Should environmental education be included in our schools?
All you have to do is read a little and watch some real "reality TV" shows like "Planet Earth" or programs on the Discovery Channel, or read National Geographic and you'd know what is going on.
Maybe we should teach children in schools so they can know the facts before it is too late. Being inconvienced by not being able to drive your Hummer will pale in comparison to what would happen if the polar ice caps melt!
Answer:
Yes i agree with that. I believe environmental education is fundamental these days. Today's children are our future, in the sense that whatever problems we are facing today they will have to face in the near future. It is therefore important that they learn to conserve energy, not to waste water etc in order to preserve the environment. I also agree with the person that said that parents are an important source of education, because that is true. The best way of learning to switch off the light and not waste water while brushing a person's teeth is at home. But i think the way forward is to increase environmental awareness both in school and at home. Then children will understand how serious the problem is.
I absolutely agree.
i think thats something PARENTS are educated enough about to be teaching their kids.. parents themselves can spend some time with your kids and teach them things like not to litter, turn off lights, dont waste water, etc. and go for walks in the park to teach children about why it's important to keep the environment clean. i personally dont think you need a class for it because every parent already knows what causes global warming, and they can teach that knowledge to their children themselves. parents would also receive benefits from this because they'd be spending quality time with their family while also recalling themselves why they should conserve the environment.
YES! Definitely.
Yes it is very important to save the world and i think it is already included in the syllabus..
Sure. Why not?
Sure, infact I did recieve environmental ed. in the 90s when I was in school..However, were are you getting your facts?
Fish stocks are not depleting
Planet warming..Hmm..It could be natural
Greatest extinction of plants and animals..Nope, reference the ice age for that one.
And, if the polar ice caps melt, I will be safe in my hummer while looking down on the roof of you car that's under water.
yes
Yes this should be taught in our schools. these kids are the ones who will be left in the future to take care of the earth. We could get some kids to change or even create careers that are towards helping the environment.
If it's taught simply to educate and inform, fine. If it's used to promote an agenda on global warming, mass extinction, or for teachers to use it as a platform for their political beliefs, then no.
Global warming has its points but it's nowhere near the massive issue as it's hyped. Should we be concerned? Certainly. Paranoid and under the assumption the world is rapidly dying? No. Turn off the Al Gore and wake up to reality.
There's a need for broader and deeper environmental education in the US and elsewhere. So how can we achieve environmental education for all? One effective approach is including environmental topics in all of the general science courses that are taken by every high school and college student. Although these courses are often undervalued, particularly at the college level, they are a key route to the scientific literacy that is essential to solving environmental problems in industrialized democracies.
There is enormous opportunity here. For example, in the US secondary school students generally take two or three science courses during grades 10 through 12 and non-science college students typically do likewise. Although some students might encounter an interdisciplinary "environmental science" course, most or all of these courses will be in a single discipline such as biology, chemistry, physics or earth science. These single discipline courses do not generally include much in the way of environmental or other societal topics. They easily could, and they certainly should. And a similar situation exists in most nations.
I will frame my argument within the context of a broader argument for science literacy. Why is science literacy so important? The answer is simple: industrialized democracies cannot survive unless their citizens are scientifically literate. Think about it - science and technology drive every industrialized nation. And in democracies, it's the people - the taxi drivers, lawyers, teachers, journalists, politicians, mothers etc. - who decide about energy policy, global warming, science in the classroom, and much more. If they don't understand science, if they have negative attitudes toward science, if they are wrapped up in pseudoscientific baloney, then the outlook for the nation is not good.
But, even in industrialized nations, few people are science literate. They don't know what a molecule is, or what causes the seasons. They can't or won't read a science-related article in the newspaper. About 50% of Americans believe that humans were created separately from the other animals and by a non-natural miracle.
Scientists and science educators are not taking this responsibility seriously. At least at the secondary school and college level, our courses tend to be directed at future scientists rather than at the general public. But science education isn't just about future scientists. It's about all people, it's about everybody's quality of life, and in fact it's about the survival of civilization.
Look at practically any PhD-granting university's science department and ask yourself, "What are this department's priorities?" Highest on the list will be faculty research and publications, followed by PhD students, and then graduate-level courses. The department's own undergraduate science students will be next. In my own field, physics, many departments hold undergraduate programmes in such low esteem that even their own undergraduates receive little attention, and their stream of graduating seniors narrows to just one or two per year. Below the department's own undergraduate majors in priority are the undergraduate courses for students majoring in other sciences. The lowest, and sometimes non-existent, priority is undergraduate education for nonscientists, that is, for that 90% of the students who will graduate to become our K-8 teachers, attorneys, journalists, mothers, business people, politicians, and presidents. These are the people who will determine science's and the planet's future, but you couldn't tell it from the short shrift they get in most PhD-granting science departments.
Far from being the lowest priority, science courses for non-scientists are the most important courses we teach. All the scientific research in the world will do little good if the state of the nation and the state of the planet continue to deteriorate. Every science department worth its salt needs to teach courses to large numbers of non-scientists.
As for students of the sciences, they too need wide-ranging, conceptual, liberal-arts science courses at some point in their career, presumably in high school. Like most other people, most scientists are scientifically illiterate. For example, most scientists finish college with little knowledge of such societal topics as global warming, the scientific process, or energy resources. It's a real mistake to push future scientists directly into a detailed and highly technical "Advanced Placement" science course in high school when they have not first learned the broad concepts of their field and the relevance of these concepts for their own lives and for the planet. All science students need their first high school science courses to be broad, conceptual, and socially relevant. Then they'll be ready for that Advanced Placement course.
Humans have had a massive impact on the environment, particularly since the advent of technology and large expansions in population. The survival of civilization is not guaranteed.
And yet business continues as usual, and most of us continue teaching our science courses as usual, with little or no social content. I find this amazing. It's as though we were sitting in a sinking lifeboat, discussing Newton's laws. Somebody had better think about rescuing the lifeboat! Newton's laws are terrific, but today we must also find room in every science course to consider the health of this rare jewel of a planet. There will be no science education on a devastated Earth.
Every introductory science course should include societal topics. Such topics should not be tacked on to the end of the course, but should instead be integrated into the science so that students experience science and society as really connected. We could insert societal topics at appropriate points throughout the course, somewhat in the manner that traditional problems are inserted into math-based courses. Such inserts can range from a few minutes to an entire lecture.
Again looking at my own field, physics, there are plenty of society-related topics: ozone depletion, global warming, all sorts of transportation issues, the precautionary principle (scientific uncertainty should not be a reason to postpone measures to prevent harm, that is, it's better to be safe than sorry), risk assessment, biological effects of radioactivity, the steam-electric power plant, fossil fuels, nuclear power, all sorts of renewable energy resources, exponential growth and the population explosion, energy efficiency, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, pseudoscience, nuclear weapons, the energy future, and the bottom line in every good introductory course: the scientific process.
There's plenty of good science in these topics, and students are fascinated by their social relevance. Although societal topics occupy only some 15% of the time in my own course, it's the part that students remember best, and the part that seems to attract them into the course. The reason: this stuff is directly relevant to their lives.
Every instructor should include at least a few societal topics in every introductory course. My top choices are overpopulation and global warming, two topics that could fit comfortably into nearly any introductory science course. Overpopulation is a driver of all the other human excesses that are destroying the habitability of this beautiful planet. The "population bomb" is all too real. In fact, it exploded decades ago with devastating effects on Rwanda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China, and especially the United States, where energy shortages, water shortages, congestion, overuse of oil and other resources, enormous carbon dioxide emissions, and uncontrolled overdevelopment are rampant.
But let's end on a happier note. Let me describe some socially relevant science concerning transportation efficiency, suitable for an introductory high school or college course in physics or physical science. Although we often measure automobile efficiencies in kilometres per litre of gasoline, "passenger-moving efficiency" is a more general and useful measure because it can compare different modes of travel and because we really want to move passengers rather than the two-ton car. We can measure it in passenger-kilometres (the number of passengers times the number of kilometres) per megajoule of energy. Measured this way, what is the most efficient way to transport humans?
It turns out that bicycles win the day, with 18 passenger-kilometres per megajoule of energy, followed by walking (with 5), intercity railroad train (1.7), urban bus (0.9), carpool automobile containing 4 people (0.7), commercial airplane (0.4) and commuting automobile with an average occupancy of 1.15 (0.2).
For bicycling and walking the energy comes, of course, from the extra food calories - above those used while resting - consumed during those activities. Looking at passenger-kilometres per megajoule of energy holds all sorts of social lessons about the advantages of trains, mass transit, car pooling, and bicycling.
Now let's broaden our efficiency comparisons to the entire animal and technological kingdoms. How do bikes and buses compare with birds and bees? We shouldn't use passenger-moving efficiency for this comparison, because small creatures like bees would come out far ahead since they use so little energy to transport one passenger. Instead, we need to give the animal credit for its mass, including the mass of any vehicle. So the natural measure for this comparison is "mass-moving efficiency," measured in kilogram-kilometres (the mass of the animal plus any vehicle that might be involved, times the distance) per megajoule. So whales and airplanes get credit, in the numerator, for the large mass that they must transport. Now, in terms of mass-moving efficiency, how do birds, bees, bikes, and buses compare?
Again, the human on a bicycle comes out far ahead, with a mass-moving efficiency of 1100 kg-km/MJ. Runner-up was typical fish (at 600 kg-km/MJ), followed by the horse (500), human walking (300), typical birds (200), intercity railroad train (100), urban bus (55), hummingbird (50), carpool automobile (40), commercial airplane (40), fly and bee (20), commuting automobile (12), and in humble last place, the mouse (5).
In many ways, the bicycle is one of the world's most elegant pieces of technology. What's the secret of the bicycle's efficiency? The answer lies in basic physics: Newton's first law and the second law of thermodynamics. Bicycles have wheels. Rolling vehicles are able to take advantage of Newton's first law by maintaining their motion. Walkers such as horses and humans must start and stop their legs with every step, which involves accelerations, forces, work, and energy. That's why Carl Sagan used to say that if animals ever evolved on a planet that was "paved" by lava outflows, they would evolve wheels. On Earth, there are salamanders that form hoops to roll down hills.
But trains and automobiles are also wheeled. Why are they less efficient than bicycles? The answer is that they also employ heat engines. The second law of thermodynamics declares that engines running at practical temperatures are horribly inefficient. But animals convert chemical energy directly into work so they are not heat engines and aren't burdened by the second law (although they must, of course, obey it).
The bottom line is that we need to teach "relevant science"-science with a social component-to all students.
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