blog




  • Essay / California State Standards and Lack of Environmental Education

    After reading the California State Standards for Education, it became clear to me the lack of environmental education that goes into most science programs in California, and the rest of the country. country elsewhere. California is one of, if not the, most progressive states in the country, and references to the environment in science standards are rare. The environment is referenced in the California State Standards book about six times, and these references are made in broad strokes, without detailing anything specific about what they hope for children to achieve a certain level of knowledge about the environment. Given the times we live in, where the environment is in more trouble than ever, this is not an acceptable solution. truth that should exist in the education of our children. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay That being said, the curriculum that we as a group of students have designed certainly deviates from what is detailed in the standards for the state. Although, as we have learned through our readings in the book Failure of Environmental Education, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather speaks to our more progressive and modern approach to how we should go about educating children to science and its relationships with the environment. Science, unlike history or mathematics, does not occupy a fixed position in time and is not set in stone. We are constantly learning more about the world around us through all fields of science, and the way we think about the world is in turn affected by our perceptions which have been informed by what we learn through these scientific practices. Scientific practices today are intrinsically limited by the technology available to us and which allows us to carry out experiments. Simply put, these experiences, alongside observation, allow us to unravel the mysteries that the world has presented to us. This is how the Greeks discovered that the Earth is round, this is how we flew to the Moon and this is 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 achievements did not come out of nowhere, but rather they were the successful implementation of a compilation of years of scientific research and testing, building on other scientific achievements 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, with no real changes having been made. That represents nearly two decades of scientific progress and discoveries that have been left behind by state demands. Science relies heavily on using previous knowledge and technology to inform contemporary hypotheses, and without using this information, we are left with obsolete and outdated information. In that vein, let's take a moment back to when California's state standards were last changed: 1998. The Titanic won an Oscar, cell phones were a weird bastardization between bricks and walkie talkies, and a gallon of gasoline cost about a dollar and ten cents. To say the least, times were different. At that time, the importance was the impact on..