General Overview

As young people all over the world have begun protesting and advocating for action to be taken on climate change, a major oversight in our education system has been revealed. Most middle school and high school curricula do not include basic information regarding the scientific consensus on climate change. This oversight can be addressed through guidelines like the recently developed Next Generation Science Standards. These standards for middle and high school curricula include climate change as a core concept; since 2017, they have been adopted by 19 states along with the District of Columbia.

Act Now

According to the National Center for Science Education, climate change denial (and the ideologically and politically motivated denial of scientific principles) poses a serious threat to the integrity of science education. Will the educational opportunities presented by COVID-19 face similar hurdles? At the state, district, and classroom levels, action must be taken to prevent personal attitudes and beliefs about science from influencing educational strategies.

Since the 1940s, advertising and public relations strategists have been leading efforts to insert propaganda from the fossil fuel industry into school curricula, which are primarily concerned with presenting the interests and worldview of fossil fuel companies to an impressionable audience.

Although more than 95% of scientists agree that human activity is the primary driver of climate change, nearly a third of middle and high school teachers have wrongly asserted that climate change is naturally occurring. In addition to removing the influence of the fossil fuel industry from schools, we must also invest in continuing education opportunities for educators on this crucial issue.

Moving Forward

Educators should familiarize themselves with organizations that are developing comprehensive climate change curricula. The National Wildlife Federation, NASA, NPR, NOAA, the Pulitzer Center, and Young Voices for the Planet are just a few of the organizations with easily accessible climate change curricula.

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