It seems to me that most of the doubts I have raised could be allayed

by a little different approach in this legislation.

For example, why wouldn't it be a good idea for this "ecological education"

bill before you to take the basic initial step of authorizing grants for the

development of curricula (just as it now does, but more specifically directed),

with a modest appropriation of one or two million dollars and for a specified

experimental period of two or three years? At the end of that time the

Commissioner of Education would have to report back to Congress specifically

what had been accomplished, and with his recommendations for future programs.

This would force the Commissioner to make full evaluation of the curricula

developed under these grants.

It would undoubtedly be useful to undertake experimental and developmental

projects in devising, curricular guides and instructional materials about the

whole subject. This developmental work should be comparatively concentrated

in order to obtain maximum impact. If the funds and effort are distributed

among a large number of universities and a large number of different projects,

very little in the way of accomplishment can be expected. In other words, I

would hope the Commissioner would develop the educational programs and curricula

Finally, I would like to re-emphasize that our knowledge as to how

environmental quality can be improved is limited; the entire subject is vast

and complex; and there is yet little general agreement, let alone informed

understanding, about public policies which can enhance environmental quality

without condemning man to surrender many of the achievements of his civili

zation.

The real challenge for man today is the simultaneous advancement of his

civilization and the quality of his environment within the limitations of a

healthful and prosperous balance between life and environment. Every possible

and reasonable method to advance man's understanding of this issue must be

pursued today. And this bill before you, in my opinion both as a manufacturer

and educator, is a long overdue step in that direction.

Senator NELSON. Our next witness is Mr. Edward Ames, Division of Resources and Environment of the Ford Foundation.

The committee appreciates your taking time to come here today and present your statement. It will be printed in full in the record and you can present it however you desire.

STATEMENT OF EDWARD A. AMES, PROGRAM OFFICER, THE FORD FOUNDATION

Mr. AMES. Thank you, Senator Nelson.

I am very pleased to be here in response to a letter of invitation from the chairman.

I would like to summarize my statement. The Ford Foundation has had a variety of programs in the environmental field and, more specifically in education, starting in June 1966 and going through the present.

Today I would like to talk about programs in elementary and secondary schools, and about how schools may affect behavior in relation to the environment. In doing so, I will give you some specific examples because, among other difficulties, the term environmental education suffers from a lack of definition.

Virtually all learning consists of coming to grips with one's environment in one way or another. The problem that has concerned us is that the schools present a very special environment which is different from that of the community and quite separate from the life which surrounds them. This separation is pervasive throughout the school experience, both in the elementary and in the secondary schools.

Children learn about the environment of their community from being in it, and from their direct experience in it. In schools, they learn about school environment and how to survive in that special setting.

This is a fundamental problem of education, and it is the level at which we have sought to develop programs at the Ford Foundation. As we have gone around to schools and have talked to people about programs in environmental education, we have been concerned by the separation between the school and the community.

This separation comes about because the teachers are not trained to take advantage of the resources in the immediate community. It also comes about because the textbooks treat the environment in a very generalized way, and because the administrative practices in many schools make it difficult for classes to go out into the community and have a free exchange of materials and experiences in the local surroundings.

This separation exists even because of the architecture of the schools. For instance, I.S. 201 in the city of New York is in a building without windows. It is also lifted up a floor above the street level. This was done with a constructive purpose in mind, but it does, we have to recognize, represent at least a symbolic separation between school and community. This symbolism is in all probability not lost upon the children who go to school there.

I think we can assume that this separation has a behavioral effect on children, although it may be hard to measure. Our concern has been to find ways of making the actual experiences of children in their

environment as important a part of the learning environment of schools as possible.

One way of doing this is exemplified by a program on water pollution at the Tilton School in Tilton, N.H. Forty or fifty teachers from both public and private schools have been trained to date in teams with children from those same schools.

The teachers and the children go out into the local communities and they make measurements, observations, assessments of the water quality in local streams. They learn the technology of making these measurements, and of using the appropriate instruments in addition to learning a good deal of basic science.

They then investigate water pollution control law, the economics of the enforcement of this law, the practical problems of standards and the enforcement of standards and what this means to the communities, including the question of financing secondary sewage plants, and the question of industry's attempts to comply with the laws.

The result is a very broad program organized around a specific topic, namely, water quality. Significantly it also involves some changes in what goes on in the school and these changes are quite important, I think.

First, the student is put in a central position to contribute to the design of his own academic program. At the Tilton School the training involves teams of teachers and students, who prepare research programs to be carried out in their own schools during the following school year.

Secondly, the work is organized around problem solving in the community around that school, so that each team serves as the nucleus of student groups doing extensive field work or local pollution problems.

Thirdly, the course work transcends the academic boundaries and is organized around the requirements for solving that problem. As a result it draws freely on courses in social studies, government math, sciences, and various other aspects of the academic curriculum of that school.

Finally, there has to be some arrangement made in the school scheduling to allow the students to get out and do the fieldwork and do work together on these problems. This means being able to use blocks of time so that students can accomplish some of these tasks which cannot be done in the normal 50-minute class period.

Another example at the secondary school level is a program in the marine sciences which has been developed at the John Dewey High School in New York City.

Incidentally, the school is built on a tidal estuary which has long served as an informal, illegal dumping ground. A fact again, I think, which was not without significance to the students who go to school there.

In any case, Dr. Joshua Segal, who is the principal of John Dewey High School, was determined to draw very deeply on the community resources for the academic program. Fortunately, the New York Aquarium is located in the school neighborhood. He was able to make arrangements with the Aquarium so his students could make full use of its facilities both informally and as part of their academic pro

grams. This was coupled with fieldwork on the beaches of Coney Island, which is also in the immediate neighborhood.

The reason the school could work in this way was because they found administrative methods of injecting flexibility into the scheduling. The students were allowed to use blocks of time to go to the Aquarium, to do fieldwork on the beaches or to do laboratory work in the school and to make real headway on some of these problems.

The spirit in that school is quite extraordinary and what they are accomplishing shows great promise. This is a perfectly normal New York City high school in other regards.

This kind of environmental programing is best started in the elementary school but there it has a somewhat different form. Whereas in the secondary school you deal with topics such as water quality or the marine sciences, in the elementary schools, because of the nature of elementary education, the work is not organized around topics or academic disciplines.

I believe that you heard yesterday from Prof. David Hawkins of the University of Colorado, who has done some very interesting work in elementary schools in this country and more recently in Great Britain. I would like to mention the work that has been done in some of the British primary schools and its significance for what might be done here in this country and for what is indeed going on in some American schools now in an experimental way.

The British primary schools have developed a program called Integrated Day, which we think has considerable significance for environmental education. This significance lies from the fact that "Integrated Day" makes good use of physical materials which are collected from the neighborhood by children and by their teachers and brought into the classroom. It gets the children out into the community to pursue investigations using the school neighborhood for the learning experiences that are invariably to be found there. It allows children to to work together in teams on problems which interest them with the teacher working in a supporting role to guide them.

But what it really does, and I think this is really very important, it gives children the message that their perceptions of their environment, that their work in their surroundings means something and has relevance and importance. I think this is the challenge that we face in environmental education. We may introduce topics, academic disciplines, courses, textbooks, films about the environment, but unless we do something to give children the expectation that they as individuals count for something and can have some ability to change what goes on in their environment or to cope with it, these more specific topical treatments will be for nought.

The sense of isolation from the environment that exists in some classrooms is hard to exaggerate. I have gone into classrooms in New York and talked to the children and found that they have never seen a river although their community may be surrounded by rivers on three sides. These children, either alone or as a class have never gone the two or three blocks down to the Harlem River or the Hudson River or the East River. They have very little understanding of what tides are, of what a river is, of how it is used by man, of what its significance is. We have gone into classrooms in the Bronx that are two or three blocks away from Van Cortlandt Park and discovered that the chil