{"id":7353,"date":"2018-11-26T07:04:23","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T07:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7353"},"modified":"2018-11-26T07:04:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T07:04:23","slug":"how-can-we-take-environmental-education-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/11\/26\/how-can-we-take-environmental-education-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"How can we take environmental education seriously?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a follow-up to my <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/11\/21\/who-really-thinks-that-environmental-education-will-save-us\/\">post<\/a> last week about the King's research and the seeming impossibility of expecting government to take environmental education seriously.<\/p>\n<p>If we cannot trust government to do the decent thing, what can we do? \u00a0Trust ourselves, perhaps, and work with willing allies to create a groundswell \u2013 a movement of NGOs, teacher associations, trusts and others to promote what is necessary: young people who are aware of the issues and committed to do something about them by working with others.<\/p>\n<p>But you have to wonder why this hasn't been done already when so many such organisations say they are already involved. \u00a0There are reasons for this.<\/p>\n<p>One is that there are two obvious problems. \u00a0The first is the geography \/ science divide; the other is the global learning \/ environmental education split. \u00a0The first of these is fundamental if you work in a school where\u00a0geography and \u00a0science are separate disciplines, albeit with overlaps. \u00a0This is a long-standing separation and hard-wired into our thinking.<\/p>\n<p>The second is more recent and arises from a split in government between environmental protection and socio\/economic development \u2013 DEFRA and DfID in our case which often are seen to pull in opposite directions. \u00a0The shift from\u00a0<em>environment\u00a0<\/em> to\u00a0<em>sustainability\u00a0<\/em> has brought this to the fore, and it's global learning that has the lions' share of the spoils in recent years.<\/p>\n<p>Another reason is the self-interest of the organisations involved who are willing to share and collaborate, but only up to a point, and where institutional self-interest outweighs the collective common good. \u00a0This applies as much to NGOs as it does to business. \u00a0That is what Kant might have termed\u00a0<em>the crooked timber of institutions,\u00a0<\/em>had he thought about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a follow-up to my post last week about the King's research and the seeming impossibility of expecting government to take environmental education seriously. If we cannot trust government to do the decent thing, what can we do? \u00a0Trust...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-talks-and-presentations"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}