87
Volume:
2019
,
September

On Their Minds, Not In Their Classrooms

Submitted By:
Jonathan Gold, Moses Brown School, Providence, RI

Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action by Sarah Kaplan and Emily Guskin
The Washington Post, September 16, 2019

This article summarizes research from a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey of teens’ perceptions of climate change. In general, teens report higher levels of concern about climate change than adults, chafing at adults’ perceptions that they are alarmist. At the same time, although many teens express worries about how climate change will affect their futures, "fewer than half say they’ve taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints." There also seems to be a growing awareness of environmental justice – the idea that environmental harm is often distributed along racial or class lines – with "black and Hispanic teens express[ing] a greater sense of urgency around climate change." Most urgently for educators, few teens report learning much about climate change in their schools; "fourteen percent say they learned 'a lot' about the subject, down from 25% in 2010," according to research from the Yale Project on Climate Change. Encouragingly, approximately 25% of American teens have participated in climate change activism, which the authors claim as "remarkable levels of activism for a group that has not yet achieved voting age." And yet it is clear that schools need to do more to teach students about the scale of and potential solutions to this mounting global crisis.

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