The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). Charles Saylan
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can be accomplished only if we acknowledge our individual responsibility and, as noted earlier, abandon the idea that environmentalism is a political choice. To be practical, we need to ask ourselves: how likely is this to happen? Even if we are at the outset of a global environmental catharsis, are the institutions of government and enforcement even capable of moving fast enough to make a significant difference in the short-term effects of global warming? Given the bureaucratic process and the array of special interests at work, it is unlikely we will see effective legislation or policy in the near future.
Our educational institutions are often large and unwieldy, and the task of educational reform is, without question, a daunting one. But institutions are composed of individuals, and individuals can initiate grassroots efforts with great effectiveness, even from within unwieldy institutions. From an educational perspective, the best hope for positive feedback in the short-term probably lies with efforts moving from the ground up rather than from the top down.
A review of environmental education must take the overall structure of public education into account. Simply shoving some environmental curricula into existing school programs probably won't help much. Environmental education must motivate individuals to act on environmental problems, and it cannot accomplish this without an integrated approach.
Our educational process trends toward specialized, compartmentalized vocational training, and programs developed in response to the No Child Left Behind Act tend to exacerbate this by emphasizing some areas of study over others. Little thought is given to teaching logic, which one can argue is the basis for common sense. History, as well, has fallen by the wayside, as has literature, through which students can learn the morality of our societies. Civics, by which we may understand how to live and participate in a democratic process, is not well incorporated into the current overall educational curriculum. How, then, can we expect our children to grow into involved, concerned, and productive citizens capable of supporting the democratic ideals we supposedly live by if we fail to provide them with the experience to do so?
The democratic system in the United States depends on an informed citizenry. The founders of the American republic believed this and viewed an educated populace as both a critically important defense against the rise of tyranny and a fundamental necessity for self-government. Thomas Jefferson was a strong proponent of national public education.8 He advocated providing a formal education as a basis for lifelong learning, a pursuit he believed represented humanity's purest endeavor. Success, in Jefferson's opinion, was not monetary but rested on contribution to and participation in the collective society.
But success in today's societies is generally measured in monetary terms. For example, when we talk about the status of nations, we rank them by economic progress as developed, developing, or underdeveloped nations. We would not apply the term developed to a society that had learned to care physically and culturally for its people if it lacked economic or industrial infrastructure. In providing students with tools for leading productive, successful lives, we may need to reevaluate our definitions of success to accommodate our changing world of diminishing resources and increasing population.
John Dewey believed schools are social institutions where students learn from experience within a community rather than through abstract lesson plans that have little bearing on the students' individual realities. Educative activity, reconstructed or transformed, reveals the value or meaning of the experience, thereby increasing the ability to direct subsequent experience.
Dewey saw teachers as members of an organic community rather than as those whose job it is to “impose certain ideas or form certain habits.”9 He envisioned the teacher as a sort of guide who provided influences appropriate to the community and then helped students to respond to these influences. Dewey believed careful and sympathetic observation of the student's emerging interests, which he saw as signs of their growing power, would reveal developmental stages reached and offer a preview of what influences to apply in later stages.
Dewey also believed political responsibility rests not only on government but also on the individuals living in a given social system, and this capacity for political responsibility would emerge through the public education experience. Current public education, especially since the passage of the NCLB Act, misses these important concepts by instead emphasizing standardized achievements and short-term assessment, an emphasis that tends to further separate the goals of public education from that of fostering good citizens.
The rate of adult illiteracy in America around the time Dewey was writing My Pedagogic Creed was high, with 20 percent of the population unable to read or write in any language. As the twentieth century progressed, the nation's illiteracy rate underwent a prolonged and dramatic decrease, and in 1979 it dropped to just under 1 percent of the population.10 It is important to remember, however, that these statistics reflect a strict definition of literacy as the ability to read and write simple sentences, and literacy tended to increase as public schools became more accessible to the general population.
Functional literacy, on the other hand, attempts to quantify the ability to function in everyday society and is measured by a variety of things, including the ability to read and comprehend job postings, past-due notices, and instruction manuals and to solve simple arithmetic problems. The degree of functional literacy in society is hard to calculate, considering the broad scope the term encompasses. There is strong speculation that the percentage of functionally illiterate adults in Western society has increased in the last fifty years. If true, this would help explain a decline in civic concern and an increase in political apathy. Environmental education must foster functional literacy if it is to accomplish any measurable impact on environmental problems.
The barrage of information confronting us today is unparalleled in human history. We surf the Internet, watch record amounts of television, check e-mail, monitor an ever-expanding array of social networks, endlessly text-message each other, and chat on cellular phones, all the while plugged into our iPods. All this input ought to enrich us, but instead of being better informed, we are becoming more frustrated and confused by the sheer quantity of information there is to digest. This invokes Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and what Neil Postman summarized when he wrote, “The truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”11
As a result of information overload, we increasingly turn to blogs or television for synopses of current events and issues. On the surface, this seems like an efficient choice for a busy populace, but the media tends to play to an identified audience, and objective journalism tends to drop by the wayside. As Matthew Kerbel writes, “If it bleeds, it leads,” referring to the media's focus on stories that attract consumers.12 As a result, the gap between liberal and conservative widens, and our ability as citizens to reason and compromise diminishes. Meanwhile, we tend to abbreviate communication and summarize knowledge. These are trends that do not foster working together to solve environmental or any other problems.
The environmental problems we face have been exacerbated by the lack of definitive action on almost everyone's part. Where several decades ago one might have argued we didn't know any better, that argument simply doesn't hold much water anymore. There has been much disinformation and foot-dragging on the part of our industrial and government leaders, who have taken advantage of our shortened attention spans to prolong profiting from old technologies and squeezing the last drops out of diminishing resources. An educated and motivated citizenry would not have allowed this to happen so easily, if at all. Public education must accept some of the responsibility for failing to keep pace with the needs of an increasingly complex society.
Notwithstanding, much has been accomplished through the efforts of environmental educators, most of them working via self-organized, independent channels. The strides made in environmental education have had a massive impact on public awareness in a relatively short time frame and are an excellent example of grassroots success in the face of numerous obstacles, including sluggish institutions and political attacks. Without environmental education, we likely would not now have widespread recycling, environmental impact assessments, cleaner air and water in many communities, local decreases in pollution and urban runoff, and increased industrial accountability, to give just a few examples. But this is not enough. The successes of twenty years ago are not the successes needed today. As environmental education meets a social climate