ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN NIGERIA: FACING THE CHALLENGES IN CURRENT PRACTICE

摘要

Since the bold step was globally taken to include environmental education in the educational system, it has emerged in most developing countries as a leading approach to addressing environmental problems and engendering sustainable development. The knowledge and use of the environment are important since a degraded environment offers all a degraded quality of life. It is therefore the collective responsibility of every living human being to secure the minimum quality of the environment. Building standard environmental curriculum on this principle becomes necessary. This paper therefore examines the extant practice and content of environmental education and training in Nigeria. It insists that there is clear inadequacy in the environmental education paradigm in the Nigerian educational curriculum. The National Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) for instance only brushed elements of the environmental problems into the curricula of English Language, Social studies, Health Education, Integrated Science, Agricultural Science, Geography and other areas. This approach is insufficient if environmental regeneration must be undertaken sustainably as presently advocated through environmental awareness and educational programming globally. The Nigerian curriculum needs immediate adjustment to allow for the inclusion of standard environmental education and training at primary, secondary, tertiary, and informal levels. By so doing the nation and its peoples would prospectively thwart the on-going environmental damage which is a threat to human survival and sustenance now and in future. In appreciating the obvious challenges to environmental education in Nigeria, the paper makes important recommendations as follows: that the theory of environmental education curriculum be immediately developed and included at all levels of Nigerian educational programme; Environmental issues to occupy ample space in public discourse; environmental regeneration and protection movements to be formed in all nooks and crannies so as to entrench the philosophy of environmental awareness; and that government and civil society organizations, particularly religious bodies in the Nigerian case, take specific interest in propagating environmental awareness.