(?) The link alone solves climate – it’s try or die since education on climate is low now.

Summer vacation is here, but somehow summers have lost their innocence. After all, humanity just experienced the four hottest days ever recorded and scientists say 2023 is on track to become one of the hottest years on record yet again. That smoky air from hundreds of ongoing Canadian wildfires is forcing us to accept that climate change is no longer an invisible threat. We can see it, smell it, feel it. Perhaps that’s also why a recent NPR/Ipsos poll suggested that a majority of American parents and teachers want their kids to learn about climate change. But the poll also confirmed that there is hardly any climate education in our schools: “most teachers aren't actually talking about climate change in their classrooms.” I was not at all surprised. “If you’re right about all this” one student at Wellesley High School had said to me after a presentation about climate change not long ago, “then why aren’t they telling us?” His question hit me like a punch in the stomach. Indeed, why aren’t we? Climate change is going to affect their entire lives. They have a right to know where we are headed. It will not only help them consider their future careers. It will help them survive. And it should not just be science education. Kids need to know more than why it’s happening. They need the knowledge and the skills to deal with it, too. All disciplines are called upon to help students prepare for what’s to come. It’s somehow more disturbing that Massachusetts is no exception. “Massachusetts, a science and biotech center, ranked very low in a study of climate change curriculum policy,” concluded Renee Cho, author and regular contributor to the Columbia Climate School earlier this year. Cho pointed to Rabiya Arif Ansari and Jennifer M. Landin’s recent study of 57 college biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. The experts found that coverage of climate change had actually decreased during that period. As had the focus on solutions to the crisis. No surprise, then, that our students feel unprepared. Megan O’Donnell, a recent graduate of Wayland High School (WHS), devoted her senior project to researching what teachers at WHS are teaching about climate change. Her results show clearly that there is a lot of room for improvement. Unless a student is enrolled in a particular level of chemistry, it seems, they will not encounter any climate science during their four years of high school. If they happen to be enrolled in a foreign language, they may talk about the issue of global warming in French or Spanish. If they have a committed English teacher, they will read about it in English class. That’s it. Tara Sawrikar, a 10th-grade WHS student, who also serves as a student member on Wayland’s Climate and Energy Committee, surveyed WHS students, asking them how worried they are about climate change, whether they have taken a class or a unit on the subject and what they wish they had learned about it. Of the 38 students who responded, the large majority (71%) said they were concerned or very concerned, and about 66% said they had not encountered a class or unit about the subject. Sawrikar does not claim to have interviewed a representative sample, and O’Donnell and Sawrikar’s interest was spurred by their 8th-grade science teachers. Indeed, the Wayland Middle School science curriculum does include a few weeks of climate education at the very end. But there is only so much a single unit in 8th grade can cover. But what hits home the most in Sawrikar’s survey results are the students’ responses to the question about what they wish they had been taught. “Everything,” two of them say. Other answers: “Anything more about it”; “Maybe some more baseline knowledge like what exactly is happening and why”; “about how bad it really is and what we can do and why it matters.” Perhaps now you feel that punch to the stomach, too