Critics Contend Eco-Education
Aims To Make Kids Activists

WASHINGTON —(AP)— Third graders at Mason Elementary School in Texas thought selling T-shirts to help save the rain forest was a neat extracurricular project, but it irked a parent, Bruce Lehmberg.

Like other critics, he thought students were being made unwitting pawns of the environmental left. He said materials accompanying the save-the-rain-forest project gave one-sided views about deforestation, global warming and depletion of the ozone layer.

"This did not give a balanced approach," Lehmberg said. "I'm not down on the school, but I don't want our teachers or students used as pawns."

Conservative organizations are convinced that some environmental education materials being used in the nation's schools are attempts to turn students into eco-activists. They want lessons on ecology, forestry, waste management and the like based on science, not emotional environmental campaigns urging political action.

"I don't mind saving the rain forests or endangered species," said political scientist Michael Sanera, a leading critic of environmental education. "I want the kids to have their facts straight."

He cites textbooks that he says distort population growth and global warming or give one-sided accounts of managing waste accumulation or protecting threatened species of plants and animals.

Environmental educators admit to isolated cases of teachers using poor materials or urging students to promote pet causes. But they claim that most materials used in schools are balanced.

"There are award-winning programs all over the country," said Rick Wilke, associate dean and professor of environmental education at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. "Recent attacks on environmental education are overstated and politically motivated."

Wilke is past president of the North American Association for Environmental Education, which will release new environmental teaching standards within two weeks. Reviewed by 1000 educators and experts, the standards are supposed to help teachers choose materials free of bias, scientifically accurate and with balanced viewpoints.

Next spring, the association is releasing guidelines on what it contends fourth, eighth and 12th-graders need to know to be "environmentally literate," Ed McCrea, the group's executive director, said.

In Washington, a conservative science and public-policy research group, the George C. Marshall Institute, has appointed an independent commission to examine teaching materials and determine whether environmental issues are presented objectively.

What leading environmental educators know and practice often differs from what goes on in many school classrooms, where teachers of the science sometimes aren't even trained in it, said Jo Kwong, environmental researcher at George Mason University.

Busy, budget-strained teachers often grab whatever educational materials are available, some of which present a single viewpoint. Pupils might be taught that recycling is morally correct, for instance, without discussing the gasoline used and pollution caused by extra trucks needed to haul recyclables, Kwong said.

"They just say ‘Save things,’" 11-grader Tiffanie Cherry said at Washington's Wilson High School. "It's like if we don't do this, or don't do that, then the Earth is going to explode."

Last year, 14 year-old Lacie Wooten and her friends at Stone Ridge High School in Bethesda, Md., boycotted McDonald's restaurants after a teacher told them the hamburger chain decimated rain forests to make grazing land for cattle.

Wooten, who now goes to school in London, admitted that nobody thought to call McDonald's, which issued this statement: "We do not, have not and will not purchase beef from rain forests or recently deforested rain forest land. Any supplier that is found to deviate from this policy, or that cannot prove compliance with it, will be immediately discontinued."

Project organizers had no intention to politicize the children, claimed David Younkman, an official of The Nature Conservancy, a co-sponsor of the rain forest project. Instead, he said, the children involved themselves in "an issue they are clearly concerned about."

Critic Sanera, who heads the conservative Claremont Institute's Center for Environmental Education Research in Tucson, Ariz., said he has a file cabinet full of materials pushing strict environmentalist agendas and urging pupils to become politically active.

He mentioned emotional letters that second-graders at Canyon View Elementary School in Tucson sent to a local newspaper to protest home construction in a desert.

Pupil Ashley Wallach wrote: "I can't stand watching all the damage that is going on near my school. I see smashed cactus and piles of trees. Soon all the beautiful cacti in Tucson will be gone."