ENVIRONMENT-CHINA: Little ‘Green’ Guards Show the Way

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Rong Jiaojiao

BEIJING, Nov 6 2002 (IPS) - Tang Jiaqi, a third grader from an elementary school here in the Chinese capital, has become a teacher of sorts to his mother.

”Thanks to my repeated warnings about ‘white’ pollution, my mother has now got used to carrying a cloth bag instead of a plastic one when going to the vegetable market,” says Tang Jiaqi, who goes Baiyun Road Elementary School.

To teachers and local officials, Tang’s actions show that the lessons on the environment that children learn in school can go much farther than the classroom.

”Children are movers of environmental protection. Naturally, they like to share what they have learned with their parents and people around them,” says Jing Yanpu, headmaster of the school.

”They set a good example for adults,” agrees Huang Xuechun, an official of a neighbourhood committee near the school.

Great strides in environmental knowledge are not something China is usually known for, but since 1978 its primary and secondary schools have included environmental protection in their curricula and have been helping train ‘little guards of the environment’, as their teachers call their pupils.

”Environmental awareness is one of the key factors that determines a nation’s population quality,” says Xie Zhenhua, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).

”As the future of the nation, children must develop a correct outlook on the environment and sustainable development so that when they grow up they can solve environmental problems caused by our generation,” Xie says.

Primary and secondary school students are quick to accept new ideas and once they develop good habits, they keep them for life, adds Jia Feng, a SEPA official.

”Environmental protection knowledge (already) exists in many courses like geography, biology, physics and chemistry,” says Zhu Muju, deputy director of the elementary education department of the ministry of education

”We reinforce the environment concept and stress the importance of environmental protection wherever relevant,” Zhu explains.

Today, China can boast of an army of 6.8 million ‘little guards’ who officials say are using the knowledge about the environment they have learned in school to benefit their local environment.

More than 20 years after the country first introduced environment education, officials believe they have obtained fruitful results.

The number of schools recognised by SEPA as having excelled in environment-related classroom teaching and extracurricular activities – so called ‘green schools’ – had reached 4,750 across the country by January 2002.

Studies done by the education ministry and SEPA, as far back as 1998, show that nearly 40 percent of young people aged 10 to 15 chose environmental protection as their top concern – a rate much higher than that among their parents.

In a typical physics class, for instance, students get an understanding of noise pollution while gaining knowledge on sound waves. An experiment on carbon dioxide in a chemistry class helps students understand the reasons behind global warming.

Even during a Chinese-language class, students can feel the importance of the environment by appreciating a text about nature, Zhu says.

Besides acquiring knowledge from books, students participate in field activities that ”promote a student-oriented and inquiry-based method of learning,” says Dr Shi Gendong, a director of the Beijing Education and Science Institute.

”This is intended to instill in them a sense of responsibility to find environment problems and solve them on their own,” explains Dr Shi.

One ‘green’ school in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China, won the ‘Global 500 Best Environment Educators’ award from the United Nations in 1995.

Fifth graders at the Daxing Road Elementary School there have been managing a special environmental monitoring station established in 1990, the first of its kind in China.

Under their teacher’s guidance, students monitor rainfall, air, dust and noise in the monitoring station and then write reports.

In Longjiang Road Elementary School in south-west Chengdu province, students took a special journey along their local Funan River as part of their studies.

After carefully examining the river’s polluted water, they wrote detailed reports and issued a ‘Funan River Protection Initiative’, which caught the attention of the municipal government and led to the launch of a project to clean the river.

China’s environment education programme has also attracted international attention. In 1997, the ministry of education signed an agreement with one of the world’s largest conservation organisations, the World Wildlife Fund(WWF), and British Petroleum, to launch the ‘Environmental Educators Initiative for China’ programme.

This six-year programme helps train environment education staff in China. In October 2000, the three parties signed a second-phase agreement,which aims to make environment education a major component of compulsory education in the country.

”By drawing on the experience, resources and methods of developed countries, we hope to do a better job in environmental education in the future,” says Zhu of the ministry of education.