THE INADEQUATE TEACHING OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN SCHOOLS
An important initiative of the National Children’s Campaign (NCC) is Schools for Climate Action (S4CA), which helps school boards, student councils, school environmental clubs, PTA’s, teachers’ unions, and school support organizations pass resolutions that:
- Drive a paradigm shift so people recognize climate change as a generational justice and equity issue;
- Clearly articulate the political will for all elected leaders, especially Members of Congress, to support or enact common-sense climate policies; and
- Celebrate and expand school district responses to climate change.
That’s why it was disheartening to read the long Huffington Post article called “Are We Ready? How We Are Preparing – And Not Preparing – Kids For Climate Change”, which concludes too many schools are failing to properly teach children about climate change. As the article states:
In the review of the 32 textbooks, which are used in California, Florida, Oklahoma or Texas, we found that at least 12 included descriptions of climate change that were superficial or contained errors. Another four of the science books did not discuss the topic at all. And some downplayed the scientific consensus that human activities are causing the current climate crisis, according to the four experts who reviewed the passages for Hechinger/HuffPost, although they had varying perspectives on the extent of those problems.
NCC is proud of S4CA’s work, which has resulted in 136 educational sector organizations adopting climate change resolutions to date. While S4CA has made considerable progress in a few short years, there are battling against the fossil fuel industry.
Granted these corporate behemoths aren’t actively scheming to thwart S4CA, but they do try to influence the curriculum students are exposed to. Think about it. A company like Exxon Mobil, which made $14.3 billion in profits in 2019, is part of an industry that has unlimited resources to undercut the global response to climate change. They long ago identified young people’s concerns about climate change as a threat their profitability. Last year those fears were exacerbated, as the article details:
High school students have become an increasing force in climate change activism; in 2019, hundreds of thousands of young people skipped school and took to the streets to protest the climate crisis in a global strike. But in the United States, many of the textbooks they use in class barely scratch the surface of the tremendous obstacles their generation will face on this issue.
While the fossil fuel industry and their allies who have been planting language that either ignores, misinforms or soft pedals man’s role in climate change for years, the growing activism of Generation Z is likely to intensify those efforts going forward. One of the people who examined this academic manipulation was Richard Alley, a Department of Geosciences at Penn State professor. In the article he said:
“What many of the texts have done is to give the few contrarian voices with their loud megaphones a much greater voice in the text than is warranted based on the science and the assessments of the various national academies of science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a publishing company that is emblematic of the problem. As the article points out:
A passage that appears in a 2019 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sixth grade science textbook used in Florida and in a 2015 sixth grade science book used in Texas calls climate change “one of the most debated issues in modern science.”
The rest of the passage from the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt book talks about recent warming and also mentions that evidence from the geologic record shows that Earth’s climate has experienced even larger changes in the past. That language is misleading, according to the experts we contacted, because it minimizes the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are responsible for present-day climate change and suggests that the wide variations in climate before human civilization bring into question the role of human activities in the current warming.
When questioned about the textbook language Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and similar companies use the same defense – they are complying with the standards set in places like Texas where the textbooks are sold. Back in 2013 new academic guidelines were issued about modernizing the science discussion, including climate change. In response six states developed their own standards, with the fossil fuel industry-dependent state of Texas leading the way “because of its market size plays an influential role in shaping the content of textbooks even beyond its borders.”
The Texas state education board of 15 elected members that approves the textbooks standards are known for their climate change skepticism. As Dan Quinn of the of the Texas Freedom Network explains:
“Politics trumps facts and sound scholarship when it comes to developing curriculum standards, particularly on issues that are considered controversial like climate change…They know they have to get their textbooks adopted through a political process and the way to do that is to make sure nobody hates your textbook, certainly not the people who are voting on it.”
So how can we support efforts to stop the miseducation of students on climate change? Here are a few steps we should take:
- Encourage more school districts to pass climate change resolutions by working with S4CA;
- Use the internet to help increase young people’s understanding of the issue;
- Utilize legislation like the Green New Deal as framework of the type of measures that can effectively address climate change; and
- Vote in elections for school board members who determine the direction of how schools teach students.
Ultimately the fossil fuel energy will lose the battle to continue the status quo approach of passivity towards addressing climate change. The science is clear and young people aren’t going to be limited by a little education obfuscation about the issue.