Reflections on environmental education: past development and future concepts

Abstract

In attempting to review the recent progress and outline a few of the remaining problems in environmental education it is important, but also because of the scope of the task extremely difficult, to find a suitable structure that will provide some continuity. I have elected therefore to comment firstly on the fundamental issue of philosophy, of what we mean by environmental education and what we acknowledge as practical examples; secondly to discuss a few prominent issues of teaching and learning in four different spheres of education: primary and secondary schools, higher education (universities and colleges of advanced education), technical and further education (TAFE), and non-formal education; and lastly to comment on two general issues in environmental education that relate to the entire field, the first to participation and the need to identify and make suitable provision for those sections of the community who have as yet had no formal contact with environmental education, and the second to the special problems and teaching demands arising from its characteristic focus on the development of attitudes and values and appropriate behavioural change.To take firstly the issue of philosophy: it appears that the level of discussion on the nature and objectives of environmental education has advanced considerably in the past decade. The sometimes bitter and generally unproductive arguments of the early 1970s about what was and was not related to environmental education seem now to have largely disappeared, being replaced by a more or less common dialogue about the nature and purpose of environmental education and ways in which it can be further developed. Nevertheless, despite this general and encouraging trend there still exist some significant areas of disagreement and confusion. One example concerns the distinction between environmental education as a movement or collective enterprise and as a description of individual activities or programmes. This distinction is an important one because of different expectations — in the former case that it necessarily reflects an interdisciplinary character and has a clear emphasis on problem-solving and decision-making activities; but this is not to say that a particular programme which fails to reflect these emphases has nothing to contribute to environmental education.