I gave a talk last Saturday to at the University of Birmingham Education Department's postgraduate research conference which had a climate and sustainability theme. \u00a0I traced the attempts to have schools take environmental issues seriously in what they taught students, doing this over a 60 year perspective: from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Greta Thunberg's #FridaysforFuture.<\/p>\n
I chose Rachel Carson because her iconic book was instrumental in the development of both modern environmentalism and what we came to know as environmental education; and Greta Thunberg chose herself in a way as so much has developed from her dissatisfaction which led to her sitting in front of the Swedish parliament. \u00a0My talk was on the day following the latest of the Friday school strikes which, sadly, were pushed off the front pages by yet more pointless murders.<\/p>\n
Everyone in the room (some 80 people) had heard of Greta Thunberg, but no one had heard of Rachel Carson which did not really surprise me, especially as some had not heard of the sustainable development goals.<\/p>\n
I did a Cook's tour of developments in England; from the 1965 Keele conference through the golden age of environmental education in the 1970s, to its ruination by the national curriculum in the 80s and the pathetic sop to activists that was its designation as a cross-curriculum theme in the 1990s. \u00a0I lingered over the unfunded and non-mandatory sustainable schools initiative, which focused on care as a slogan but excluded biodiversity as a topic, and then spent time on UKSCN and Teach the Future before exploring what we might be teaching about climate in schools now. \u00a0I shall return to this on Friday.<\/p>\n
At the end of the talk, I compared these two quotes:<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.\u00a0 We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.\u00a0 And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth<\/em>.\u201d \u00a0\u2013 Greta Thunberg addressing the UN, 2019<\/p>\n \u201cWe still talk in terms of conquest.\u00a0 We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.\u00a0 We in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and \u2026 prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves<\/em>.\u201d \u00a0 Rachel Carson interviewed by CBS, 1964<\/p>\n 55 years on the CBS interview we still have not \"come to terms with nature, and \u2026 prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves\". \u00a0<\/i>You have to\u00a0wonder if we ever shall.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I gave a talk last Saturday to at the University of Birmingham Education Department's postgraduate research conference which had a climate and sustainability theme. \u00a0I traced the attempts to have schools take environmental issues seriously in what they taught students,...<\/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":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606","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=7606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}