Environmental Education Program Heber Au Sable Institute offers a master of science degree in environmental science which includes a requirement for the college students to lead environmental education programs for primary school children. The environmental education programme for school children is run twice a year.

The environmental education programme for the academic year of 1999-2000 benefitted at least 400 children from the third, fourth, and fifth standards of four Diocesan Schools: St. John's Vestry School; CSI Elementary School, Woraiur; Methodist Elementary School, Woiraiur; and All Saint's Elementary School, Puthur. In this programme, the master students from the Department of Environmental Sciences visited the schools with charts and models to create awareness about the wonders of creation.

They, later, brought the school children to the college campus for an 'hand-on' experience with nature through various games and activities in different stations focussing on fishes, birds, plants, trees, animals and insects. The hard work put in by the college students was fruitful as they watched the children thank the Creator through a prayer and take a pledge to protect the environment.

           Primary School Education Program Challenges of Primary Education in India Early childhood education in India is subject to two extreme but contrary deficiencies. On the one hand, millions of young children in lower income groups, especially rural and girl children, comprising nearly 40% of first grade entrants never complete primary school. Even among those who do, poorly qualified teachers, very high student-teacher ratios, inadequate teaching materials and out-moded teaching methods result in a low quality of education that often imparts little or no real learning. It is not uncommon for students completing six years of primary schooling in village public schools to lack even rudimentary reading and writing skills.

            At the other end of the social and educational spectrum, children attending urban schools, especially middle and upper class children in private schools, are subjected to extreme competitive pressures from a very early age to acquire basic language skills and memorize vast amounts of information in order to qualify for admission into the best schools. Parents and teachers exert intense pressure on young children to acquire academic skills at an age when children should be given freedom and encouraged to learn as a natural outcome of their innate curiosity, playfulness and eagerness to experiment. Rising concern over compulsory learning at an early age is prompting many educators to advocate dramatic steps to counter the obsession with premature and forced teaching practices.

In Search of a ‘Third Way’ Between these two extreme positions, lie a wide array of mostly mediocre practices. Rarely do we find the educational system fostering the natural process of spontaneous, self-motivated self-education in which children learn just as they play and as a form of play out of their innate curiosity and urge to acquire knowledge of the environment. Internationally, there have been many efforts to find a ‘third way’ that suffers neither from the sad neglect all too common in low quality public education or the compulsive pressures exerted even on very young children by competitive, career-conscious school systems. A highly successful alternative approach has been evolved in the USA by the Institute for the Development of Human Potential, founded by the eminent educationist Dr. Glenn Doman. Doman’s work is founded upon the conviction that learning is a natural instinctive urge in young children that is very often curbed or destroyed either by neglect and lack of exposure or by compulsory teaching.

During more than three decades of work with both normal and brain damaged children, Doman has shown that exposing young children to interesting sources of information for very brief periods each day actually stimulates the development of the brain cells during early years and fosters a spontaneous curiosity and natural love of learning in children. Doman’s methods have been practiced for more than 20 years at the Institute’s school in Philadelphia and more recently in similar institutions established in South America, Western Europe and Japan. The same methods have been applied successfully by more than one million parents around the world. Another alternative approach has been evolved and practiced for the past 45 years at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. Here too the emphasis has been on fostering a conducive atmosphere for the children’s curiosity to emerge and express itself so that they acquire a natural inclination toward learning and self-development