Topic > California State Standards and the Lack of Environmental Education

After reading the California State Standards for Education, it became clear to me the lack of environmental education that is part of most science curricula in California , and the rest of the country for that matter. California is one of, if not the most progressive states in the country, and references to the environment within scientific standards are few and far between. The California state standards book references the environment about six times, and these references are made in broad terms, without detailing anything in particular about what they hope children will gain at a certain level of knowledge about the environment. Given the times we live in, where the environment is in more difficulty than ever, this is not an acceptable truth that should exist in the education of our children. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay That said, the curriculum that we as a group of college students have designed certainly strays far from what is detailed in the standards for the state. Although, as we learned through our readings in the book Failure of Environmental Education, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather shows our more progressive and modern approach to how we should educate children about science and its relationship with the environment. the environment. Science, unlike history or mathematics, has no fixed position in time and is not set in stone. We are constantly learning more and more about the world around us across all fields of science, and the way we think about the world is in turn influenced by our perceptions that have been informed by what we learn through these scientific practices. Nowadays, scientific practices are intrinsically limited by the technology we have available that allows us to perform experiments. Simply put, these experiments along with observation are what allow us to unlock the mysteries that the world has presented to us. That's how the Greeks discovered the world is round, that's how we flew to the Moon, and that's how we created the large hadron collider, and we will continue to build on these same ideas to create another scientific revolution in the future. Each of these findings did not come out of nowhere, but rather were the successful implementation of a series of years of scientific research and testing, building on other scientific findings and discoveries that occurred before the events. This is precisely the problem with the California state standards as they currently exist. In their current form, they were written in 1998 and have only been reprinted since then, without any real changes having been made. That's nearly two decades of scientific progress and discoveries that have been excluded from the state's requirements. CV. Science is heavily dependent on using pre-existing knowledge and technology to inform contemporary hypotheses, and without using this information, we end up with outdated and outdated information. In this sense, let's take a moment back to the time when California state standards were last changed in 1998. The Titanic won an Oscar, cell phones were a strange bastardization of bricks and walkie-talkies, and a a gallon of gas cost about a dollar and ten cents. Times, to put it mildly, were different. released into the environment were considerably lower than today. This is partly due to our lack of knowledge about the environment, but it is also largely due to the fact that people simply don't care..