Why Don't Schools Teach Climate Change?

Written By Teacher: Elaine Makarevich

Elaine is a New Jersey educator with 30 years of teaching experience in grades K-6. The earth and the natural world have always been a focus of her life and throughout her career as her students learned critical lessons about their planet when visiting her indoor or outdoor classrooms.

Why don’t schools teach climate change more often? As educators, we know how important it is, but many schools face challenges like limited curriculum time, lack of teacher training, and fears of political controversy. Teaching climate change requires navigating complex, interdisciplinary topics that connect science, social studies, and current events—areas where resources can sometimes be scarce. Thankfully, tools like SubjectToClimate's Teacher Guide for Teaching Climate Change in Schools and the En-ROADS Climate Impacts and Solutions Learning Lab offer practical ways to overcome these barriers. By equipping ourselves with these resources, we can empower our students to understand climate change and engage in solutions for a more sustainable future.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

American teachers and parents want climate change to be taught in the classroom. According to a 2019 IPSOS/NPR survey, 86% of K-12 teachers and 84% of parents of kids under age 18 believe that climate change should be taught in schools.

Yet despite this support, climate change usually receives little to no dedicated time in the classroom. One survey of 1,500 middle and high school instructors, for example, found that teachers only dedicate about one to two hours to the subject across an entire academic year.

And this has clear impacts: in one of, if not the, largest survey of middle and high school science teachers about climate education conducted in 2016, researchers found that the majority were unclear about whether there’s scientific consensus that global warming is caused by humans. One in five instructors chalked global warming up to natural changes in the environment or said that they either didn’t believe it was happening or weren’t sure of the causes.