The impact of the National Environmental Education Policy initiatives in South African schools

Abstract

The South African environmental policies, NEMA (1998), and the White Paper on Environment and Development (1995) support the incorporation of environmental education into the national school curriculum. These policies propose that environmental education should be interdisciplinary and holistic in approach and should run across all school learning areas and disciplines. The policies further recognize the role of environmental education as a potential tool through which learners and the general public can engage themselves in critical issues related to environmental justice in South Africa. Interviews with teachers, government officials and Delta personnel show that the national policy initiatives, documents and projects have not yet reached schools in the Gauteng region. The triangulated findings from this research show that there is poor coordination between parties responsible for the implementation of policies. This poor coordination has resulted in teachers not being prepared and empowered to initiate, organise, implement and run environmental education in schools. As a result integrated environmental education is not being implemented across the curriculum in the schools that were interviewed in the study. The basic problem seems to be that teachers and school principals have poor understanding of the nature of environmental education. It appears, from the research findings, that this is linked to a lack of training and support.