Environmental Sustainability

Early Pedagogues and the Environment

The efforts by the United Nations and other international organizations to promote environmental sustainability are the most recent manifestations of theory and practice advocated by educational leaders worldwide since at least the eighteenth century. Swiss educators Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi were two of the earliest pedagogues who advocated that children should have direct sensory contact with the natural world to develop a healthy personality. German educator Friedrich Froebel, the founding father of the kindergarten movement, further developed these ideas. Influenced by Christian ideals, Froebel believed that God was the unifying force that brought together humankind and nature, and it was incumbent upon educators to nurture in children a strong sense of continuity with the natural world. Froebel was one of the first to discuss a pedagogy of place as a way of promoting individual autonomy and ensuring the unity of selfhood with the living and nonliving world. Another leading educator who [Page 345]recognized the pivotal role that the natural environment plays in enhancing the cognitive and emotional wellbeing of children was the Italian pedagogue Maria Montessori. Without subscribing to the romanticism and mysticism characteristic of Froebel, she nonetheless agreed that involving children in real stories of the universe opened endless possibilities that would inspire their imagination.

For Montessori, the universe story provided the background for much of the content of the elementary curriculum. According to her, this content helped facilitate a biological and psychological connection between children and nature, and ultimately satisfied children's search for a sense of meaning and purpose in the world. A contemporary of Montessori's from a different part of the world was the poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore. He challenged the anthropocentrism of his contemporaries by stating that to take destructively and wastefully from nature was in fact severing humanity from itself. Founding Santiniketan, a school near Calcutta, India, in 1901, Tagore believed that learning should integrate the intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual domains. Like Froebel and Montessori, Tagore supported gardening as a key strategy for allowing children their first glimpses of the wonders of nature, the interdependence of living things, and an incipient sense of responsibility and duty. Gardening also was a way to involve children in the ongoing cyclical process of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth of life. He also encouraged the idea that in order to love something, one needed to truly know it. For instance, children could not learn to care for the forest from afar; they needed to walk, sing, eat, meditate, laugh, and sleep in its midst. Tagore even suggested that children should walk barefoot in the forest, as feet were the limbs best adapted for intimately knowing the earth by their touch.

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