Roger Hart - Why we need environmental education

We need a radical transformation of environmental education in schools that can match the passion that children are increasingly feeling for the subject.

 

Key Points

• Sustainable development brought together the three pillars that we need to consider when thinking about our behaviour in relation to the environment: environmental protection and enhancement, social progress and economic development.
• Young people today know about both sustainable development and children’s rights. When we bring them together, you can understand why they feel that they have the right to go on strike. Earth’s environmental crisis is a children’s rights issue.
• We need a radical transformation of environmental education in schools that can match the passion that children are increasingly feeling for the subject. Children largely learn about distant environmental problems in the abstract while ignoring local ones.
• Environmental education must bring children into a critical engagement with their local environment that results in improved understanding and care for the environment and helps the community move further towards engaged local democracy.