ABSTRACT
Environmental Education (EE) in schools in the USSR is part of the general education. Students are taught the fundamental principles of the interaction between nature and society and acquire some practical skills. EE is integral, interdisciplinary and socially-orientated. To make school children aware of the responsibility for the environment means to make them realise the relationship between man and society and the need for an ecological behaviour that is consistent with the interests of society they live in. It is essential that school be oriented towards two social objectives. The first goal is to foster the sense of responsibility for the state of the environment that they must observe in all aspects of their personal and social behaviour. The second goal is to teach them practical skills in how to monitor the environment, protect it, improve it, and foster an intolerance of carelessness and wastefulness in respect to nature. This objective can hardly be achieved without the general involvement of students in the active movement for a better environment. Though these goals are separate, they may go hand in hand in the educational process.
