Are US Students Learning Enough About Climate Change?

The fact that human industrial activities have been altering our climate system,
mainly by heating up the planet, has been publicly known for far longer than
many people think.

Some of the first documented cases of discussion of human-induced climate change
began with the ancient Greeks,
who debated whether the draining of swamps and cutting of trees could affect
local rain patterns.

But it wasn’t until a few millennia later, in 1896, when Swedish scientist
Svante
Arrhenius
calculated that human activities could significantly alter the entire planet’s
climate system.

Fast-forward nearly a century to a hot June day in Washington DC in 1988,
when James
Hansen,
then-director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, stood before
the US Senate Energy Committee and asserted
that
“the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now;”
and in 2015, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a damning
report
documenting the deception tactics used for decades by major fossil fuel
companies to spread misinformation about climate change.

Since then, global average temperatures have continued to climb — with each
recent year warmer than the last, and people the world over experiencing the
escalating effects of the climate
crisis
in some form or another.

Climate change in US education

Historically, the United States has been the most significant contributor to
human-induced climate change — having released more than 509 gigatons of
planet-warming C02 into the atmosphere from 1850 through
2021.

One might assume, then, that education on the subject would be a high priority
across the nation. But sadly, this is not the case — for numerous reasons we
will get into, in this first of a four-part series on climate change education
in the US.

Today, there are roughly
90,000 pre-kindergarten,
elementary and middle schools in the United States (both public and private) —
and climate change education programs among them are few and far between. In
fact, wildly differing, state-by-state educational and funding priorities have
created a system that seems to be letting students
down
in terms of learning key subjects: US K-12 students have lagged
behind
their peers in other developed nations in recent years on international math and
science assessments. In a 2015 Pew Research Center
report,
only 29 percent of Americans rated the country’s K-12 education in science,
technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as above average.
Scientists were even more critical: A companion survey of members of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science found that just 16
percent called US K-12 STEM education the best or above average; 46 percent
called it below average.

So, maybe it’s no wonder that an emergent area such as climate science hasn’t
yet made the list in US school curricula? But quality isn’t the only
consideration, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate
Portal
pointed out in 2022: “In the US, climate change is not a standard part of the
public-school curriculum in many districts due to a lack of resources, lack of
teacher background knowledge, and forces that push against this type of
education.”

What do educators have to say?

“There is nothing in Florida’s curriculum pertaining to climate change,”
Maria Fialcov — a retired elementary school teacher who taught at Tropical
Elementary School in Plantation, Florida for 27 years — told Sustainable
Brands® (SB). “Unless there’s a teacher who is willing to — and has the
ability to — have an environmental club, there is no talk about climate change.”

In 2021, Harvard Graduate School of Education published an
article
detailing how award-winning journalist Katie
Worth visited several US states, spoke
to teachers, analyzed textbooks, and had conversations with students and
families — all on her quest to find out what children in the US are learning
about climate change.

“There were disagreements among teachers about how to approach it. Sometimes
teachers were educating their kids about it, and the kids would push back
because they’d heard at home that it was a hoax. Sometimes parents were mad that
the kids were learning about it or that they weren’t learning about it. So, it’s
a hot topic on the ground — even for children,” she reported.

As Ariani Serrani, a
Washington DC-based education professional and curriculum developer with Earth
Charter International , told SB: “Most kids in the
US haven’t learned much about climate change; and if they know, it’s because
they learned on their own, through social media — and not something they’ve
learned in school.”

Serrani published a story book, The Jungle
Jinni, to help elementary and middle-school
educators integrate climate into their curricula. While writing the book,
Serrani did her own research, over a period of four years, by speaking directly
with teachers.

“I’ve been trying to see what makes paradigm shifts and why there’s a gap
between consciousness and application of knowledge,” she said. “The issue is, we
can’t get to the point of consciousness because we can’t even get the material
out there. Many teachers I’ve spoken to, even if they are aware of it, don’t
have the knowledge or the background to teach climate change — and they’re
already so overburdened with their load that asking them to teach climate change
… they’re already burnt out.”

Public opinion is not enough to improve the situation

In 2019, a survey conducted by
IPSOS/NPR
found that 86 percent of K-12 teachers and 84 percent of parents of children
under the age of 18 believe climate change should be taught in schools.

Yet, despite such overwhelming support for this urgent issue to be a part of
primary school curricula, one of the major barriers is the fact that less than
half of K-12 teachers have
any formal education in climate science — nor do they get enough support to
teach on the subject.

Looking to the future

As the effects of climate change become increasingly evident, will the education
system in the US finally catch up?

Unfortunately, climate change has become increasingly and unnecessarily
politicized;
and its integration into the US public education system may ultimately depend on
who is in charge — at the highest levels of government — of who learns what, and
the personal and political beliefs behind those decisions.

Part two of this series will focus on high schools, along with more on the US
education system as a whole and some of the other underlying issues it faces
when it comes to climate change education.