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Social Necessity and Urgency to Include Ecology in Education of Young Generations
Nenad Prelog
; Referalni centar Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb
Abstract
The crisis of man's environment has become a fact which does not require special explanation any more. Starting from a number of generally accepted definitions of the environment we reach the important conclusion: the essence of the crisis consists of two simultaneous processes — decreasing of the useful and increasing of the useless and detrimental. Man is one of the important causes of the establishment unbalance on the Earth.
Ecosystems in nature, even the very biosphere, are closed systems with developed ability of self-regulation; man’s system however, is an open system. In this system self-regulation is substituted by social organization. Since the crisis of the environment is not interpreted as the entropy of the system itself, it is necessary to consider the shortcomings of the organization. It is essential to achieve a change in our established attitude, in our way of thinking. Recycling must become a systematic principle. Everything that is rotten (ruined, used) should be restored or exchanged. Air, water and earth are no resources, but public wealth whose quantitative and quantitative balance is the condition for the survival on this planet.
Starting from these principles we shall try to apply them to education, whose task is to enable future generations to make adequate decisions concerning changes of the environment. Nowadays school is still a depot of knowledge. Processes and events are being analysed in a traditional way according to pre-established standards. Due to our insisting on parts and only certain meanings of the process, we find it difficult to comprehend it in its entirety. School is not adapted well enough to the new interdisciplinary sciences and does not find adequate solutions for new problems.
What we need is a school that would satisfy the demands of our time, a school that will educate for action. Applying the ecological world-view, we open new roads and at the same time we pay our debt to the future. It is of primary importance that we start thinking about it now, when the Marxian world-view is increasingly present at our schools, because the Marxian and ecological criticism of the world do not exclude, but on the contrary, complete each other.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
156426
URI
Publication date:
31.12.1974.
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