Abstract

As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore’s nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray humans in Singapore as isolated from, rather than depending on and entangled with, the environment. We describe and analyze two trends. First, narratives about the nonhuman environment are largely relegated to Singapore’s past and disappear almost entirely as textbook narratives approach the present. Second, history narratives represent narrowly utilitarian, negativistic, and dominionistic perspectives of thinking about and relating to the nonhuman environment. We contextualize these results and discuss the implications of teaching such narrow and misleading conceptions of human–environment interactions in official history education.

摘要

作为历史教科书中环境教育存在（或不存在）的案例研究，本文探讨了新加坡国家规定的中学历史课程如何描绘人类与非人类环境之间的关系。它分析了 1984 年至 2015 年间出版的所有七本政府编写的初中历史教科书。结果表明，历史教科书在很大程度上始终将新加坡的人类描绘成与环境隔绝，而不是依赖和纠缠于环境。我们描述和分析了两种趋势。首先，关于非人类环境的叙述在很大程度上被归入新加坡的过去，并且随着教科书叙述接近现在几乎完全消失。其次，历史叙述代表了狭隘的功利主义、否定主义、以及思考和与非人类环境相关的统治主义观点。我们将这些结果背景化，并讨论在官方历史教育中教授这种狭隘和误导性的人与环境相互作用概念的影响。