Jackson-Reed’s climate change education does not do enough for our future

Sonja Boser and Sarah Wiesenfelder

Climate change continues to be a life-threatening issue, and one of the only ways a difference can be made is through education to promote widespread awareness. In light of this, Jackson-Reed should incorporate climate change policy into its curricula.

While environmental issues are already lightly discussed in our school, the education provided is nowhere near sufficient. To improve the environmental education within Jackson-Reed, we need to create more classes that deal with climate-related topics.

The topic of environmental racism is one that is not addressed prominently enough with our current curriculum. Environmental racism refers to when racial discrimination is present in environmental policymaking. Furthermore, less developed countries tend to be much more affected by climate change than developed countries but international scale solutions rarely take the disparity in contribution and effect into account. We can’t combat something that we know nothing about so incorporating these topics into the existing environmental curriculum taught in classes like AP Environmental Science is key to forming future solutions.

After reaching out to Rob Flack, a biology teacher at Jackson-Reed, to learn more about climate change in the biology curriculum, we learned that he can only recall two different lessons in Honors Biology that address climate change. None of the lessons he remembers discussed potential large scale solutions to the issue of climate change. If we want to prevent climate change, we need to learn more than how to use public transportation and recycle. We need to incorporate history and policy into the curriculum to understand how politics and climate interact.

We also talked to Phillip Bechara, a biology and marine science teacher at Jackson-Reed who expressed that there needs to be more time to teach the essentials of climate change. We all learn a little bit about climate change in biology, but we talk very little about the environment from a political perspective. Introducing a class that would talk about environmental justice through a historical and scientific lens, focusing on lessons that aren’t in the established curricula is another potential solution to the issue of our lackluster climate policy education. Although there is currently an AP Environmental Science class, it is only open to seniors. Given the pertinence of climate change, a course relating to that issue should be open to underclassmen as well. Jackson-Reed needs to offer more classes on these subjects to improve the quality of our environmental education. 

Climate change is a significant issue faced by everyone. Increased knowledge of the effects of climate change allows people the opportunity to adjust their behavior and support societal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including climate-related topics in school curricula will improve students’ ability to deal with the physical and psychological effects of global warming.

At the end of the day, there are many facets to a successful climate change education. While  covering them all is a lofty goal, students would benefit from knowing more about such an urgent and widespread issue. •