By: Annabelle Ma

New Jersey has become the first state to require students in grades K-12 to be taught about climate change in 7 of the 9 total subjects. Climate change is incorporated into the other school subjects, including physical education classes.

Michelle Liwacz, a first-grade teacher in Trenton, N.J., has incorporated climate change into her lessons. She teaches at Slackwood Elementary, a public school that serves 250 students grades K-3.

One day last week, Liwacz was teaching her students about the dangerous smoke from the wildfires in Canada that were the result of climate change. She told them that if they avoid the fire, the smoke would gradually disappear.

Ms. Muzi, another teacher at Slackwood Elementary, was teaching her students about floating garbage. After introducing her class to this concept, a second grader proposed that plastic shouldn’t have even been in the waterway in the first place.

“He’s 7,” Ms. Muzi said. “And in talking to him, I was like, wow, that is such a big idea.”

According to a poll conducted in May by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 70 percent of the residents in New Jersey support climate change being taught in school. So, though this may sound like a good idea, 30 percent of residents are still against it.

Some critics said that the climate change conspiracy theories should also be taught. They also say that climate science is a form of “indoctrination.”

A 2016 study shows that climate change is taught by around 75% of the science teachers in the U.S., but many students get less than two hours of climate education a year.

Some states don’t like the idea of putting climate science into learning. For example, Texas issued guidelines saying that students have to learn the “positive side of fossil fuels.” Some educators say that teaching climate change will give students anxiety.

Monica Nardone, a third-grade teacher in Trenton, NJ, thinks that the people who say that climate science will make students anxious are ridiculous.

“We have lockdown drills” to prepare for school shootings, she said. “How much more are we going to make them afraid?”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/climate/climate-education-schools-children.html