Environmental education is indoctrinating children with a "sentimental, unthinking and ill-founded attitude to nature", according to a report by a government curriculum adviser. Professor Anthony O'Hear claims schools have exchanged "value-neutral" nature study for "decades of propaganda about human effects on the environment".
Pupils are now "bombarded with tracts about ozone layers and sustainable environments and graphic representations of seal-clubbing, whaling and other forms of what are uncritically presented as pure human wickedness," he says
As a result, children are developing a hostility towards "many of the achievements of our civilisation", even though it is natural for man to transform nature, according to Professor O'Hear, a member of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA).
His report, Nonsense About Nature, published by the Social Affairs Unit, flies in the face of parental opinion on environmental education, revealed in a survey earlier this year for an SCAA-appointed panel of government advisers on values in education.
The MORI poll found almost universal agreement with the statement that schools should teach children to "value the natural world as a source of wonder and inspiration, and accept our duty to maintain a sustainable environment for the future".
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