Schooling is designed around futures that are collapsing. And yet, if you ask anyone what they think is wrong with the education system, you can easily guess the typical answers. What if I were to tell you that fixing any of those issues will still not prepare the children of today for the present climate-altered reality? This is a challenge that they will feel more acutely in the future. This is because the design and content of formal schooling are largely built on a blueprint that serves the very economic paradigms that have put us in the global mess that we have today. To tweak and refine the existing ‘system’— through better pedagogy, curricula, teachers or infrastructure — is like missing the wood for the trees.
The call for climate education is getting stronger and clearer, but what is ‘climate education,’ considering that in some form or the other environmental education has been a part of the curriculum of most Indian examination boards after the Supreme Court verdict of 1992 made it mandatory? Why is there a new imperative, given that global and national policy imperatives like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 talk of learning about ‘environmental management’ and ‘sustainability’? Meanwhile, Article 12 of the Paris Agreement (2015) and Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) have also established a mandate for ‘climate education.’ These resolutions clearly indicate that we are politically and legally required to add these topics to the core curriculum as independent subjects.
A change in nomenclature to ‘climate education’ is also a call to bring about a shift in consciousness, putting education front and centre to prepare individuals to handle the crises caused by anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change. This does not mean just improving the related curricula or pedagogy, although this is indeed important. It must recognize the fact that education is a crucial human activity that both shapes and is shaped by socio-political and economic systems and can play a truly significant role in helping us reimagine the future.
There are several posited and robustly contested perspectives on whether climate education should be considered and taught as a discipline or as a set of skills. The primary contestation is that climate change does not have a firm epistemological basis to warrant a disciplinary status of its own. A ‘green skills’ framework, folding in more complex capacities like ‘inquiry’ and ‘critical thinking’ that expand the possibilities of what skills can do, has been gaining traction. One reading of the tea leaves in this bubbling teapot of research helps us build a thesis: climate education can use a ‘climate lens’ i.e. a systemic focus on sustainability, environment and biodiversity conservation themes to create clear curricular imperatives. What would that mean in practice? The implications are that curricula must:
- shift from just providing information and raising awareness to building an action-oriented outlook;
- have more lessons on the adaptation and resilience for eco-socio-political impacts of climate change;
- enable willing participation in the transition to greener or low-carbon economies;
- equip students for constructive engagement on social justice issues that are exacerbated by climate change;
- and finally, address ‘eco-anxiety’— a mental state that eats into the sense of wellbeing of a fairly large number of young people!
To develop these capacities in individuals, it is important to emphasize that the new curriculum should be interdisciplinary in scope. This also demands intentional rather than incidental pedagogy for collaborative problem-solving and the development of metacognition. It requires learning that is rooted in ‘place’, taking into consideration impacts on nature as well as on people.
Climate education must be seen as an arc through the primary, middle, and secondary years. The primary years are best spent on developing a grounded relationship with nature. Several alternative schools such as the Krishnamurti schools have historically been nature-centric in their curriculum. They ensure that there is a green cover on their campuses making these a haven for insects, reptiles, birds and mammals. Thus, students can spend a significant amount of time in non-directed play and observation. All this fosters a sensory, non-verbal, and fond relationship with nature that embeds itself in the subconscious. Research today shows that this is crucial for wise planetary stewardship. The special relationship with nature should ideally permeate their homes too, such that parents also pause to watch trees and living things more carefully, and grandparents feel inspired to recall and retell stories in which nature plays an important part.
As much as direct experience of nature is important in forming this caring relationship, so is an exposure to the beauty of multiple disciplines. This could take the form of nature-based themes in painting, music and dance projects, or outdoor science and mathematics projects, or themes in storytelling involving local history and culture — ideally all concurrently. This is key to making the relationship with nature whole — an important basis for well-rounded climate action.
In middle school, as a child’s sensibilities have developed enough to take in the wider social context, so the curriculum must offer experiences that can help students think about detrimental factors like fear and power-seeking, and dwell on notions of care and compassion. This is key to priming a student’s capacity to understand and act on issues of social justice. Rather than a prescribed structured approach, children in these years need creatively designed, interdisciplinary and interactive lessons, built on contextually relevant intersectional stories. They should be allowed to consider why societies are organized the way they are and imagine what alternative forms of social relationships might be like. For example, there could be a lesson on the build-up of urban heat in cities, a complex but palpable human-induced phenomenon that affects us all, but especially domestic workers in schools and homes, as well as those who work in factories to produce modern conveniences. Such lessons can trigger critical questioning and enable a sense of agency in students through small acts of reconfiguring their relationships with people and places. This would prevent the paralyzing righteousness that can creep into conversations on making the world a better place to live in. Re-imagining human societies begins through the scope provided for this in such early engagements.
The secondary years see young people — as they step out of childhood — get naturally drawn to conversations, experiences and perspectives that help them understand their place in the world. Rather than helping them understand the ways they ‘fit in’ or don’t, using a climate lens can help them see possibilities of contributing in some small ways and developing their sense of agency. Young people today are not just interested in this, but may subject their teachers to audacious, complex and mind-bending interrogations about everything around them! What if they were to bring their growing awareness, concerns and questions to the curriculum itself? For example, most high school economics syllabuses are still built around traditional growth-oriented theories that have led to our unsustainable ways of life. We could help students find out who gets to choose what we are expected to learn and who gains from these choices? A curriculum for secondary school must harness the power of a young person’s sense of agency by co-designing the curriculum with them, thus showing them that they too can participate in creating a more human world that honours the earth as well as justice for all. This is a potent and enduring antidote against eco-anxiety.
Anthropogenic climate change is a wake-up call for educational curricula. Innovation, critical thinking, teamwork, proactiveness and so on — twenty-first century skills, as they are known — are currently not being developed through school education, and this has often been lamented. However, the very way we imagine the twenty-first century in mainstream discourse and the role of education and what it ought to achieve, fails to centre the biggest crisis of the times. Today, critical thinking skills, collaborative learning or innovation, even if they are taught in schools, are only complicit in perpetuating destructive attitudes vis a vis the planet.
The climate education imperative must make us ask what seem like rudimentary questions, but which are now increasingly urgent ones, on the aims of education. We can no longer be content with plugging in an ‘environmental studies’ syllabus, or teaching individuals to live sustainably and believe that we are preparing individuals for the complex crisis ahead. The impact of climate change will, in waves, keep showing us that we are now beyond the stage where ideas of sustainability have any traction (sustain what? is a legitimate question). A reimagined climate education is the spade that must dig and overturn the soil, and sow the seeds through which regenerative, new, and inclusive futures can grow and thrive.
So, the call to action for the education ecosystem is to commit to and support a complete overhaul of formal education for the future. Curricula must truly serve our young to create and inhabit a different world. The limitations of information-heavy curricula are being starkly exposed by the advent of AI. The current format does not foster a sense of agency in children, or build the capacity for action, nor encourage true collaboration — all of which they will sorely need in their climate-altered future. If you are a concerned parent, teacher, principal, bureaucrat, policymaker or a young adult, do find the nearest climate education conversation or initiative you can join and participate in mobilizing resources for enabling this shift.
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We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
— Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring