My own environmental education is almost identical to that of the one described in Bigalow and Swineheart’s article. Growing up, my parents sent my sister and I to private, Catholic schools. The school system in my area was large and poorly funded (yet another byproduct of urbanization and poor urban planning), which steered my parents into sending us to private school. I personally feel like I never learned about the environment and human-driven issues plaguing it until I started high school. Up until then, Catholic education taught us that God created everything in His image, and that there was no true explanation for how, or why. This alone closely reflects what the editors described in their article: many school systems condition children to not question the world around them & what is being done to it. I also related my experience in Catholic school systems to this idea of alienating people from the environment through education. Because I was always taught that some higher being created the world and deemed it perfect in their image, we were taught not to question beyond what just “was”. It made the environment feel almost optional, as if we could pick and choose when to care/partake in it. As previously mentioned, I did not truly learn about ecology and the environment until my freshman year of high school, and even at that, it was very minimal. This lack of environmental education is frustratingly common, even today. It is especially common in private schools similar to ones I’ve personally attended. I believe that environmental education has become too important to ignore (in favor of including it into future curriculum), but it does make me question how long it will be until students are required to learn about such topics. Even then, it makes me question why it has taken so long to implement something so integral to our lives into our education.
