Teaching about climate change?

“We call France, the country of the Paris agreement, to launch a major project to make the fight against climate change a priority of national education and higher education, and make the school a laboratory of the transformation of society.”

This vibrant call made by Valérie Masson Delmotte, vice president of the IPCC workgroup 1 and Laurence Tubiana rightly questions our capacity to act upon climate change from an educational perspective.

Why should we believe in the overwhelming power of education to act upon climate change? Why would climate change education succeed in raising awareness and changing behaviours when environmental politics have been a dismal failure?

The New York Times asked a simple key question in one of its surveys:

Do you think schools should teach about climate change? Why or why not?

That is the first question we must answer!

Others follow: Should students learn about the natural and human causes of global warming? Should they learn about solutions? Should they learn about the politics related to it? Why do you think these topics should or should not be included in science curriculum?

Once the questions are raised about students, come the questions about teachers and their ability to teach climate change.

The NCSE/Penn State survey found a robust correlation between ignorance of the level of the scientific consensus on climate change and willingness to use pedagogical techniques:  10 percent of the teachers declared rejecting human responsibility over climate.

© Yale Climate Connections

More dangerous, is the tendency to use fallacious pedagogical arguments such as encouraging students to “debate the likely causes of global warming” or “come to their own conclusions” on the topic to foster doubt or denial about climate change.

The following question was raised on a debate platform (see here): Should climate change be taught in schools?

We can read answers from climate deniers such as: “Climate change is a myth. God is the great and merciful and we have to act accordingly to his emotions. Acid rain is simply God crying angry tears at the reduction in the burning of forests.”, Much more worrying is the following answer: “All theories, whether they be evolution, climate change, or any other kind of theory should be taught in school. As long as they are backed up with facts and great minds behind them, I do not see why climate change would be any different. Of course, there should be a counterpoint to any theory which should also be taught.”

The pedagogical argument for debate in the classroom is in that case the starting point of climate change denial. And denial is at work on many more issues that we now consider as part of what must be taught in school. It happens with climate change and also with evolution, sexual abuse, gender, antisemitism…

Even if we rightly believe that education is part of the answer on climate change, we may question the efficiency of teaching in this matter. Ivan Illich criticized the “illusion on which the school system rests (assuming) that most learning is the result of teaching”. For him, “most learning happens casually”.

Margaret Mead argued that fighting back the dangers facing our planet should begin by understanding “the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices”. Is it the responsibility of schools and teachers?

Protecting nature can’t be reduced to an educative challenge. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, once argued that “protecting nature is a right of the environment in regard to man”. Enforcing this right is maybe first a matter for lawyers and not for teachers.