Today in class we had a presentation with regards to the chapter in the "2010 State of the World: Transforming Cultures" on Education's New Assignment: Sustainability.
This particular chapter of the book focused on how the government should be encouraging sustainability practices in schools so that children can be taught early thereby enabling them to grow making sustainability not merely something to think about but a way to live their lives. It is often said that is you teach them young it will become second nature to them; lessons learned young become ingrained.
I could not agree more with this sentiment. The portion I really enjoyed was with regards to changing the "Three R's of learning" (reading, writing and arithmetic) to the "Seven R's of sustainability (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Respect,Reflect, Repair and Responsibility). Our world is changing and the government is ALWAYS slow to change, the machine's gears just don't move fast enough. But this should be of utmost importance, each day that goes by where we do not instill these values in our children is a potential child lost who could be developing these ecologically minded values and practices - these are our future leaders. There is no time to waste!
Perhaps the saddest part of this presentation was with regards to commercialism in kids' lives - the statistic that caught my attention was the fact that the average child spends 40 hours a week watching TV and only 15% of mothers see a problem with this. When did we stop being involved with our kids and made the TV the convenient babysitter. This really shows a breakdown of core values in the home and more than 15% of mother should be concerned about this!!! Is it really so hard to spend time with your children anymore instilling values in them???
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