Cutting climate from the curriculum leaves me cold

Rachel Gibbons

20 March 2013

Unbelievable. The self-proclaimed "greenest government ever" has decided that climate change is not important enough to be in the geography curriculum.

Ministers say they want schools to teach "in a way that best meets the needs of their pupils". Yet the greatest need for everyone is surely to live in a world that can support them and their children in the future.

As a member of Friends of the Earth's Youth and Education Network, I've been to lots of school assemblies to speak about renewable energy. I've taken a model power station, wind turbine, wave machine and solar panels, to show the children what clean energy looks like.

Even the youngest children have no problem seeing that the fumes coming out of the power station are damaging our planet - and that renewable energy is the way forward. I don't go into the science of climate change at age five, but it's setting the scene for the most important lesson: things humans are doing are causing problems and we can change that.

The current geography national curriculum says it is important that:

Geography inspires pupils to become global citizens by exploring their own place in the world, their values and their responsibilities to other people, to the environment and to the sustainability of the planet.

In my 13-year-old daughter's geography lessons, she's learnt about: climate change, renewable energy, deforestation, pollution and the impact we are having on our world and the people in it. She understands not only the facts about our world, but the effects we have on it and what needs to be done.

Compare this to the most similar aim in the new curriculum:

...understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, how these are interdependent and how they bring about spatial variation and change over time.

All the meaning and value - and all the chances for young people to think for themselves - has been stripped away.

If this new curriculum is implemented, my younger children will come away with a very different view about their place in the world. They cannot possibly come to see that they are the change that is needed. This curriculum sees children as vessels to be filled with knowledge - not as thinking, feeling people determining their own future.

This new curriculum will stuff the brains of our children but leave their hearts cold.

We are working with other organisations including People and Planet, as many voices together are stronger. Please sign their petition asking Michael Gove to reconsider dropping climate change from the National Curriculum.

Do you feel as strongly as me about the need to switch to renewable energy? You can support Friends of the Earth's 'Clean British Energy' campaign at www.cleanbritishenergy.co.uk.