1972, UNESCO published the book "Learn to Live: Today and Tomorrow in the Education World", and put forward three main arguments for establishing a new concept of education: ① One-sided technology has produced serious harmful results, which has damaged and is still destroying the balance between it and the environment, between nature and social structure, and between human physiological organization and personality. The traditional model or partial reform can no longer meet the unprecedented needs of the new tasks and responsibilities to be completed in education. Only comprehensive lifelong education can cultivate perfect people.
Under the social background that the whole educational cause turns to emphasize adult education, moral education, humanistic spirit education, lifelong education and learning, environmental education has a good humanistic environment and healthy development conditions, and has become an important part of the whole green cause.
In recent years, people pay more and more attention to ecological education. Since advocating environmental education, scholars have increasingly realized that ecological education should have rich connotations. It is proposed that "ecological education" should include six aspects: ecological consciousness, ecological philosophy, ecological values, ecological ethics, ecological civilization and ecological culture.
Ecological education should not only care about how to make a natural person become a social person, but also care about how human beings learn to live in harmony with nature, society and even themselves. Education should not only make people learn to know and do things, but also learn to live together, that is, learn to live in peace with others, society, themselves and nature. This is the real sense of learning to survive. It is not that man is subject to nature, nor that man tramples on nature, but that man and nature respect and depend on each other as a whole.