Generation-E
With another school year just ending, or ending soon, it doesn’t seem like the most advantageous time to discuss education trends. But we’d be crazy to not take advantage of the opportunity to discuss something we feel will be a very large issue in the near future - how to teach the future generation about environmental issues and sustainability.
There will undoubtedly be, if not already, a debate about how to teach climate change and global warming in schools - think Scopes Monkey Trial. As we all know from living in Spokane, there are a lot of people who just won’t agree that climate change is an issue. And apparently (because councilwoman Nancy McLaughlin made us aware), there are a lot of scientists who disagree with the scientific opinion on global warming.
Unfortunately, even if school teachers and administrators found a way to present the facts in a balanced, two-sided manner - there would be someone, somewhere, with very strong convictions of the opposite who would use the opportunity to create chaos. Call us pessimists, but we've been around long enough to know what happens when you mix emotions, science, and partisan politics.
And then there's this - we're probably too late in teaching about prevention anyways. Combine global growth, resources demand, and decades of indolence and most believe that we're too late. So instead of wasting school time on theories and technologies about how to combat global warming, we should be more forward thinking.
Which leaves us with teaching about tolerance and adaptation. How will we live in a time much different than generations before, on a planet drastically altered? How will we survive with declined resources, with less food, less water?
It presents opportunities for new ideas, fresh innovation, and world-changing technologies - opportunities that must be seized by a well educated, ambitious, and concerned population.
Andrew Revkin of The New York Times has been referring to this population as Generation E, for Environment, Energy, Equity, Enterprise. For it's this generation (us, and a core of our readers we believe) who not only have to come up with ways to make the future better, but have to do so in high-stakes trial and error, and on the heels of years of doubt and trepidation.
So it pleaes us immensley when we read stories like Arizona State's first graduating class of their School of Sustainability - a commencement that President Barack Obama gave the address at. "The mission of the program, officials say, is to “train a new generation of scholars and practitioners, and develop practical solutions to some of the most pressing environmental, economic, and social challenges of sustainability, especially as they relate to urban areas.”
Or the debate currently going on about showing the hit documentary, "The Story of Stuff" at schools in America. As The New York Times recently reported, "many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years."
Going forward, we are committed to covering this topic with great diligence, for as we previously stated, it's one of utmost importance. We would love to hear from you - especially educators, higher education faculty and administrators, and parents. DTE is going back to school!
