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Constructing Apathy: How Environmentalism and Environmental Education May Be Fostering “Learned Hopelessness” in Children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Michael Nagel
Michael Nagel*
Affiliation:
EDUCANG Ltd
*
†EDUCANG Ltd, PO Box 4078, Forest Lake QLD 4078, Australia. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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For children, environmental issues have become part of their formal and informal educational lives. The merging of the terms environment and education in the 1970s has also witnessed an emerging degree of pessimism through bringing the plight of the environment to the educational arena of children. Much of the discourse surrounding sustainable development is premised on a negative outlook regarding the state of the environment. It is these types of negative messages on which this article focuses. This paper suggests that while attempting to educate future generations about environmental issues, environmentalism may have also assisted in developing a generation of children who have not only become apathetic to environmental issues but also lost in a confusing muddle of “learned hopelessness’.

Keywords

environmental educationenvironmentalism“learned helplessness”advocacy
Type
Research Article
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 21 , 2005 , pp. 71 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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