AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
This July, Connecticut will follow New Jersey to become the second state in America to mandate the teaching of human-caused climate change theories in school. While much of the state already teaches climate change in classrooms, the new law will require a climate change curriculum for all schools. The measure has left many parents concerned about both the continued influence of left-wing special interest groups in education and the erosion of local control over education policy.
New Jersey’s experience is instructive as to how Connecticut’s law – as well as similar measures being considered in other states – might look in practice.
In Garden State schools, students begin learning about the supposed apocalyptic implications of human-caused climate change as early as kindergarten. In one example of how climate change is taught to young students, as detailed by the Washington Post, third-graders at Lawrenceville Elementary School in central New Jersey read a story called “No Sand in the House!” which tells the tale of a man whose Jersey Shore home is destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Then, students are asked to draw connections between the book and real-life events. The clear implication is that human activity causes natural disasters like hurricanes – a highly contentious notion advanced by many on the political left.
Even Physical Education in New Jersey schools hasn’t escaped doom-and-gloom climate change lesson plans. At Toll Gate Grammar School in Pennington, New Jersey, students are directed to toss balls of yarn representing carbon dioxide molecules to their peers stationed at plastic disks representing forests. In successive rounds of the game, the instructor remove the disks to represent deforestation. At the end, students are unable to move all the balls of yarn to the disks in the allotted time, supposedly representing how “global warming” occurs.
The common thread throughout all of these lesson plans is a determination to indoctrinate children with beliefs about political policies. Not only are the lessons untethered from science, but the political aims themselves are not appropriate for elementary school classrooms.
Many of these lessons are created and provided to teachers by outside groups – many of whom are also lobbying state government to pass laws mandating climate change instruction in the first place.
One of those groups is SubjectToClimate, a nonprofit that provides lesson plans for teachers on climate change. Margaret Wang, the group’s chief operating officer, has stated explicitly that climate change should be a central topic in every educational discipline. “There are elements of math [such as] being able to calculate and grasp its effects over time using statistics and science,” she said. “And there’s art as a way to mobilize collective action.” The latter comment clearly reveals the group’s political goals.
The “Next Generation Science Standards,” which is what New Jersey and Connecticut have based their requirements on, are themselves a product of left-wing activist groups – a fact reflected in sample lesson plans. In one of these lessons, titled “Youth Climate Heroes,” the “heroes” listed are not brilliant young minds or young inventors, but activists and protesters. Another lesson, titled “Gaming and Climate Change,” focuses on teaching kids how to use video games to “bring awareness” to the “climate crisis.” In so many words, the lesson suggests structuring video games around activist heroes and corporate “villains.”
We are already seeing the concerning effects that indoctrination into the left’s climate cult is having on American youth. A comprehensive study published in The Lancet in 2021, for instance, found that children were suffering from high levels of “climate anxiety.” Of 10,000 children surveyed, 59% were “very or extremely worried” about climate change, and a majority said it was negatively affecting their daily lives. 68% further reported feeling sad or anxious about it. Considering the relentless media onslaught forecasting the imminent doom of the human race, these results are hardly surprising.
Parents and community leaders have also raised concerns that state and federal actions are usurping local control over education. Following passage of the Connecticut law, state representative Christine Palm, a Democrat, explicitly stated that she voted in favor of the bill because “I didn’t want local boards of education to have the power to overturn the curriculum.”
If advocates of Connecticut’s new law were actually interested in “solving” the climate crisis, one might think they would be chiefly interested in molding future innovators, engineers, and scientists. Instead, the predominant focus seems to be scaring children into compliance with far-left environmental policies while also inculcating future generations of climate activists. Once again, it seems that it is politics, not science, that is really at the heart of this education fad.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.
