Children require early environmental education
Wuryadi, Yogyakarta
Ahmad Bukhori's article in The Jakarta Post, on Jan. 22, Raising Environmental Awareness in Children, provides the fundamentals of environmental education in general.
There are some important points in his piece: First environmental awareness should be developed to enable children to develop environmentally sensitive behavior.
Second, basic environmental knowledge should be introduced early by giving them interesting experiences in their own local environment.
Third, the most accountable parties for developing environmental awareness among children are parents, social organizations and schools.
Fourth, we, as children's primary role models, must be consistent in how we treat nature.
I'd like to give some complementary concepts to Ahmad Bukhori's thoughts, not only to support his ideas but also to demand that the accountable parties develop a comprehensive concept for environmental education.
Education for developing sensitive behavior toward the environment is a very fundamental concept in environmental education, and a very important paradigm in effective education.
Sensitive behavior is usually developed by a series of meaningful experiences, either real or programed. Such sensitivity among the people of Simeuleu island toward the tsunami was developed by real meaningful experiences, hence they were already familiar with the tsunami phenomena following an earthquake.
In normal education such experiences can be programmed in formal or informal education, by using a deductive method of education. Small things or simple things in the form of experiences should be organized or programmed to have a meaningful learning target.
Basic environmental knowledge already exists in the local environment, but in the form of unorganized facts or phenomena. Educators should utilize the environmental facts by organizing the facts to become interesting experiences for the children. But how to introduce these to children?
The most responsible educators are parents, and they should start with simple and small things related to their children's living environment. Parents should show their children how to properly dispose of garbage so as not to block the rivers for instance.
The other small things to do is to turn off lights or electrical appliances when they leave the room, and how to use water properly and efficiently. The children should know the very simple relationship between rain, deforestation and floods. All these are about nature and its relationship with human life, as basic environmental knowledge within their local environment.
The pre-school age is very sensitive, and things perceived at this age will have a long-term impact on their life afterward. Environmental awareness developed by direct positive experiences will have a significant contribution to their attitude, ethics and moral responsibility toward the environment.
Respect for the environment will develop ethics and a moral foundation for the nation to support Indonesia's sustainable development in the future.
The three centers of education -- parents, social organizations/non-governmental organizations, and schools -- should have a functional relationship to develop a fair and effective education. This functional relationship could be used to develop environmental awareness in young children.
Real education should start within the family, and the parents will shoulder most of the responsibility until the very early education. If the parents fail to develop the basis for environmental education in their children, the schools and organizations cannot do much. But most parents are not aware of this responsibility and almost all of them have the perception that education should start in the school.
Unfortunately not all children have the opportunity to go to school, either because of economic considerations or intellectual limitations. Each school has its own system for selection, and both limitations have a significant role. So there will be no schooling for the poor and intellectually challenged children in our current educational system.
Who will be responsible for this? No schooling is not necessarily no education. Parents and society will educate them but in a very random setting and they will be exposed to positive and negative risks. If negative risks occur, then there will be a national disaster of greater proportions than the tsunami, because the cycles of intellectual deficiency and poverty will cause a moral destruction of the nation. No more national identity, no more national spirit, and no more Indonesia.
We as adults, as parents, teachers or leaders in the society, should consistently treat the environment in a proper way. The children will take us as their reference point in their decision making. If we exploit the environment to a level beyond its capacity, the children will do the same.
Adult education for parents, teachers, social leaders, government officials, has the same importance as early childhood education. There must be adult education before they educate their children directly or indirectly.
Prof. Dr. Wuryadi is a lecturer at the Yogyakarta State University, Yogyakarta. He can be reached at wuryadi- uny@telkom.net
wuryadi-uny@telkom.net