Students Demand That Schools Prepare Them For Climate Change

As young people begin to understand adults’ betrayal of the planet, the eyes of all future generations will be watching – Greta Thunberg

Many young people are scared for the future because of the climate emergency. Meanwhile, schools are not teaching students sufficient information about how to survive the crisis. As anxiety levels increase, students in the UK have come together to solve this problem.

Teach the Future is a student-led campaign with one main goal: to reconstruct the entire education system around the climate crisis and ecological emergency. The campaign, founded by a sixth-former student named Joe Brindle, is run in partnership with UKSCN (UK Student Climate Network) and SOS-UK (Students Organizing for Sustainability), an educational charity.

Joe, age 17, said:

It’s educated people who are causing the most damage to the planet. It’s people with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge who are becoming fossil-fuel chief executives, and they are the ones who are causing the most destruction to our world. Therefore, that shows that education is not succeeding and that our education is broken because education should be creating better people, not worse.

According to Joe, schools are failing to prepare students for the climate emergency. He argues that schools should put the environment at the heart of education, and students need to learn how the climate crisis even happened. Joe believes that most young people want to understand more about climate change, what’s behind it, the issues of justice, and how to survive it.

However, schools are constrained by limited budgets, and most teachers themselves lack knowledge about climate change and sustainability. “It’s not good enough that sustainability is restricted to a few subjects, and most of our teachers and lecturers don’t know enough about it,” the campaigners explain.

Next week, Teach the Future will go to the Parliament with their call for an environmental overhaul of education. Joe will join over a dozen students who make up the core of Teach the Future, to host a crowdfunded reception for MPs (members of the parliament) at the Parliament’s Terrace Pavilion.

The group will introduce a drafted English emergency education bill that represents their key demands. They hope the draft will form the basis of a private member’s bill. However, in the meantime, their goal is to get as many MPs on their side.

Teach the Future, are demanding the following:

1.  A review commissioned by the government into how the entire English formal education system is preparing students for the climate crisis and ecological emergency;
2.  Adding climate crisis and environmental emergency in teacher training, along with a new professional teaching qualification;
3.  An English Climate Emergency Education Act;
4.  A national climate emergency youth voice grant fund;
5.  A federal Youth Climate Endowment Fund;
6.  All new educational buildings to be net-zero from 2022, and all existing educational buildings net-zero by 2030.