Critics+Rise+Up+Against+Environmental+Education

Education = Critics Rise Up Against Environmental Education = By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr Published: April 22, 1997 A generation after the teach-ins of the first Earth Day, environmental education has come of age in the United States. Today, 31 states require schools to incorporate environmental concepts into virtually every subject in all grade levels. Some even go so far as to require special training in environmentalism for all teachers. High schools are teaching such sophisticated courses in ecology that top students can receive college credit. The maturing of environmental education thrills environmentalists, who see millions of allies growing up in the nation's schools. For unlike any other subject, environmental education not only gives students information, but also encourages them to turn precepts into action outside the schoolroom. But this state of affairs -- particularly the call to action it promotes -- does not please everyone. A backlash is developing among people who say the environmental education movement is based on flawed information, biased presentations and misguided objectives. At worst, they contend, impressionable children are being browbeaten into an irrational rejection of consumption, economic growth and free market capitalism. When you look at what is happening in environmental education, it sets any reasonable person reeling at the abuses, said Michael Sanera, a policy analyst at the Claremont Institute, a conservative research organization in California. What the kids tend to get is the catastrophic, doomsday version of environmental problems. In language equally bold, environmentalists argue that nothing short of the future of the planet is at stake. We won't forge a sustainable society until we have nurtured a generation that is imbued by a guiding environmental ethic, said Gaylord Nelson, a former United States Senator who organized the first Earth Day in 1970. Mr. Nelson is now a counselor at the Wilderness Society, a leading national environmental organization based in Washington. At the heart of the debate is the kind of project under way at Kramer Middle School for Environmental Studies in southeast Washington, where children have built a boat to explore the Anacostia River -- one of the most polluted in the nation. As Kramer develops its environmental studies program, it is getting help from the Environmental Protection Agency. An E.P.A. official for regional water quality issues has an office at the school, and the agency has given Kramer two grants for environmental studies. Nancy Berry, the principal of the 250-student school, says she hopes the program will help students develop an awareness, a consciousness of taking good care of our earth. But that does not imply a political agenda, she said. We are not jumping on one specific action, protesting and being adamant about it, Mrs. Berry said. I'm not going down that activist road at all. In its solicitations for grant applications, the E.P.A. stresses evenhandedness. Environmental education does not advocate a particular viewpoint or course of action, E.P.A. guidelines say. (In the last five years, the E.P.A., with Congressional authority to spend $13 million on environmental education, gave grants to about 1,200 such projects.) But a report by a conservative research center in Washington, the George C. Marshall Institute, citing half a dozen experts in the field, noted that unlike most schooling from kindergarten through 12th grade, environmental education often expressly encourages students to change their own behavior and that of their society. Promoting good personal behavior as a civic responsibility is to be applauded, but promoting a particular kind of environmental activism is not, said the report. Clearly, environmental groups have encouraged teachers to study the role of advocacy groups. An example can be found in materials produced by the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research and policy group in Washington, which has prepared an extensive curriculum package for high schools. The guide's unit on citizen action tries to teach students about the role of nongovernmental organizations, like the well-known environmental advocacy groups. By organizing into groups, they cajole, demand and persuade governments into saving natural resources, building housing for the poor, and halting the logging of ancient forests, the guide says. One case study shows how a coalition of students collected 100,000 signatures on a petition to Congress calling for steps to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, which threaten to alter the earth's climate. But nowhere are attacks on the quality of environmental education more forceful than in the denunciation of some of the most widely used teaching materials. With few exceptions, I found that textbook treatment of environmental issues is influenced by an ideological view that presents human beings as evil and blames the United States in particular and Western industrial societies in general for every environmental ill, Mr. Sanera wrote in a report on texts used in Wisconsin. A political scientist who in 1995 led a successful campaign to overturn Arizona's environmental education law, Mr. Sanera is co-author of a new book titled Facts Not Fear. He is part of a loose network of critics from more than a dozen groups who have been actively promoting their point of view. Marianne Manilov, director of a pro-environmentalist California group called the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, called the campaign carefully masterminded ploys by industries with an anti-environmental agenda. The center has published a 73-page study tracing the activities of critics. Mr. Sanera said the test of his ideas should be the scientific validity of the specific points the critics make. Those, too, are ripe for debate. For example, both Facts Not Fear and the Marshall Institute's study criticized textbooks for their treatment of acid rain. They cite the work by the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project, a 10-year study that was published in 1990 and says that the problem of acid rain was exaggerated when it first came to prominence. That study, they point out, is rarely mentioned in environmental textbooks describing how acidic air pollution affects the environment. But other experts said that the critics themselves had presented a skewed picture of acid rain, which is not only widely recognized as a serious problem, but is also being corrected by new air pollution rules. Basically, this document is itself a distortion, Michael Oppenheimer, a climate specialist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said after reviewing the chapter on acid rain in Mr. Sanera's book. If you used this document as an education tool, you would be doing children a disservice. The North American Association for Environmental Education, after two years of discussions involving more than a thousand participants, has issued detailed guidelines for educators to use in assessing textbooks and other materials. The first characteristic on the list is fairness and accuracy. This means that the materials should reflect sound theories and well-documented facts, the guidelines say. Where there are differences of opinion or competing scientific explanations, the range of perspectives should be presented in a balanced way, the guidelines say. And the most important indicator of fairness, the guidelines suggest, may be that a range of experts in appropriate fields reviewed the materials or helped to produce them. []