Environmental Education

A detailed Summary of Environmental Education

This week's reading focuses on Environmental Education. It identifies academic institutions and the media as main actors in environmental struggles and it looks at the conflicts among them to reach their goals. As shown by Gillian Symons in "Education For Sustainability", Environmental Education (EE) enables one to develop the skills needed to analyze and solve environmental problems. It teaches us How and not What to think about the environment. It also enhances our decision-making skills as well as develops our critical thinking by increasing our understanding of the environmental challenges we are faced with today. The media, on the other hand, want to teach us what to think and not how to think. They do so by choosing a certain framework and presenting it to us by visual means. In his work, "Participatory Democracy in Enemy Territory", DeLuca shows how the media filter situations so that they affect profit orientation framing and conventions. He shows this in a long analysis of a CBS clip on the Greenpeace confrontation with whalers and he shows how it is presented in a heroic Cold War frame. The media are often also intertwined with corporations who incorporate them into their strategy to promot

Despite this inevitable corporate manipulation, I think that EE is necessary for the development of critical inquiry, universal knowledge and problem-solving. Not only does it influence children but it also indirectly affects adults and their own perception of the environment. They become aware, because of their close relationship with their kin, of their personal responsibility towards Nature, while keeping a positive outlook devoid of hopelessness and open to finding solutions. Furthermore, despite the over-simplistic representation of environmental concerns and of the ways to deal with them, EE still reaches to a young audience and is a first step towards understanding what is at stake. One cannot expect young children to fully grasp everything regarding the environment and this allows a first exposure to knowledge that can be further developed at a later stage in life. Captain Planet may be seen as a form of commercialized education that is only aimed at developing consumer skills rather than citizenship; however the 30 second tags at the end of each episode still give children an insight on different ways of preserving the environment like changing kitchen habits, recycling, using paper bags and rechargeable batteries etc. In order for EE to be effective, children and students have to understand the need for active citizenship. This can only happen once this basic kno

Some common words found in the essay are:
Glynis Daniels', Captain Planet, Learning Tree, Cold War, Education EE, Selling Environmentalism, Environmental Education, Territory DeLuca, Ted Turner, Corporate Assault, captain planet, environmental education, environmental concerns, corporations ee, finding solutions, critical inquiry,

Approximate Word count = 931
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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