Environmental education for relevance in developing countries

Summary

The phrase, ‘education for relevance’, has been batted about the Third World for decades, and indeed some startling individual, but usually short lived, successes have been achieved. Yet relevant education has successively lost the battle for curricular prominence to academic education imported from the West. Schooling, which takes and will continue to take the lion's share of education monies in developing countries, remains bookish, oriented toward entrance requirements for higher education and biased toward a model urban environment. A brief review of attempts to achieve curricular relevance in schools in Third World countries and the reasons for their limited success forms the first part of this paper.

The second part of the paper explores the role of environmental education in placing the school in its own local community and the real socioeconomic environment that surrounds it. Particular reference is made to issue-based environmental studies in schools as an attempt to bridge the gap between purely academic education and the stated desire of educator-politicians for relevance in education.