Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 6 June 2015 | Page 42

Curriculum

44

These are lyrics from a song called Teach
Your Children that became a huge hit back
in 1970 and was written by Graham Nash
of Crosby Stills & Nash fame who was
inspired by a famous photograph of an
angry child holding a toy hand grenade.
As adults, we will be remembered for the
dreams we feed our children that will go
on to inspire, nurture and motivate them
to achieve great things. All parents dream
of creating a sustainable future for their
children but in order for sustainability to
become a way of thinking, we need to
change our thinking about the world and
how we move through it.

It was Benjamin
Franklin who said:
“Tell me and I may
forget; teach me and I
may remember; involve
me and I learn.”

The messages we send to our children will
help make their dreams a reality, so we
need to ensure that they, too, are involved
in creating the messages and thought
processes. At Curro schools, we have
adopted a variety of green initiatives such
as encouraging recycling, urging water
conservation and energy saving practices,
and opting for digital information storage
rather than printing documents. These
messages serve to foster the ‘Curro goes
green’ way of thinking about ‘reducing,
re-using and recycling’. In addition,
our learners become members of
environmental clubs, where they learn
about the importance of green initiatives
and begin to foster a positive and forwardthinking mindset.
Although this helps develop what is best
referred to as environmental literacy, it this
does not go far enough. As Franklin said,
we need to ‘involve’ all our stakeholders
in this process and this education
must become part of our essential
school culture. We need to develop an