With another school year wrapping up in a profoundly new fashion, now’s a good time to think about climate and education. After all, we know that because kids are particularly persuasive when it comes to making their dismissive or denier parents care about climate, putting denial in the classroom has long been a priority for the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists.
Have they been successful? Well, according to an analysis by the Hechinger Report published as part of a series in HuffPo, over two thirds of roughly 30 science textbooks used in California, Florida, Oklahoma or Texas describe humans causing or contributing to climate change. Some downplayed the consensus, a handful didn’t mention it at all, and about half only provided superficial coverage or had errors. About half of them provide detailed explanations of climate impacts, like sea level rise and wildfires. As for those that don’t, some teachers are taking it upon themselves to develop lessons that incorporate up-to-date science, “using scissors to cut out useful information from the books and pasting it together with materials they found from online resources or that they created themselves.”
Sadly, though, climate change itself may be an even more instructive teacher. Because in addition to a piece about how education in the era of coronavirus may be instructive for teaching through climate change, and another about climate’s public health risks being taught in Medical schools, there’s an interactive that lets people see how flooding will affect schools, and a piece that looks at how much harder schooling is now in Paradise, California.
In November of 2018, the Camp Fire burned through Paradise and destroyed all but one of the district’s nine schools. A year and a half later, there are still kids living in temporary housing, grades are down, and mental health issues are understandably common. The financial situation is also dire as a roughly halved student population means widespread layoffs.
The kids, though, are still eager to learn, and aren’t shying away from potentially tough topics for wildfire survivors, like Fahrenheit 451. One student’s encapsulation of the book: “Burning our way into destruction, if you burn away society, that destruction will take you with it.”
And they’re not going to let it burn without a fight. As Ashley Thorshov explained in her first-person piece about dedicating her life to fighting climate change: “If I want a future, I have to fight for it.”
She’s not alone. Another story tells of a local group in Mississippi, “Creek Rangers,” who are addressing a storm drainage system that’s failed their small rural town. For decades, a foot of rainwater has remained on the streets for days after major storms, the sort of storms getting more frequent and intense because of climate change.
One of the Creek Rangers’ adult sponsors, Romona Williams, explained that because “Mississippi is a climate-denying state. It’s a Trump state,” it lacks the sort of “policy infrastructure” to address these issues on top of the issues they face that are “rooted in structural racism,” so they “have to look at how we can empower small communities and the residents who live in those communities in order to build power.”
And key to that is education. Because while the town obviously was well aware of the flooding, they didn’t know what was causing it. “But now,” thanks to the Creek Ranger program that offered explanations and solutions, Williams said, “our children know why it’s happening. This is their future.”
But as the kids in Paradise know all too well, it’s also our present, and we are already “burning our way into destruction.”
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