Position Paper National Focus Group on Habitat and Learning

Abstract

Taking good care of the human habitat, that is, of the environment that nurtures us, is emerging as one of the most significant concerns of the new millennium. As humanity endeavours to move onto a path of sustainable development, even as it enters the Information Age, it is evident that we need a new paradigm for education. Environmental education (EE) is ideally placed to serve as the lever for this paradigm shift that would focus, not on memorising what authoritative textbooks decree to be correct answers in order to reproduce them to get good grades, but instead on learning, on building capacity for critical thinking and problem solving. Since holistic thinking is at the heart of EE, the new paradigm would replace sectoral thinking by multidisciplinary thinking. The human habitat displays tremendous variability in space and time, and its understanding has to be locale specific, albeit in the context of a global vision. A great deal of the knowledge of the environment lies with India’s barefoot ecologists, the people at the grass roots, and the new paradigm will be participatory, engaging members of local communities and will be sensitive to issues of diversity, gender and equity.