LATIN AMERICA: Bringing the Environment into the Classrooms

By Diana Cariboni Reprint | | Print |

Diana Cariboni

ALAJUELA, Costa Rica, Mar 22 2002 (IPS) - Universities from Latin America, the Caribbean and Spain have forged a new alliance aimed at tackling the environmental problems and development challenges facing Latin America by incorporating environmental issues in education and research.

Researchers and academics meeting this week in Costa Rica agreed that the university must provide scientific and technological solutions that smooth the way for a development model that is based on equality and does not compromise the resources that will be left to future generations.

“We are facing formidable environmental challenges. There is as yet no economic model appropriate for development. We cannot follow in the footsteps of the United States, Japan and Europe,” and “with the old model, we just don’t all fit on this planet,” Mario Molina, a Mexican Nobel laureate in chemistry, said Wednesday in Alajuela, located 22 kms northwest of the Costa Rican capital.

“Universities must assume this challenge, implementing changes in education and in curricular content, to provide a space for real environmental problems and for an environmental and social ethic,” Molina said at a seminar on the role universities can play in achieving sustainable development.

In the seminar, representatives of 19 centres of higher education from Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Spain, Venezuela and Uruguay stressed the importance of recuperating the humanistic values and philosophy that infused the birth of universities in the western world.

The Latin and Ibero-American Alliance of Universities for Sustainable Development is aimed at “fomenting and developing action in research, education and sustainable services on the economic, ecological and social fronts,” according to its founding statement.

The seminar was supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and formed part of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS).

AGS is a cooperative venture that brings together research teams from four of the world’s leading research universities – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Tokyo, the Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology – “to study large-scale, multidisciplinary environmental problems that are faced by the world’s ecosystems, economies, and societies.”

“Universities have been forced to change,” said Molina. “Science is an intrinsic part of culture, and has an enormous weight in society. Lawyers and economists should study science. No one who considers themselves cultured should be unfamiliar with the scientific method.

“We must integrate different disciplines” and governments, business and civil society, he maintained. “Scientists and economists should come together, because we don’t understand each other. The use of jargon in the approach to concrete questions is only tradition, it isn’t an intrinsic problem.”

Molina spoke out in favour of active learning that incorporates the question of the environment in basic subjects and abandons “the chalk and blackboard.

“Students must be taught to learn on their own,” he underlined.

“Education is in crisis, and the solution is new digital infrastructure that overcomes classist structures,” said Gabriel Ferrate, rector of the Open University of Catalonia, a virtual centre of higher learning founded in that Spanish province in 1995.

On-line education opens the door to development for poor countries in a sustainable manner, making the right to education reality by overcoming linguistic, geographic and cultural barriers, and avoiding the consumption of energy in transport and the construction of buildings, according to Ferrate.

“The drop-out rate at our university is lower than that of other distance learning facilities and even of some traditional universities, due to the special characteristics of our students,” he told IPS.

“They are adults, 95 percent of them work, nearly half of them have attended university in the past, 40 percent are heads of households, and only 20 percent would have the possibility of attending a regular university,” he explained.

“Technology might not be the answer, because it is not just a question of adopting a mantle of modernity. The difficulty lies in changing our ways of thinking,” he said.

Ferrate described his theory of interconnected on-line universities that would allow anyone to gain an education at any point throughout their lifetimes, regardless of where they live, what language they speak, or whether they are physically disabled.

“Universities in Spain suffer from under-enrollment and aren’t growing due to the low birth rate. Our university, on the other hand, draws a different cross-section of students who are motivated by life-long learning, and enrollment is growing fast. We have more than 20,000 students with nationally recognised degrees,” said Ferrate.

The Open University emerged as an initiative of the government of the province of Catalonia to meet local demand for university training. But “two years ago we launched the Ibero-American initiative, which exclusively uses the Spanish language, and we have hundreds of students in a number of Spanish-speaking countries,” he said.

“If we really want to achieve sustainable development, we must overcome a number of tensions in the global context, like the disequilibrium between the local and the global, the universal and the singular, the creation of knowledge and the human mechanism of assimilation,” said the rector of the University of Costa Rica, Gabriel Macaya Trejos.

“There is also a disequilibrium between the long and the short- term. The passage from written to spoken or televised information also represents the passage from analysis to image-fed immediacy, which is unsustainable,” Macaya Trejos told IPS.

A meeting of journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean involved in reporting on the environment was held during the seminar. The reporters decided to create a new forum for debate and for the search for mechanisms enabling journalists to specialise in environmental issues, taking advantage of the new ties created with the universities.

In the field of communication and the media, the university alliance will focus on initiatives like Tierramerica – an on-line publication and print newspaper supplement that provides news on the environment and sustainable development with the support of United Nations agencies – to disseminate the results of research and strengthen ties with the public.