Teach Hope, Not Fear: Rethinking Green Education in Kerala’s Schools

Environmental education has a problem of fear. If you ask a school student anywhere in Kerala what they have learned about the environment this year, the answer would involve melting ice caps, vanishing reefs, and exploited natural resources that point towards a planet running out of time. They learn the extent of the damage, but end up not knowing what they can do about it. The lesson arrives as apprehension, not as agency. For decades, this has been the content-delivery model we offer.

Environmental education and the study of children's happiness and well-being developed as separate disciplines. One stream unmasked the scale of ecological collapse to students, hoping fear would elicit responsible behaviour. The other studied what makes young people satisfied, resilient and hopeful about their own lives, with little discussion of the planet they are inheriting. In 2014, three psychologists, Dorit Kerret, Hod Orkibi and Tammie Ronen, stated that understanding both disciplines separately is an oversight, in their article in the journal Review of General Psychology. They claimed, with their framework, which was called Environmental Subjective Well-Being (ESWB), that caring for the environment and feeling good about one's own life are not conflicting ideas. They are from the same psychological niche. Though the argument seems simple, it is vaguely perceived.

Part of their argument is reframing what "green" behaviour even means to the person doing it. Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, or any of those remedies repeatedly suggested for saving the planet have long carried an undertone of loss, or self-denial for the greater good. Positive psychology sees the same actions through a different lens. Frugality connects to old virtues like temperance and prudence, which stand in contrast to the consumerist tendencies to link discipline to discontent. Caring for the environment can be understood as an altruistic act. If directed that way, it can help individuals to create a sense of purpose and satisfaction by helping to restore, rehabilitate, and regenerate something outside oneself. Kerret, Orkibi and Ronen's contribution is to argue that these are not two separate entities, but a single mechanism, working in one direction.

For generations, households across Kerala ran on a version of this logic without ever naming it. Hand-me-down clothes, repaired vessels, food preserved from the family's own land, compost from courtyard leaves, the routine exchange of surplus between neighbours and none of it was framed as sacrifice. It was simply how a household worked, and it provided people with more, without any shortness. That older, lived model of sustainability is worth remembering now, because what Kerret, Orkibi and Ronen are effectively describing is how a school might reconstruct its psychological effects for a generation that no longer grows up immersed in sustainable living.

The environmental hope

At the centre of the model sits a variable the authors call environmental hope, built from three parts borrowed from Hope Theory in psychology. Pathway thinking is the ability to see an actual, workable route to a goal, like a waste segregation system that functions or a pond that can realistically be revived. Agency thinking is the will and energy to walk that route once it is visualised. Social trust is the belief that other stakeholders like local government, industry, community and fellow citizens will do their share too so that one person's effort is not wasted in isolation. Deprivation of any one of the three will leave the young person with information and no way to act on it. That gap is where the model locates most of the helplessness environmental curricula unintentionally produce. That is, present the crisis in full and offer no credible pathway to manage it, and hope collapses into dread.

The significance of green schools emerges in this context. A school cannot be defined as green just because of the fact that it has installed solar panels or constituted a nature club. They are institutions organised around real, attainable ecological goals that a student body can see through to completion. A biodiversity survey of the school pond, a working compost pit, a waste segregation drive or a self-audit carried out by the students themselves are a few examples. These give a pathway and agency that gives something concrete to grow on. Involving local officials, NGOs, PTA members and community leaders will ensure social trust. The school is equipping the students to turn an assignment into evidence that the wider system is capable of responding.

Why hope alone is not enough

Hope by itself won't get a teen to carry wet waste to the compost bin when classmates are tossing everything into a single waste bin. The model ESWB accounts for this with a second layer, self-control. Paired with the ability to resist peer pressure, hope can act as a major driving force in attaining ecological goals. Self-control here means a learnable set of skills like delaying gratification or managing the small irritations of doing careful things. Resistance to peer pressure matters because adolescence is the stage at which belonging to the group can feel more compulsive than almost any personal conviction. Kerret, Orkibi and Ronen suggest that green schools work on both sides of this problem at once. They build a student's internal capacity to hold a position under social pressure, while also shifting the group norm itself, so that sustainable behaviour becomes the ‘ordinary thing’ to do rather than an exceptional behaviour that attracts attention.

Where Kerala's own programmes fit

Kerala already runs large-scale efforts that touch this area, even if they were not designed with the above-mentioned psychological model in mind. The state's Haritha Keralam Mission has made "green protocol" compliance into schools on a considerable scale. As per a statement to the Kerala Legislative Assembly in 2024, more than 14,000 institutions had been inspected for adherence to green protocols, of which over 9,000 qualified for a green certificate, and water-quality testing laboratories had been set up in over 200 schools, alongside dedicated biodiversity knowledge centres. These figures need updating while reporting on them today, but the scale of the intent is clear.

What is less clear is whether certification-driven programmes of this kind build environmental hope in the sense Kerret, Orkibi and Ronen describe, or whether they risk becoming another compliance exercise. A green certificate measures whether protocols were followed. It does not tell us whether a student developed a sense of accountability that their own effort mattered, or whether trust in the wider system of collaborators grew alongside it. That is precisely the kind of question the ESWB framework is suited to asking, and precisely the kind of question it has not yet been tested against in an Indian setting.

A model still waiting for its evidence

It is worth stating that this framework is a theoretical proposal, built by synthesising existing research in positive psychology and environmental education, not a finding drawn from testing across the world's actual green schools. Kerala, with its long-standing tradition of decentralised, community-linked schooling and its own large green-protocol infrastructure already in place, would be a natural setting in which to find out whether the model holds and what needs to be changed for it to work here.

The researchers further point out that the stakes go beyond any single classroom. They suggest a link between the sustainable habits an individual carries and a country's broader environmental performance. Schools that manage to build both pro-environmental behaviour and personal well-being together are raising a generation better equipped to manage ecological pressure without being numbed by it. This deserves to be treated as an argument to test rather than a fact already settled.

The model offers a genuinely different viewpoint for policymakers, educators, curriculum designers and the government at large while designing a sustainable or green curriculum. Instead of opening with the scale of the crisis, start with a project a class can actually complete. Instead of asking students to feel guilty about consumption, ask them to solve one specific, local, achievable problem, and make sure someone outside the school notices when they do. The households that once taught sustainability without a curriculum are disappearing across Kerala, as it happens everywhere. What Kerret, Orkibi and Ronen describe is a way to rebuild in a classroom what earlier generations absorbed at home. Success is guaranteed, provided the schools change the metrics of measuring their own success. It demands a shift in perceiving success from counting certificates to assessing whether the students believe, with reason, that their effort matters.