Marine conservationist Charles Saylan believes the U.S. educational system is failing to create responsible citizens who consider themselves stewards of the environment. To do that, he says in a Yale Environment 360 interview, educators need to go beyond rhetoric and make environmental values a central part of a public education.
by michelle nijhuis
In a new book, Charles Saylan, co-founder and executive director of the California-based Ocean Conservation Society, and his co-author pose a key question: What can the U.S. educational system do to improve students’ understanding of the environment and its importance in their lives?
The environment is often seen as a political issue and pushed to the margins of school curricula by administrators and parents, note Saylan and Daniel Blumstein, a biology professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, in The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). But at its core, the authors contend, environmental responsibility is a broadly held, nonpartisan value, much like respect for the law. As such, they believe, it deserves a central place in public education, with lessons on the environment permeating every student’s day. Environmentally active citizens, they say, should grasp everything from an understanding of tipping points to the “capacity to see intangible value in things: forests simply for the sake of the forest; the expanse of wilderness simply because it is alive, primal, and fiercely beautiful.”
In a Yale Environment 360 interview with journalist Michelle Nijhuis, Saylan emphasized his conviction that raising awareness is only half the job of environmental education. Students, he said, should be encouraged to tackle environmental problems in their own communities and should learn how the political process works and how they can act at the local, state, and national levels to turn individual beliefs into policy.
aylan also talked about the frustrations and rewards of his own experiences as an environmental educator and laid out his vision of what must be done to fundamentally overhaul environmental education. If environmental education is to be truly effective in creating responsible citizens who will help stop human degradation of the environment, Saylan insists, it must go well beyond platitudes and the occasional class trip.
For interview:
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