Social or educational issue?

In beginning, one particular issue needs to be clarified. It has been assumed throughout this work that the issue of the environment is an educational problem and amendable to educational research. This assumption requires scrutiny.

It could be argued, and indeed Cough (1997) touches on this issue, that the environment crisis is a social problem and that structuring it as an educational one is

not only inappropriate, but also dangerous. This is because it deflects attention from the socio-political stage where many of the issues should be confronted. This criticism is not clearly expressed in the environmental education literature where it is assumed

that the environment is an education issue . Reading away from specifically

environmental education literature, one finds for example that in the Bruntland Report,

Our Common Future (WeED, 1987) there is only incidental reference to education.

Sustainable development is seen there as an economic issue. Suzuki and Dressell

(1999) also rarely mention education. They seem to see environmentalism as a struggle (by adults) at the level of individual and community over specific issues, and they are not especially macro-political in their approach.

Having raised this issue however, I cannot provide a definite answer to it. I would reject the proposition that the environment crisis should not be part of education for that would be to say education should not review the world impartially and thus be deliberately blind. Yet I could easily argue the case that education is not impartial and is deliberately blind to social and environmental justice. I would none the less conclude that this should not be the case, and that education should confront learners with the complexities of our global situation. There is a danger that such education approaches the issues in a partial manner that is evident in the widespread failure to confront social and political issues in environmental education. There is a further dimension to this danger in that it has been widely argued that schools reproduce society as it is, and therefore to seek to transform society through an agency that is primarily reproductive, courts trivialisation or co-option of the transformative agenda. Annette Gough reports that since its earliest days, the notion that environmental education has a place in schools as an agent of social and educational change has been contentious. She writes:

For example, at the Australian UNESCO seminar, Stenhouse (1977b, p. 313) argued that; "the strongest part of the discussion on environmental education has concerned a re-assessment of some of the things schools stand for". He saw the introduction of community action as part of the school program as "threatening some of the assumptions of the school". Yet he also believed that "environmental education can become central to the climate of education" (Stenhouse, 1977b, p. 314). However most of the other seminar participants concentrated on agreeing that changes were needed in society rather than focusing on the educational process.

(Gough, 1997, p. 16)

While this debate remains unresolved, it is no longer obvious in recent literature where there is an uncritical acceptance of schools as sites of environmental education activity.

There is little acknowledgment of schools as serving socialising or reproductive roles. Stenhouse (1 977b), however, believed education could be a vehicle for social change and perhaps "belief" is the key word.

White (1 992), within a different debate, considers that rather than shaping society, schools are shaped by it. In discussing the impact of research on education, he argues that it has been small, and that most of the significant changes in education have been brought about by social events and movements. He cites the Russian success with Sputnik and the Feminist movement as obvious examples. The linking of environmental problems with educational solutions through environmental education is now a statement of faith, but such faith is seen beyond environmental education. As Postman and Weingartner put it in the opening of thel! celebrated book claiming that education is a subversive activity:

This book was written because we are serious, dedicated professional educators, which means that we are simple, romantic men who risk contributing to the mental-health problem by maintaining a belief in the improvability of the human condition through education.

(Postman & Weingartner, 1969, p. xiii)

Certainly the educators who developed the Belgrade Charter (UNESCO-UNEP, 1976) saw education as central to their efforts as, supposedly, did the members of those governments that ratified the Tbilisi declaration. It is also true that the transformation of social problems to educational ones is not limited to the 1970s or to environmental issues, and is now an almost routine occurrence. The New Zealand Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Education 1 993a), for example, identifies a range of social issues, including drug use, suicide and youth pregnancy, as educational challenges.

The acceptance then of environmental issues as an educational challenge must be viewed as an article of faith, but one that should be constantly reviewed. I would assert that if this review is conducted without regard to the sociological arguments regarding schools as sites of hegemonic social reproduction, the environmental education endeavour stands in grave risk of being co-opted and becoming part of the problem rather than part of the answer as Huckle (1991) has suggested. This conclusion strongly influences the development of my thesis and informs the methodological critique that follows.