 in the hope that meaningful legislation will follow. As of the writing of this book, no such legislation has made it through either the House or Senate committees to which it has been referred.
In California, the Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) was mandated by two assembly bills, passed in 2003 and 2005.7 The initiative's backers hope the EEI will lead the nation in providing environmental curricula to primary and secondary public schools in the state, with an overall goal of creating a high level of environmental literacy in students. The curriculum is based on a set of environmental principles and concepts that reflects causes and effects, which is missing from the current state science standards and even from in-depth presentations of current environmental issues. The EEI is expected to be integrated into the state science content standards sometime in the near future, although it is doubtful this will happen before 2011 or 2012, given the slow nature of the bureaucratic process. This effectively means the first students to benefit from a full EEI-integrated curriculum will graduate from public school sometime around 2022. Better late than never, but hardly in time for effective mitigation of the compelling environmental crises we are facing today.
What the EEI aims to accomplish is unquestionably worthy of support. It is the first legislation of its kind, and was conceived of and brought to fruition through the work of many dedicated and conscientious people over years of effort. The persistent delays and setbacks they encountered were a result of a systemic flaw of modern public institutions: institutions are unable to respond expediently because they are subject to the politics of special interests.
We must now ask ourselves what environmental education ought to accomplish and in what time frame? Say we exclude changing student behavior as a goal of environmental education, because we deem it to be a form of advocacy, even though existing behavior leads us closer to adverse alterations to our environment—as consumption rates and climate studies indicate will happen. Then we should ask ourselves why we are spending money and time on environmental education at all if it's not expected to change our behavior in a way that directly impacts looming problems? It is not a reasonable use of public money to simply inform students about nature without teaching them ways they can act to protect it.
Environmental deterioration does not respect the time frame of public institutions, nor does it wait for assessment reports or pilot program evaluations. It is critically important for us to recognize that the next decades are strategically significant, especially with regard to potential tipping points (which we'll discuss in more detail in a later chapter), and that changes we effect sooner will have greater impacts than changes that come later. We must jump-start institutional processes, not only within state boundaries, but at national and international levels as well.
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