Climate change to be taught in US schools

Climate change has been incorporated into the US science curriculum for the first time, with American school children set to receive extensive lessons on the issue.

This move marks new science education guidelines, but critics have pointed out that the final standards were substantially weakened from earlier drafts. A number of experts have accused the government of ‘burying’ the human role in climate change. However, there is no denying that the teaching of climate science is a step forward.

The final guidelines cut the amount of time devoted to the subject by about one-third, it was found. What’s more, earlier drafts were more explicit about the role of humans in climate change, with Mark McCaffrey, policy director for the National Center for Science Education, now describing it as “buried at best”.

These new science teaching standards are set to introduce the teaching of climate change as a core part of science for students at middle and high schools.

Frank Niepold, co-chair of the climate education group at the US Global Change Research Program, commented: "In the current situation the state standards are all over the map.

It's a hodgepodge.

"We are still in a situation where across the country basically in every state students can still graduate from high school and in some cases go through college without learning the basics."

These new guidelines come at a time when conservative groups are holding up teaching climate change in a similar way that they do teaching evolution in classrooms.

What’s more, the standards the teaching will have to meet also appear much shorter than the draft versions that had circulated in recent months. Earlier standards proposed teaching younger children on the subject too.

According to Mario Molina, deputy director at the Alliance for Climate Education, the experts drafting the guidelines saw 35 per cent cut from the sections devoted to climate change after public outcry. However, the expert did not believe the reason was political, but was instead due to the need to compress a large amount of material.