The Failure of Environmental Education (In US)

Environmental education and legislation grew out of a grassroots movement that was generally regarded as counter-culture. The claims and research of early environmentalists, like “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson, were vigorously attacked and discounted by the chemical industry and their political cronies. Today, attacks on environmentally sound and sustainable policies have largely shifted from the personal to the economic, with critics arguing that sustainable practices would place too high a burden on various economic sectors. Economic hardship is one of the main reasons cited by President George W. Bush for the United States' withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.

While the environmental community's persistence under such adversarial pressure is admirable, we believe that years of constant conflict created a bunker mentality, causing the environmental community to remain exclusively focused on its ideological goals and on self-protection. Even pragmatic evaluations of efficacy were viewed as an assault against the movement, and they were often rejected without acknowledging important criticisms.

With some trepidation, we would like to argue that it is time for the environmental education community to take stock of itself. Problems lie not only with what has been taught, we believe, but also with the way environmental education curricula have been developed and evaluated. We will challenge the hypothesis that environmental education is successful, and we will suggest ways that an “evidence-based” approach can improve environmental education. Finally, we suggest that to create environmentally aware citizens, some difficult lessons must be taught.

In the US, kindergarten–through–12th grade curricula include environmental education modules, and environmental educators who work in the private sector provide highly sought after extra-curricular activities to school districts unable to develop their own programs and to parents who want their children to have more positive environmental experiences. Yet by most objective measures, this money has been wasted, because out of the classroom, people have failed to make the link between their individual actions and the environmental condition. For example, per capita fuel consumption has increased worldwide, with the US leading the pack by a significant margin. Car size has increased notably over the past three decades, with sport utility vehicles and light-duty truck sales, until very recently, making up a large proportion of the passenger vehicle market. Additionally, the fuel economy of modern smaller vehicles has dropped to its lowest point in over two decades. These trends have contributed to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the advent of the industrial age, leading us toward a global climate change of potentially catastrophic proportion and duration. During the past 50 years, between one half and one fifth of all terrestrial biomes capable of producing crops have been modified by human activity. This activity has resulted in a massive loss of ecosystem function and has lead to a serious debate about oil and gas exploration in one of the last large, untouched pieces of Earth—the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ironically, we do not know how much worse it would have been without this investment in environmental education. But the current disconnect between environmental education and personal responsibility is not reassuring and should cause one to stop and re-evaluate both the process by which we teach environmental education and the subjects taught.

Some studies have found that although civic scientific literacy in the US has improved since 1970, only about 20% of the public is considered scientifically literate. Despite this modest literacy, we have no good data on the public's awareness or understanding of environmental problems, nor on whether the public has learned what must be done to preserve biodiversity or reduce the threats to our environment. Many people see a hydrogen economy as part of the solution, for example, but they fail to make the link between clean-burning fuel cells and the source of energy required to make those fuel cells. Coal-fired fuel cell plants may concentrate pollution, but they certainly won't eliminate it. And, the recent call by President George W. Bush for ethanol to replace or supplement automobile fuels may not solve the problem, because ethanol production requires land to be cultivated using carbon-based fertilizers and fuel-burning vehicles for planting, harvesting, and transportation. Modern agribusiness relies extensively on fossil fuels. While older ethanol-production technologies used more energy than they produced, proponents argue that new technology will be more efficient; a suggestion that remains to be properly evaluated.

Of course, there have been some modest successes. The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, and while the act and listings continue to meet resistance from landowners and private interests, some species, such as gray wolves in the lower 48 states, have been rescued from the verge of extinction. We have banned DDT in the US. Pressure on the propellant industry led to the replacement of ozone-depleting CFC propellants, such as Freon. Virtually all tuna is now “dolphin-safe,” a designation that reflects practices designed to reduce the accidental capture of marine mammals. Air and water quality throughout the US has improved (notably in Los Angeles, California, our hometown, where in 1999, there were no smog alerts at all, compared with the 121 first-stage and 11 second-stage smog alerts in 1972. But these largely legislative victories cannot properly test the effectiveness of environmental education, because they fail to measure directly the impact of environmental education on individual behaviour.

More importantly, should such successes truly be considered successes? Consider recycling. We certainly recycle a lot more than we did in 1970, but we still don't know whether recycling really works in a practical and sustainable way. We have successfully concentrated on the mechanics of the recycling process without devoting adequate effort to making sure that the process is economically feasible, and thereby sustainable. This will likely be accomplished by legislative action, governmental incentives and disincentives, and institutional cultivation of “environmental entrepreneuring,” all of which are key factors in developing a place for recycled products in the global marketplace. Viewed this way, recycling should not be called a success until recycled products are routinely used in the manufacturing process. Importantly, recycling a product takes far more energy than reusing it—or simply reducing consumption in the first place.

Consider the Amazon rainforest and the several decades of worldwide efforts to stem the trend of deforestation through education, public awareness, and the implementation of sustainable development strategies. Recent figures released by the Brazilian government show that in the past three years, deforestation levels have averaged above 25,000 square km per year. This represents a failure of environmental protection policy in favour of lucrative soy and cattle farming. We have now lost 20% of the largest tropical forest in the world, an area that contains an estimated 30% of global biodiversity. While some may consider Brazilian development far removed from classroom lessons in North America, US citizens are purchasing both forest and farm products from Brazil—making us partially responsible for Brazil's deforestation. This distressing fact suggests that as environmental educators, we should take a long, hard, and pragmatic look at our methods, because we are failing to make an impact on the problems that are taught in the classroom. Our educational efforts are intended to bring these issues to light and stimulate individual action or increase public awareness, yet they fail to provide the essential support, economic pressure or motivation, or legislative change necessary to create significant, measurable changes on specific issues. Viewed from this perspective, the environmental education community may have failed the greater cause and may indeed have lost sight of its original purpose.

Education involves learning; learning, according to psychologists, is seen when an experience or set of experiences changes behaviour. Yet not all changes in behaviour can be attributed to learning. For example, older children behave differently than younger children for a variety of reasons, including changes in hormone levels as children age. Thus, psychologists have developed strict protocols to determine what evidence is required to properly demonstrate learning, including trials in which individuals must be “pre-tested,” trained in some way, and then “post-tested.” The objective measure of learning is the difference between post-test and pre-test scores. Importantly, there must also be controls that receive no training; controls allow us to isolate, specifically, the effect of learning. Thus, in the field's jargon, we must use a “before-after, treatment-control” design to properly evaluate learning.

It is difficult to say much about the efficacy of environmental education if only students in higher income neighbourhoods are exposed to extra-curricular activities. Thus, the treatments and controls must be randomly assigned with respect to location, socioeconomic status, school quality, etc. Remember, while we claim that environmental education has failed, we have no proper control group with which to properly evaluate how bad things might be if there had been no educational efforts.

Such scientific approaches to evaluate the efficacy of environmental education are either not conducted or are conducted over such a short time period that we have absolutely no idea whether programs or lessons actually work. We are aware of no long-term follow up tests designed to quantify environmental literacy. Moreover, in our experience, while educators feel responsible for providing information or illumination of any given topic, they do not see themselves in the role of changing specific long-term behaviours. Perhaps this feeling stems from environmental education's historical focus on teaching respect of nature. Respecting nature is an essential objective of environmental education, but respect alone has clearly not changed our destructive behaviour. Respect and appreciation are the first steps toward developing environmentally aware citizens. We maintain that environmental education must go beyond teaching respect and awareness, and must focus more on changing consumption patterns; it is through changing our consumption patterns that we will have the largest impact on our environment.

Thus, testing procedures, as currently implemented, are likely to be designed to provide an inventory of assimilated information with no metrics to gauge changes in lifestyle or behaviour. Comprehension of a subject may be measured by a student's ability to memorize key bits of information, rather than the ability to grasp the concepts from which the bits of information measured are derived. This approach has led to a superficially informed society that is unable to act—and it illustrates the failure of environmental education.


-- My point of view...

The parts in bold are points which I find points out the failure of using environmental education to encourage environmental efforts. The ones in italics are those that I find quite amusing and agreeable. On the whole, I think that what this article is saying is kind of helpful as it explains to people of what’s the point of teaching children how to be environmentally friendly in school when they have no way of applying what they learn in school in the real world? So many “adults” are breaking the “rules” of being environmentally friendly. Many say that the young ones are the future. Teach them the proper skills and information and the future will be a better place. I agree with that; but, if we teach them all of the “good things” but do not let them practise it, what is the point? They will just grow up to know that the problem exist but they would not know the solution. Hence, I think what the article hope to do that is to teach students to ACT instead of just KNOWING, and providing a means for them to do so, should be an interesting approach to tackling the failure of teaching environmental studies as a form of environmental effort to curb the current crisis planet earth faces.


- idp.