By Paola Roccella, a member of the External Writing Team at ThinkYoung, the first think tank concerned with young Europeans. Paola, 25, is an intern at the International Office of the University of Catania and graduated cum laude in “Foreign languages and literature” from the same University.
Ettore, a five-year child, was looking at me with a questioning expression on his face when I scolded him. He was playing with the running water. I was the entertainer of a group of children aged 5-12 in a summer camp based in Catania, Sicily. I called Ettore and told him: “There are many children of your age in the world who can’t have clean water. If you were one of them, would you like that a luckier child in another part of the world wasted something you need for your survival?”
He listened to what I was telling him in a very concentrated way. After one month of experience with the children in the summer camp, I noticed that they paid a lot of attention to your words if you spoke to them in a way that they could understand with their hearts.
The day after I spoke to Ettore, I saw him playing again with water. I thought that maybe he was too young to understand what I had told him the day before: “Ettore! Don’t you remember what I told you yesterday?” He looked very guilty and said to me: “You told me that, in Africa, children ‘die of lack of water’, so that we shouldn’t waste it. I will never do it again”. I was very surprised and excited by his answer. He had understood and from that day on I didn’t find him playing with water anymore.
This episode makes me think that education isn’t strictly related with school; educators and parents outside the school have the most important responsibility towards children’s education. I think that what children learn outside the classroom walls can be deeply understood and be part of their usual behaviour.
Nowadays people are generally aware of the numerous problems our planet is suffering. Not only these problems are discussed in television and newspapers, but also we can perceive them around us. Despite this, few people think about the relation between environmental problems and our everyday life.
This leads to an important conclusion: it is not lack of knowledge that makes us act in a wrong way, but the lack of willpower in acting in a positive way.
We undoubtedly communicate this lack of willpower to our sons or students; how can we hope that future generations have a more sustainable lifestyle if we don’t give them a good example in the first place?
Children are very imitative: if parents and educators don’t behave in a correct way in front of them, they will probably adopt the same incorrect behaviour.
In her book, Educaciòn ambiental. Una experiencia interdisciplinaria, 1988 (Environmental education. An interdisciplinary experience), Francisca Martìn Moler, a Spanish writer and Professor of environmental education at the University of Madrid, talks about a “pedagogìa del ejemplo” (“teaching by example”). This kind of implicit teachings would achieve more effect than abstract concepts and predications and is strictly connected with children’s ability to imitate.
In ancient Greek society, the relation between education and life was very strict, since the first has the task to prepare to the second.
This is probably what also Harold W. Sobel refers to, when he talks about “Educating for survival” (Educating for survival, 1984). Education for Sobel has an important role in terms of educating for life and, talking about environmental education, it is essential to ensure the survival of our species.
The great Roman writer Seneca (ca. 54 BC – ca. 39 AD), had already established this relation between life and education. According to him, living well means living in harmony with nature and education has to teach individuals how to live well.
In ancient times children and adults learned through experience, imitation, practice, so that learning was an essential part of life. There was no theory, there were no books or schools.
In the International Strategy of Environmental Education (ISEE, 1987:12) education is proposed as “A form of educative practice attuned with life in society”. However in the History of education there is a constant separation between theory and practice. The traditional system of education gives more importance to theory than to practice.
Is it only a problem regarding the educational system of the past? According to the writer Robert Coombs, no. In his book, The global crisis of education (1978), he criticizes the actual educational system, arguing that there is a strong delay in the contents of the books proposed at school compared to the extra-scholastic world.
Besides, a survey elaborated by the Department of Environmental Education of the University Complutense of Madrid – posed to 210 students who had chosen environmental education as one of the subjects in the academic year 1993/94 – shows how young students actually perceive education in our society. 90 % of students answered “No” to the question: “Does education prepare to life?”.
In conclusion, I think that a revised educational system, improved and organized in order to make teaching as useful as possible for its practical application in life, would obtain extraordinary results. Correlatively to the introduction of the subject of environmental education in primary schools, teachers and environmental associations should cooperate together. These last could organize courses for children and teenagers.
If we combine all these elements, I think that statistics concerning the actual level of environmental education would radically improve; and this would imply, of course, a greater respect for nature. The final aim of this process, the survival of the planet and, consequentially, of human beings, is so important, that I think whatever effort in order to achieve it would be worth it.
