Everyone has a different idea of how public environmental education looks like. In Singapore’s case, the first large-scale environmental education campaigns launched by the government was Keep Singapore Clean. This month-long campaign in 1968 was focused on behavioural modification, such as discouraging littering. The campaigning was done through media blitz, cleanliness competitions (carrots), and fines (sticks). The campaign worked and laid the foundations for Singapore’s good reputation for being a City in Nature.

Robottem and Hart (1995) and other scholars, however, argue that behaviour modification contradicts the spirit of education.

“[the] deterministic character contradicts on of the foremost aims of environmental education — or any education — the development of critical independent thinking.” (Robottem and Hart, 1995)

Undoubtedly, a campaign based solely on behaviour modification is not ideal. Nevertheless, the choice of resorting to such methods should have a fair chance of being evaluated based on circumstances. Singapore in the 1960s was a newly independent nation, comprising a high percentage of uneducated immigrant population who were from different cultural backgrounds. The Keep Singapore Clean campaign helped set a benchmark for cleanliness and acceptable behaviour in a heterogenous and largely illiterate society; this has benefitted generations of Singaporeans who then had the opportunity to undergo formal environmental education in schools in a clean and green country.

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Over the years, Singapore’s public environmental education has also evolved. For example, the National Parks Board has launched citizen science programmes that are open to the public to sign up and participate in. These programmes have the potential to fulfill other objectives of environmental education according to the Belgrade Charter.

Click the relevant tabs below to find out more about some national environmental education initiatives in Singapore:
Reduce water consumption (Public Utilities Board)
Recycling right (National Environmental Agency)