Abstract:

The Ilia State University was founded in 2006 on the basis of several higher educational and research institutions. Its establishment was stipulated by the reform of the former Soviet Union educational and scientific system, that became essential after the restoration of Georgia’s independence. The object of the University is to get into the European Higher Education Areas, due to which it is acceded to the Bologna Declaration.
There are three basic trends in the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Ilia State University: Geology, Geophysics and Geography. The personnel is staffed by the key specialists of the former Georgian Academy of Science Institutions where higher educational and scientific researches are merged.
In the Ilia State University and in the country in whole there is obvious disbalance among the quantities of students of humanities, law, economic and engineering profiles. The latter one is chosen by considerably less number of students, whereas without the engineering profile personnel it’s impossible to lead out our developing country from economic crisis and overcome increasing ecological problems.
To put right this fault we decided to propose the firs-year students, who haven’t yet chosen their future profession, earth sciences in an interesting and attractive side for the spring term of 2012. To get them interested in geological science and natural resources I have prepared for them 30 hour lecture course with the title: “Natural Resources of the Earth Modern Civilization”. This course involves 11 lectures, two presentations and two colloquiums, each 2 hour long. In the course of these lectures are synthesized the earth geology, the history of civilizations and natural resource characteristic; were there is shown how was increasing the amount of used natural resources simultaneously with the humanity progress, that causes natural resource significant deficit and ecological problems as well.
This innovation caused great interest in students, as from those 17 subjects that were offered to 900 the firs-year students, 150 students expressed their wish to take these courses. Students master these courses with great enthusiasm, prepare interesting presentations and etc. We can say with certainty that during my 10 year teaching practice when I used to deliver lectures on classical “Magmatic and Metaporphic Rocks Petrology” “Geochemistry” and “Ore Geology” I have never come across such interest from students and in the end it’s worth mentioning, that from those students who intended to choose philosophy, psychology or biology, many of them decided to acquire a profession of a geologist.
Thus, we can conclude that studying the earth natural resources is reasonable for students in the context of modern civilization progress and problems. It’s clear that this approach arouses an interest in them for the earth sciences and especially for natural resources, that is guarantee of their reasonable use in the future.

Keywords:

Modern Civlization, Natural Resources, Geology.