It has been a few months since I completed my doctorate. Yet, when I look back, it has been nearly a decade since I took my first ecology course. Back then as a freshman, I had hardly an ounce of knowledge about the natural environment. I did not even take A level biology (I opted for physics instead), and my biology background was limited to Grade 10 equivalent. In an ironic twist of fate, I chose to specialize in ecology for my major and the rest is history.

Today’s news is flooded with pressing issues about ecosystems and their inhabitants, be it the biodiversity crisis, ocean acidification and the weakening efficacy of forests as carbon sinks. Clearly, ecological issues are at stake here, and humanity stands to suffer massive losses if we ignore the symptoms of a dying planet.

Yet, the curriculum of my education system seems to depict a different, almost indifferent picture. Where’s the ecology? Back in my secondary school days, ecology was in the very last chapter of O level Biology and comprised of only one chapter (my class spent exactly two weeks out of two years on it). The contents covered were also extremely rudimentary and touch-and-go, ranging from food webs, trophic networks, quoting the main types of interspecific interactions (mutualism, parasitism) and very briefly, how humans have contributed to climate change and pollution. Nearly 90% of the curriculum was geared towards human/plant/animal physiology, as well as genetics. I did not take biology in the A levels but I heard from friends that the curriculum at that level was extremely focused on molecular biology and natural evolution (speciation and Darwin’s theory of evolution).

It could be argued that all these topics in biology at middle/high school technically count as ecology. After all, all life and ecosystems on earth function and evolve through species’ physiology, heredity and natural selection processes. The line is certainly blurred between these two fields, but I would assert that ecology, by and large, was a miniscule part of the pre-university curriculum. For one, a lot of the bread-and-butter concepts in ecology (e.g. species, biodiversity, communities, ecosystem functioning) that distinguish our field from mainstream biology are virtually absent in these classes. Secondly, even the ones that do make it into the curriculum were mentioned so briefly, all students needed to do was to accept them as facts they needed to regurgitate to pass their exams (if it came out in the exams at all – it didn’t in my year). As a personal anecdote, I remember knowing roughly that we were losing species, global warming was real and it was important to do something about it. But I would have no idea how to articulate how and why, however.

The media covers ecological issues so regularly and these issues cover so many aspects of our routine lives, such as palm oil production and consumption, food security and biodiversity loss. Yet, schools have not equipped students with the breadth of knowledge and thinking skills to wrestle and gain familiarity with some of the most pressing issues in modern society. Worse still, all the above assumes one even took biology. For those that choose alternative subject combinations, exposure to ecology becomes virtually nil.

Why?

Why ecology is not emphasized in school curriculums

I don’t work in middle/high school education, nor do I have the power, authority or capacity to have a say in what schools teach. Nonetheless, here are some of my guesses as to why the curriculum is not designed to emphasize ecology, despite it being so prevalent and important in our lives – especially for the future generation.

Reason 1: Ecology is a highly interconnected subject which is hard to constrain

How is ecology defined? According to the Oxford Dictionary, ecology is “the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.”

Within these two lines, there is a lot to unpack. What is the scope of “relations of organism to one another”? Do we start with predator-prey interactions, competition, speciation, niche theory or evolution? To me, it isn’t immediately obvious where to start as a lot of these concepts bleed into one another. For example, predator-prey interactions go hand in hand with the relative fitness of species, which lends into evolution by natural selection and possibly the establishment of distinct populations (biogeography).

Similarly, what is our scope when we deal with “the relations of organisms to their physical surroundings”? Are we examining abiotic or biotic variables? Are we examining it from a resource/nutrition perspective? Or are we referring to species’ adaptation? What scales are we studying? Yet, resource limitation in the environment often induces species to evolve various adaptations to overcome said limitation. However, when multiple coexisting species evolve in different ways, abiotic and biotic drivers collide. Concepts salad galore!

The endless number of links between ecological concepts makes ecology a difficult subject to teach and fit into standardized tests. At the pre-university level, students are often taught concepts that have been pre-packaged into neat little topics. This can easily inhibit their thinking and their ability to bridge distant concepts within ecology with one another. The difficulty of teaching ecology is further compounded when we consider the fact that ecosystems nowadays almost never exist in isolation of human influence, adding a human dimension to the way ecosystems are influenced by our actions. This leads to my next reason, which is…

Reason 2: There are rarely fixed answers in ecology

Ask any professional ecologists a question, and the most common response you’ll get is likely “it depends”. Will plants grow faster under eCO₂conditions? It depends. Will we lose species if the local government decides to build a road through the forest? It depends.

But that’s the nature of ecology. It is just hard to predict what might happen in the future.

However, this uncertainty does not gel well with the nature of the school curriculum and standardized testing. Students want to know what answers to give to get that A, and it has to be one that can be found at the back. I recalled how my biology teacher used to teach us scoring techniques for exams – we must hit very specific key words according to the answer key. Even paraphrasing was discouraged, if not outright marked as incorrect.

What happens when the answer is “it depends”? All hell breaks loose in the classroom for both the student who doesn’t know what answer to give, and the teacher who doesn’t know how to grade the students’ answers. This is coupled with restrictions on what schools can teach, given…

Reason 3: Ecology can be a sensitive subject

As much as ecologists want to pretend that ecology is nothing more than a science, the issues we discuss and study are often intertwined with multiple stakeholders and conflicting demands and constraints. This is something often emphasized in geography but often silenced when teaching ecology and biology.

Within the education system of my country, there is a common theme to teach about local initiatives to preserve the natural environment. Occasionally, students are quizzed on some of these initiatives in their exams. This itself isn’t bad – in fact I think it is great that students are at a minimum, exposed to these initiatives. The problem comes when students are taught to memorize these initiatives (as opposed to learning how to critically evaluate them instead). Sure, there is a need to cut down on fossil fuels to reduce global warming. Why then is oil refinery still such a large proportion of the nation’s economy when the rest of the world is seeking ways to decarbonize? Sure, we should conserve coral reefs. Just a few miles down, land reclamation launches tons of sediments into the water, doing the exact opposite.

As far as I can tell from my personal experience and how the current textbook is structured, students are taught about the positives but not the shortcomings in our efforts to maintain the natural ecosystems in my country. Rarely, a few interested youths will find the interest to look beyond the textbook to see what was done well and what could have been improved. But for the majority, there will never encounter an opportunity for critical evaluation of ecological issues.

Are teachers actively involved in teaching students how to think through ecological issues and take a stand?

Reason 4: We have few teachers who can deliver an ecological perspective effectively

A scarring memory I had of O level Biology was when I scored a goose egg out of 20 in a biology practice quiz. I was marked wrong even for the trivial question that asked me to label cell organelles – I wrote cell membrane instead of cell surface membrane; and cell wall instead of cellulose cell wall).

But that memory was a symptom of a bigger problem in how biology and ecology was taught in school – to do well in the subject, be perfect in regurgitating facts and mechanisms. The impacts of human activity on wildlife were handed to us as a list in our notes – just memorize them! The trophic pyramid is a pyramid because of the 10% rule because of metabolic processes and energy loss, full stop. We lose biodiversity when deforestation happens and that’s bad – end of story.

To be clear, none of these facts are wrong. But like the rest of the biology curriculum, teaching facts about life can only get you so far. No one explores or even questions why biodiversity loss is bad beyond losing resources from species that meet human material needs. No one draws the link between the evolution of species by natural selection and why we should finish our antibiotics course when sick (although there exists new evidence to the contrary too, see here). No one connects the trophic pyramid with our diets, and why eating less meat makes sense as a way to mitigate our impact on the environment. When teachers teach to the test and nothing else, ecology becomes a mechanical set of statements about our natural world and nothing more.

Closing thoughts

These are just some of the reasons I feel why ecology has not made it into the mainstream curriculum in my country, despite the prevalence of environmental-related issues presented in the media today. Let me know if you feel any of these reasons are also equally applicable in schools in your home countries.

The good news is that such an issue seems to be gaining traction, at least informally. Youths are contributing towards documenting wildlife in their local areas, and more young adults are joining the rally to campaign for conservation. Academics are also actively involved in pedagogical research to see how education programs can steer the attitudes and beliefs of students towards biodiversity and conservation. Nonetheless, many of these silver linings are still happening at small local scales, and we remain a far cry from formalizing ecology as a key subject in the education curriculum.

My personal view is that in the modern era, everyone should go through a formalized core module in ecology and environmental issues at least once throughout their education. There is simply no excuse to choose or claim ignorance considering the pressing ecological issues we see today. Without such knowledge, we would lose our sole defense against ignorant actors, skeptics and denialists, allowing them to run rampant and wreak havoc on what’s left of our ecosystems. Unfortunately, the ones who will pay the heaviest price are likely not us, but the generation after us whom we have a duty to educate today.