Environmental Education Research Of Primary And Secondary Schools In The United States

Enjoying more expansive material wealth than ever before, people are faced withunprecedented environmental hazards and crisis nowadays. In somewhere of our planet, there isa lifeless sunless filthy picture consisted of nuclear threat, environmental pollution, ecologicaldegradation as well as resource exhaustion. The most direct consequence of human beings’unlimited endless plunder and conquest to nature is that environmental pollution is exacerbated.Increasingly serious environmental pollution has attracted worldwide concern toenvironmental protection and environmental education, which also stimulates the developmentof the international environmental education. America is the just one of the earliest countrywhich successfully established environmental education. Many years’ practice has accumulatedabundant experience in American environmental education. From the point of view ofeducational psychology, the stages of elementary and high schools play a crucial role in theformation of individual’s behavior as well as personality characteristics. Therefore, the U.S.government and other relevant departments showed their great interest in the elementary andhigh schools’ environmental education, which made it convenient to penetrate the environmentaleducation into the various courses and training. As the largest developing country in the world,though our environmental education develops rapidly, the base for environmental educationresearch is still weak and the present situation of our environmental education is not optimisticfor the reason of China’s enormous population, the pressure of economic development and therelatively-late-established environmental education. So our environmental education inelementary and high schools should be strengthened. St ones fromother hills may serve to polishjade. Experience in the United States provides important references for the steady and rapidbetter development of China’ s environmental education. Fr om the perspective of learning fromthe American experience, to explore its hi stori cal develop ment and current status, the articlema inly provides some positive reference for the elementary and high sc hools in China, thuspromoting the improvement of envi ronmental education as well as protection.The article is divided into four parts in total. The first part puts forward the problem,analyzes the present situation of environmental education resear ch longitudinally andtransversely and defines the concept of “enviro nmental education”. The second part verticallydiscusses the historical devel opmen t of American environmental education. This parts alsosummarizes the implement of American elementa ry and high schools environmental education integrally and systematically for three aspects, such as the teaching method (which involvesoutdoor-teaching, problem-teaching and so on), school curriculum model, related-teachers’training and so on. The third part analyzes and summarizes six characteristics of environmentaleducation curriculum in American elementary and high schools in multiple levels of politic,economic, culture and so on. The fourth part mainly indicates some problems existed in theenvironmental education in China’s elementary and high school, and eventually comes up withsome reference of the environmental education in American schools on the foundation oflocalization.