ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY EDUCATION ACT

FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1970

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION OF THE

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met at 9:30 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 2261, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Brademas (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Brademas, Steiger, and Meeds.

Staff members present: Jack G. Duncan, counsel, Ronald L. Katz, assistant staff director; Arlene Horowitz, staff assistant; Toni Immerman, clerk; Maureen Orth, consultant, Marty LaVor, minority legislative coordinator.

Mr. BRADEMAS. The subcommittee will come to order for further consideration of H.R. 14753, the Environmenal Quality Education Act and related bills.

Congressman Galifianakis was to have been our first witness but had to leave unexpectedly. We will ask unanimous consent to insert his statement at this point in the record.

(The statement referred to follows:)

STATEMENT OF HON. NICK GALIFIANAKIS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, FOURTH DISTRICT OF NORTH CAROLINA

Mr. Chairman, I am most appreciate of the opportunity to add my voice to those advocating improved and intensified environmental education without delay.

I know you have heard extensive testimony emphasizing the great need for more and better programs in environmental education at all levels of the school system. In reviewing the provisions of the Environmental Quality Education Act, I concur with its recognition of the problems we now have:

1. a lack of accurate knowledge of the factors which control our environment, and of the ways in which they must be safeguarded to prevent deterioration, and permanent damage;

2. a lack of accurate knowledge of the technology and methods with which an over-exploited and contaminated environment can be brought back to full use and productivity;

3. a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the task to maintain a viable and healthy environment from generation to generation.

I think we are agreed that accurate, concise knowledge of all aspects of environmental management, preservation and utilization must be made available to our children--who have already expressed a keen interest in the subject-and that this teaching must begin as soon as possible. I believe that the priorities to be followed in acquiring the necessary tools for this purpose are these:

1. The training of teachers who will have the knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the many facets comprising man's environment, and the enthusiasm to import it to their students. A new wave of youngsters begins school every year, and each year new enthusiasm must be summoned to kindle their interest in environmental quality. The present way of encouraging nature studies and some aspects of conservation practiced by all too many of our school systems falls far short of preparing our children for the task of preserving the world!

2. Preparation of appropriate curricula and the accompanying textbooks. 3. Resource materials made available in properly structured and administered local libraries, to be used not only by students and their teachers but by the adult population as well. Such materials will hopefully form the core of informative and instructional material for adult education programs in the community. I am pleased to be able to say today that a serious effort in environmental education has begun to be made in my own State, North Carolina. A bill introduced by State Representative Norwood E. Bryan, Jr. and passed by the legislature last year led to the establishment, by the 1969 General Assembly, of a 42-member Task Force on Environmental and Natural Resources. The Task Force, chaired by Mr. Bryan, was appointed by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in keeping with the bill's specification that studies conducted by the Task Force should be under the aegis of the State Board of Education. The study undertaken by the Task Force is designed to investigate how environment is taught in the schools today. The type of instruction it aims to achieve is spelled out in the preamble of Mr. Bryan's bill which reads as follows:

Environmental education is defined as education dealing with the relationship of man and his bio-physical environment, and is aimed at producing a citizenry which is aware of environmental interrelationships and processes, understands how to solve environmental problems that arise, and is motivated to work toward their solution.

As a consequence of its investigations, the Task Force is planning a state public school curriculum on the environment, perhaps the first in the nation. Within the State, my own district is fortunate in housing the Research Triangle Park where several institutions of higher education are located as well as several divisions of the National Air Pollution Control Administration, including the Office of Manpower Development and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The numerous environmental activities undertaken by these institutions as well as their joint undertakings such as the recent Triangle Universities Consoritum on Air Pollution, provide orientation and technical and planning help for primary and secondary education as well. Specific studies on environmental resources within the State are particularly helpful such as studies conducted in the University of North Carolina's Water Resources Research Institute, and programs conducted in the School of Public Health, the Carolina Population Center and the Center for Acoustical Studies.

I believe that this is the type of coordination-with available resources in institutions of higher education and private organizations in the area-which Superintendents of other school systems throughout the country would do well to emulate. Obviously, the preparation of special courses of study, the writing and printing of textbooks and other instructional materials will take time. We cannot wait for a perfect program. We do have available resources which can be utilized in the interim to improve existing instructional methods, so that teachers can begin immediately to acquire the necessary knowledge and provide their students with more meaningful instruction.

Using the outdoors as a tool to environmental understanding has long been the practice in most schools having an environmental studies program. I agree that this is a very necessary component to an understanding of environmental quality. However, most of us today live in a largely man-made environment—in urban areas surrounded by man-made structures, man-made utilities, man-made facilities. Our inability to cope with life in such surroundings and the resulting deterioration of many of the values which have brought mankind to its present sophistication are the cause for our abused and polluted surroundings. I would therefore urge any teacher interested in environmental quality education to acquaint his students not only with "the great outdoors", but with existing man-made mistakes as well-the slums, the traffic jams, the polluted industrial areas, rivers which have become sewers, and open spaces which have become garbage dumps.

I am also concerned lest environmental education be approached only from one aspect that emphasis would be placed only on pollution, or as another example only on the proliferation of pesticides. I feel that it is most important to stress that environmental quality is tied up with all facets that make up human lifenatural resources and technology, housing, transportation, urban and rural problems, civics and human psychology. When we provide financial support for any proposed programs in environmental education, we should take these factors which encompass as many of these aspects as possible.

Arnold Toynbee said that the essence of the story of mankind and the survival of civilizations is to be found in the cycle of challenge and response. We are meeting the challenge to a deteriorating environment today by our desire to respond. We are willing to enlist our resources and our abilities in the task to reverse the abuse and overuse of the resources which our planet possesses. The essence of our pursuit is to make the air once again invisible and odorless, the water pure and colorless, the earth rich and fertile. In this country we hold it the duty of government to secure our right to the pursuit of happiness. Proposed legislation such as the bill before you reminds us of Thomas Jefferson's statement that the care of human life and happiness-and not their destructionis the first and only legitimate object of good government. Now in the early stages of this environmental decade, Congress must respond to the great challenge before us. We must make our response as effective and meaningful as this country's ingenuity and state of technology and knowledge will permit.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Our second witness is Miss Martha T. Henderson, director of education, the Conservation Foundation. We are pleased to have you with us this morning.

STATEMENT OF MARTHA HENDERSON, DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION, THE CONSERVATION FOUNDATION

Miss HENDERSON. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify at these hearings. Although I am employed as senior associate in education at the Conservation Foundation, the following statement is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. I believe that we must have legislation which supports environmental education, but the issues involved are complex. I agree with the testimony which you heard earlier this week by James L. Aldrich of the Education Development Center, and I also concur with the published statement of Edward A. Ames of the Ford Foundation which you have in hand.

It is clear to most of us that we face a crisis of the environment. Many forms of pollution and increasing population undermines the fabric of life, but we cannot solve our problems merely by cleaning up the mess. We must develop a new social ethic if we are to build a world which represents man's accord with nature and his wise use of technology. To change people's values, their cultural set, is not easy, but it must be the task of education to try to do so.

I believe with Mr. Aldrich that—

The need is for a concentrated effort to develop the materials, teacher training, and style of classroom operation which provide the basis for exploring the vast web of relationships of man with nature, of man with man, of the partnerships which must exist if we are to reestablish a life worth living.

A broad definition-broader than the one I think given-of environmental education is a necessity for this bill.

U.S. society has recently tended to offer a declining range of options for the ways in which we should live. The emphasis has been on material progress in setting national and to some extent personal goals. We must provide a far greater range of options for future living which allow for a time of greater economic equilibrium. This may involve a different standard of living, new forms of social groupings, smaller families, and a shifting of values to nonmaterial gratifications, all of which hit us at very fundamental levels of assumptions about how life actually is or how it should be. But with population pres

sures, it may become necessary to develop nonmaterial values strongly. since there may be less opportunity for economic benefits for all.

At the moment, education is primarily transmitting the values of the status quo. While we must maintain the role of schools in the transmission of our cultural and historical traditions, we must change education in order to have school and university experiences help to suit us for a continuously changing world. We cannot know all the outlines of this world, but we must use education to begin to help us shape new ways of life.

Obviously such a concept involves children and college students in active knowledge of the real world. Too often at present our schools are insulated from the life of the community around them. I think we have some sample programs which use the city for learning and we need places for students to learn in other ways.

The changes we are posing are major and they involve using education about man and his environment as a vehicle for school and university reform. This particular bill cannot meet all educational needs, but it should contribute to basic changes in our value system.

Many question whether U.S. society can be moved toward such profound shifts. There is always a great deal of inertia in a social group with any degree of stability, and a lot of people in this country still draw considerable satisfaction from the way things are.

But one can perceive signs of a degree of openness to change in the United States, and it is upon these signs and our belief in them that we must build. We see young people and some not so young experimenting with freer social groupings. We observe those who appear to be troubled by the obvious problems of our world, but unable to figure out options which do not unduly threaten them. Their difficulty arises, in part, because the true shape of various alternatives is not made easily available for consideration, nor are they able to find ways to experiment with new options.

But as a nation we are usually hopeful and want to believe in a bright future somewhere, somehow. We care especially for the future of the young in whom hope for all of us is inevitably vested. If we can give people new ways of life to work toward which seem potentially less problematic and full of despair about our environment and more fulfilling than those they have at present, then we may be able to achieve a situation in which continuing change is acceptable.

To search out how to live in harmony with new ways of life will require the resources of many fields of science, social and behavioral science and planning. It should also include the insights of the arts and humanities.

What is to come is frequently expressed metaphorically by artists: they press their feelings into the future and give them shape. It is through the arts and humanities that we can first give voice to our aspirations and dreams and even to our religious beliefs and ethics. If we can write poems about our hoped for world, inner and outer, if we can act out theater games or project new architectural forms for our homes and communities, then we can begin to set forth options for our futures. Artists can lend drama and esthetic form to our choices, as Professor Kepes of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has indicated.