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Environmental Education Essay

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Environmental Education

When forming a curriculum, teachers need to determine three types of objectives- fact, skill, and appreciation for something. The “appreciation for” objective is the one that an environmental class stresses. Environmental courses emphasize the importance of conserving the Earth by creating environmental responsibility, evokes morals. In conservation, we have to decide what is important and certain actions we want to take to preserve what we feel is important. That’s why it is crucial for teachers to decide what is necessary to include in an environmental curriculum to create sensitivity and teach ethical problems. Teachers need to teach the three viewpoints that one could take on the environment. Once these …show more content…

This machine excludes anything with intrinsic value or something that has value in and of itself—versus the idea of instrumental value, which is anything, aside from humans, that is a means to an end or a tool for something else. In this view, humans are the only ones with intrinsic value. Knowledge, in this viewpoint, is to predict and control nature (Factor). “A result of this attitude is that any species that are of potential use to humans can be a ‘resource’ to be exploited…The view that humans have greater intrinsic value than other species also influences ethical judgments about interactions with other organisms. These ethics are often used to legitimize treating other species in ways that would be considered morally unacceptable if humans were similarly treated…Another implication of the anthropocentric view is the belief that humans rank at the acme of the natural evolutionary progression of species and of life” (Anthropocentrism).
Teachers need to provide logic, examples, and connections for students to grasp a concept. Teachers would need to explain that it is logical, that everything is comprised of parts, and that the machine is running for us. After all, we breathe the air, we’re at the top of the food chain, we have the power to destroy, and we have language. No other being on Earth compares to us; so everything on Earth is meant for us. A teacher would provide an example such as the idea of biodiversity. We need biodiversity because we have not

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