Teaching and learning about climate change
Brick in the wall
The younger you are, the higher the stakes when it comes to planetary breakdown. The cruelty of this, as with many injustices, is that children don’t have the same political, social, or economic rights as adults (and those who are yet to be born have none), so there is much less they can do in this “decisive decade”.
Young people regularly report feeling worried about climate change and are more likely than their seniors to take up activism. However, more troubling data suggest rising “fatalism” and greater polarisation among younger people, between those who are very worried and others who claim to be unphased by rising temperatures (although these trends will vary by country). Beyond these specific attitudes, there is evidence of mass psychological harm on young people from the current situation.
Children need to understand the world they will grow up in and be empowered to change it. Are educators and the education system able to meet this responsibility when it comes to the climate?
Climate Education
In February this year, I ran a series of workshops for Year 6 students (aged 10-11) at a primary school in Hoxton, London, as a volunteer with Climate Ed. The charity, although fairly new, has already delivered workshops in over 100 schools around the city since the pandemic eased.
The course begins with how greenhouse gas emissions contribute to the greenhouse effect, are produced by burning fossil fuels, and some likely physical impacts of global warming. Then, through groups activities and worksheets, kids learn how much carbon is produced by our transport, food, and other things we buy, and come up with suggestions to reduce this.
The experience clarified for me that talking about individual behaviour change for sustainability should always be a conversation about justice and fairness. After all, the concept of a personal ‘carbon footprint’ was created by an oil and gas company, BP - one which, around the time I was visiting Hoxton, slackened its targets to reduce emissions and transition to zero-carbon energy.
Several of Hoxton’s Year 6 students completed their ‘homework’: to talk to their parents or other family members about what they had learned. The intergenerational injustice of climate change is emotive, and adults often take action out of concern for their children and grandchildren. That might well go beyond their consumption and lifestyle choices, to community organising, activism, or how they vote.
Yet I had to reflect on the circumstances these families might be facing and how they would feel to hear their young ones talk about their household’s carbon footprint. Doing the school run by car could save time and money - critical for people struggling with rising bills - if combined with a trip to work, a cheaper supermarket, or a food bank. Public transport can be inaccessible for people with disabilities and unsafe for children to travel alone, especially for girls.
Switching scale again, responsibility and solidarity count at the global level too: countries with much lower historical emissions and current emissions per person than rich countries in the Global North are also the most vulnerable to risks from climate change. In short, the climate crisis creates many inequalities; finding a collective solution requires us to keep them all in mind.
It takes a village to fight climate change
It strikes me as a duty to tell the truth, and - given the timeframes involved - to enable children to participate now, not just when they’re older. However, Vox’s Kelsey Piper has written persuasively (albeit with a US focus) that climate communication for children is too pesimisstic, and “dishonest” about what they can do to prevent the worst - and that this is partly to blame for their eco-anxiety.
Deepening and extending education on sustainability might be a way to bridge the gap. Could creating more space in schools to discuss planetary change add something unique and hopeful to societal debate?
Children’s natural curiosity has a way of cutting through. After we covered fossil fuel emissions and the global nature of climate impacts, one student asked “what will people in Africa, for example, use in their homes if they don’t use gas?” (presumably without knowing that this is a live issue in climate politics). Another suggested, during the session on transport, that if the government helped people to own bikes, it would be a lot easier for them to make greener journeys. Ideas of fairness and responsibility are often central to how children interpret the world, relatively free of the biases we collect over the years we spend living in it.
Think of kids taking thoughtful questions home from their climate class to ask their parents or carers. Imagine those ideas in dialogue with older generations, through conversations about the planet’s future happening in more families and communities.
However, the education system - including both schools and charity partners - face real constraints. For a sustainability education initiative like Climate Ed to secure funding, it needs to add to the core science syllabus, which is supposed to address the physical process of climate change and wider solutions like different kinds of renewable energy. This is why the workshops focus on carbon footprints.
In the UK, a Climate Education Bill proposed by Labour’s Nadia Whitcome MP would require climate change and sustainability to be integrated into core curricula more systematically, as well as vocational courses. Unfortunately, at the present low moment in the UK’s climate politics, the Bill seems to be languishing in Parliament.
Perhaps most of all, spending four Friday afternoons trying to hold the attention of 35 primary school kids gave me a new level of respect for teachers and for their patience and resolve. Even as they work every day to provide the next generation with this fundamental human right, their own rights as workers regularly come under attack. For children to learn to be environmentally and socially conscious and confident to shape the world, teachers and schools need more support and recognition.