What would Green Studies look like?

Has the time come for Valley high schools to think about implementing Green Studies as an inter-disciplinary field? The EEI (Education and Environment Initiative) is now in the Education Code and will be coming online in 2012. All schools in California K-12 will need to include it in what they do across all subject areas (more here).

For several decades now, American high schools have abandoned the old “trade” track (technical and agricultural skills) and offered only an academic track, even for students who are not going into the arts or humanities or sciences. This has been a noble goal – ending the discrimination between elitist AP and Honors students and everybody else - but unfortunately it bears little relation to real world jobs and it has imposed some rather boring subjects on most students. Cynics will say “Forget it, these kids don’t care and you’d be imposing new burdens on overworked teachers.” I disagree but I will save that for another day.

Here is how I think Green Studies would work.

Structure: Taft already organizes students into inter-disciplinary guilds like Humanitas and Star Leadership; Birmingham has Small Learning Communities. Surely Green Studies could be an overlay for one of these for a year or two and then become its own guild? It would need parent and company involvement: bring in the solar panel guys or whoever supervises school lunch foods or a Pierce professor or two (etc.), well before the senior year. Enlist the business community to help provide teacher resources and chase grants.

Curriculum: can we reverse the learning sequence so that it is purpose-driven? Science would be more meaningful if students are engaged in an in-school gardening program and researching how electric cars work or how roads are constructed; history and economics would be more meaningful if students have to evaluate home owner options for energy savings, tax breaks, rebates and the like; English and psychology and journalism would be more meaningful if students are blogging on new technologies and sustainable living, including making their parents’ paychecks last longer.

There are parents and students (and teachers too) who would push against Green Studies as a distraction from the SAT and ACT. My point here is that by connecting education to the tangible physical world, reducing the abstractions and distractions and focusing instead on practical experience, we might find this motivates students to excel when it comes time to take tests.

Photo: Wikipedia - First Lady Michelle Obama works with kids from Washington’s Bancroft Elementary School to break ground for a White House garden.