STALACTITES, STALAGMITES AND VEGEMITES - THE NEXT GENERATION
Every day of the year children venture underground on guided tours. By the time this decade has passed, and we are into the 21st century, some of those children will have joined caving clubs, others may have become guides, and hopefully, they will all be returning to the cave with family and friends for recreational purposes. The attitude and approach they have will be founded on early experiences gained on these showcase tours.
Chubb and Chubb, 1981, state: "People are most impressionable and learn most readily from those with whom they come in close contact during their childhood and teenage years. Attitudes and skills developed at that time often remain with individuals for life are even passed on for life and are even passed on to their children". We tend to take statements like that with a grain of salt but it is evident with the rainforests and their need for preservation. Yet, go back 15 or 20 years and the rainforests held nowhere near as much importance. Cave and karst managers should be looking at implementing strategies to develop those attitudes which will be of benefit to all karst and cave environments in the future.
In the cave environment the 'close contact' is through the guides on an actual tour. That effectively gives most guides only about 45 minutes to convey a positive attitude to the children on the tour, bearing in mind that the child is likely to hold memories and feelings of the tour for many years to come.
Before examining the importance of the guide's role in achieving this goal we should firstly look at the two specific groups that bring children to cave areas.
Group 1: The Family Group
Visiting for recreational purposes either as a day excursionist or
for an extended holiday based on a cave region, as is evidenced by the
number of cave areas which incorporate large camping grounds.
Group 2: The School Group
Primary aim of this group is to achieve one or more educational goals.
The difference between these two groups are significant and the guide's approach needs to vary according to the situation. On a general public tour the children can range in age from infants through to teenagers. The more diverse the group the harder the guide has to work in laying the foundations of positive values and attitudes that will remain, if not for life at least until they are underground again until the next guide can reinforce those values.
Every tour starts with reminding visitors of the rules and regulations. Don't eat. Don't smoke. Don't touch. Don't do this and Don't do that. Some guides will expand on those regulations and explain that touching leaves skin oils that cause staining to occur on the rocks and decorations. Whilst adults have the cognitive abilities to interpret the guide, the concept is almost always beyond children's ability to comprehend. How can we be certain that parents will translate the message to their children? Likewise it would do little in improving the image of cave guides if they started talking 'baby talk' to the entire group.
Children gain great personal satisfaction if the guide takes the time to talk to them as individual people. At an appropriate point in the cave the guide should speak to the preschoolers at their level - perhaps showing them an area which has been damaged in the past. A possible conversation may be:
Guide: "Did you see this?"
Child: "Yes" (with hesitation)
Guide: "Looks yuckie, doesn't it ?"
Child: "Yes"
Guide: "Do you know what made it yuckie?"
Child: "No"
Guide: "People touching it. You wouldn't touch it would you?"
Child: "No!"
Depending on the child's age you can go further by saying:
Guide: "Will you tell me if you see grownups touching?"
Child: "Yes"
It may seem insignificant but even children as young as 2 years are able to remember their cave experience in a positive light when the guide makes them feel important. Whilst a toddler may forget the details of his visit to the cave over a period of time, parents and siblings are reinforcing values and attitudes in the home environment as they relate their experience to relatives and friends.
It would take little imagination to envisage the conversations at home if the child had pointed out his own father for touching the stalactite!
School groups, as mentioned earlier, are visiting the caves primarily for educational purposes. Management can simply look at schools as their bread and butter or undertake to utilise these groups as a tool for achieving greater community understanding of the karst environment.
Managers already recognise the differences between the general public tour and the school group, such as that where possible tours are conducted separately.
School groups provide the ideal opportunity to develop the attitudes of our future managers and visitors. In this situation the group has similar interests and a common goal. It is here that appropriate environmental issues can be raised and discussed as part of the general tour.
It is the management's responsibility to ensure that the cave guides are trained to meet the educational needs of the students and also recognise the long term effect guides have on those children.
An integral part of every educational tour is the guide's ability to relate to the age and socio-economic status of each group, in addition to meeting the educational requirements of the school. They need to have an understanding of the level of both knowledge and language of the student. For instance, talking in technical terms of weathering and carbonation processes is not suitable for primary groups just as immature language will soon have senior school students bored and restless. So it becomes clear that there is a need for the guides to be aware of the students different level of intelligence and experience. A guide with good understanding and sensitivity will be able to form an opinion quite quickly but a short conversation with the teachers is a much more reliable way of obtaining this information. Managers need to encourage their staff to do this with tact and understanding.
Information relating to caves as a non-renewable resource can be added in to the tour content. Discussions can be held about the karst environment and why various management policies are implemented. It is not essential to go in to great depth with details but if the children have input onto the discussion the end result is more favourable than if the example is saying that it takes along time for a stalactite to form. This means little as a statement but show an area which has been damaged and discuss when, why and how to prevent further damage occurring, then see how much more information is retained by those students.
The long term task of increasing the awareness of the karst/cave environment is easier when it becomes part of the school's study program. During the last three years this is exactly what has been achieved in some schools in Victoria, essentially due to the work done by staff at Buchan Caves Reserve. This positive approach to education at Buchan has resulted in a unit on karst environments being used in some Victorian schools. It has been written up in detail by Marilyn Wiber of Mentone Girls Grammar School in "Interaction" June 1991, the Journal of the Geography Teachers Association of Victoria.
Mrs Wiber's objectives, in her unit of work based on the Buchan Caves, is subdivided into knowledge, skills, values and attitudes.
Listed as a knowledge objective is the following: "Students will be able to discuss management of this type of environment in the past and the present, and what strategies could be implemented in the future."
This unit of work is aimed at all levels of lower secondary education - from Year 7 to Year 10 especially in the Geography syllabus of Victoria.
Recognising the different levels of maturity the information is adjusted according to the capabilities of the students. The knowledge gained reaffirms the values and attitudes that the students develop. Those values and attitudes are listed as an appreciation of karst environments, and understanding of time scales when dealing with caves/karst, an awareness of the problems people cause and an awareness of management strategies necessary for people to enjoy the karst experience either by visiting show caves or by exploring adventure caves.
It is pleasing to note that the adventure caves are referred to. All too often wild caves sustain damage from unknown persons. Had such an educational strategies been implemented in the past we may have saved, or at least reduced, the amount of degradation that has resulted in these wild areas. In New South Wales areas such as Tuglow and Colong may well have been kept intact. In questioning a number of cavers in NSW all, bar three, had seen a cave on a school excursion. Only one had gone underground for the first time into a wild cave. Often managers rely on the caver's sense of responsibility as the only means of protecting the wild caves. If cavers are introduced to wild caves through school programs it becomes even more important to encourage the development of values and attitudes of cave preservation through the guided tours of either show or adventure caves.
To achieve the aim of community awareness of the cave environment managers need to work to a standard that ensures uniformity in information that the guides and information officer are giving. The work achieved at Buchan may well be undermined if a student visits a different cave area when on holidays and the guide presents a different attitude towards the cave. Children have the ability not to forget but will question the significance of the cave if the second guide has a lower standard.
Whether you refer to them as ankle-biters, mongrels, or vegemites today's children are the future caretakers of our karst and cave environments. Now is the time to formulate the implement management strategies that recognise and nature the potential of the next generation to protect what they will ultimately inherit.