Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Environmental Education: A Community /University Approach, Tom P. Abeles

Higher Education

The current reassessment of higher education [1-4], coupled with increasing concern for our environment, has indicated several shortcomings in science-oriented curricula. Perhaps the most obvious one is that most basic courses in physics and chemistry focus the primary learning experience in the classroom. This isolation from the real world is further enforced by laboratory experiments which are primarily pedagogical exercises with little or no direct application to existing problems~only the techniques and principles Which are learned can be carried over, and often this can be done only indirectly.