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.
This 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
