Education with the environment

The conference of Tbilissi, in 1977, proposed this definition of the education to the environment : it is an civic education the purpose of which is “to bring the individuals and the communities to seize the complexity of the Environnement as well natural as created by the man, complexity which had by the interactivity of its aspects biological, physical, social, economic and cultural”.

This education with the environment also aims “at acquiring knowledge, the values, the behaviors and practical competences necessary to take part in a responsible and effective way in the prevention, the solution of the environmental problems, and the management of the environmental quality”.

Education with the environment rests on values of respect of the life, diversity and others, by associating with it the fundamental values of humanism and ecology: respect of the individual, his blooming and its freedom, respect of balances of the nature and the relations of the man with his medium.

Education with the environment and sustainable development

Education with the environment from the point of view of Sustainable development is an education which puts at the foreground the values. The educational sequences installation must tend to make become aware that the Earth is a community property which should be preserved, which all the human ones are interdependent between them with this Ground and all that saw. This education must bring to the autonomy which makes it possible each person to think, to decide and act by itself. It must bring to the responsibility which brings to the action, it must make of all of the citizens carrying the democratic values and always mobilized for their implementation. Education towards sustainable development is a school of respect.

This education relates to all the human ones, whatever their age, their country of origin, their function in the company. It is formal, not-formal, abstract. She does not seek to form elites, her step does not create to in no case exclusion, she grows rich by diversity. She makes understand that each individual influences the medium. She aims at the adoption, freely selected by the greatest number, of daily behaviors necessary for the eradication of poverty and the safeguard, the re-establishment or the improvement of the environmental quality. Education towards sustainable development leads to a resolutely constructive frame of mind. She aims at eliminating the fatalistic reflexes, she draws up herself against “I can nothing there”, always mobilizing the thought, she brings very quickly to the gesture: she makes become aware that each one with the possibility of acting. She develops and conveys the concrete successes obtained on the ground; she supports the expression of those which act, whatever the territorial dimension, the range of the action and the level of intervention.

This education is directed towards the action: it brings the individuals and the groups to be implied in the social life and policy of their territory and Planet. Education towards sustainable development is a school of participation.

It does not act for the benefit of a new ideology. She questions, moreover, the word “Développement” which carries in him the germ of not-durability when it is summarized with its economic dimension. Education towards sustainable development is a school which forges the critical spirit.

She conveys a social philosophy which relates to all the human ones. She poses her glance on the bonds, those which link with the daily newspaper the person with all the elements of its framework of life and those which bring it closer to the others on a common territory. She takes into account the bonds towards those which are elsewhere on Planet and those which will be born tomorrow. Education towards sustainable development is a school of solidarity through space and time.

It aims at increasing the faculty of attention. If the bottom is important, if the question of “why” of the action of the teacher to the environment must always be posed, that of the form and of “how” must also be considered.

The method is an essential aspect of education towards sustainable development. Thus, the practice of the ground for a direct confrontation with reality, the work of group to create more solidarity, the creativity to initiate new ways of “making together”, the transdisciplinarity for an comprehensive approach, the exercise of the debate to prepare the actors of an alive and quite real democracy are required passages.

Random links: