Description:
Ecological education gains an increasing importance in the moment when ecological crisis acquires increasingly larger proportions. Education is one of the most powerful social means in fighting problems and challenges of the future. This paper presents the results of the research referring to pupils' attitudes with respect to the activities they prefer to be involved in, the independent variables their readiness for involvement depends on, as well as the relation between the knowledge possessed by pupils and their readiness to be involved in ecological activities. Research was conducted on the sample of 284 pupils in the eighth grade of primary school in urban and rural area and polluted and unpolluted environment. The results indicate that pupils find more interesting the activities taking place in nature, those where they are immediate participants and those where they have a subjective feeling that they are doing something to protect the environment. Besides, the results show that girls from both samples and pupils from rural area are more ready to get involved in ecological activities. Living in polluted or unpolluted environment is not a statistically significant variable which would influence the readiness of pupils to get involved in these activities. As the most interesting result of this research, we consider the finding that a higher level of pupils' ecological knowledge and living in polluted environment do not guarantee higher readiness of pupils to get involved in the activities of environment protection.