Childhood and energy efficiency issues at school and at home: the role of information, teaching, upbringing and infrastructures

摘要

Might children be the solution to environmental and energy problems? Nowadays they are under considerable pressure to become ambassadors for energy moderation in different areas of life, learning about these issues at school and receiving recommendations from children’s newspapers and TV programmes. Yet to put children at the “heart” of this system is to forget that they have little agency and that their learning process is essentially based on adults who are stakeholders in their education. So in a net zero-energy school, technical performance, the ostentatious visibility of energy production and moderation devices, and the local council’s (which owns the premises) pedagogical determination, come into conflict with the educational projects and practices of the teaching staff; in turn, the latter have problems developing their own professional autonomy, implementing their pedagogical practices and constructing the gradual autonomy of their pupils, in buildings where such uses and objectives have not been taken into account. Children are taught about sustainable development at school, and try to put this knowledge into practice at home, among members of their family. But family configurations only permit such practices to a certain extent, depending on the educational strategies of the parents, pre-existing energy cultures and the legitimacy that parents give the school as a socializing agent in this matter. As far as behavioural instructions are concerned, social mechanisms for transmitting knowledge are not taken into account. In both cases the instructions are supposed to turn children into energy and environmental actors, but they are not free and autonomous actors; like adults, they are caught up in action systems, constraints, logics and projects related to concrete situations. Furthermore, when passing the information on to adults, there is the problem of the latter’s own definition of autonomy, based on progressivity, support, reflexivity.