REPORT OF UNESCO EXPERT MEETING ON - APCEIU

social sciences (especially ecological economics) may be appropriate ways of developing the concepts and
skills needed to address this problem.
Fourth, individual actions to protect the environment vary greatly within and between countries. However
there is a clear pattern on at least one point: in all countries other than Japan at least half of the students
claim to have taken some action to protect the environment. Even in Japan a third of the students say that
they have taken some action. The nature of the actions taken is also similar – domestic actions such as
recycling predominate. The question that needs to be asked about this finding is ‘Why is the figure so low,
especially when the young people said that they usually felt good when they took such actions?’ Perhaps, it
is because the vast majority of students felt that they did not know much about what they could do and did
not have faith in social institutions to support their actions. Indeed, the knowledge that young people seem
to have about the environment is mainly propositional in nature, rather than procedural; ie it is ‘knowledge
about the environment’ rather than ‘knowledge how to work for the environment’. This situation might help
explain the ambivalence between the young people’s high levels of expressed concern and their general lack
of willingness to change personal life-styles or take other actions to protect the environment.
This gives rise to a fifth important conclusion from the research: school curricula need to change so that
young people explore the many possible ways in which current systems can change to support sustainability,
in which current lifestyles reflect these systems, and in which their own actions can contribute to a
sustainable future. At the very least, a much better understanding of the nature of the problems and their
likely solutions might be achieved and, in this way, some of the pessimism and negativity expressed by the
young people might be dissipated.
The next section addresses these curriculum implications in detail.
Curriculum Implications for Attention during the DESD
These findings point to the need for curriculum reform on at least three levels.
Firstly, there is a need for many more subjects than biology and geography to focus on environmental issues.
While much work has been done on the environmental dimensions of all subjects in other parts of the world,
and on environmental studies and across-the-curriculum approaches to environmental education in primary
schools, and teacher education in the Asia-Pacific region, little work has been done to develop an explicit focus
on environmental education in secondary schools in this region.
In all countries, we saw that students fared much better in understanding traditional concepts from biology and
geography than they did in defining the concepts of sustainable development, biodiversity, carrying capacity,
the precautionary principle and intergenerational equity. This second set require much greater exposure and
discussion than they are receiving at the present time because of their significance in environmental thinking.
However, few of these are yet to make their way into syllabuses in the countries of the region and there is an
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