Neither Ireland, Nor Any Other Nation, Should Be Promoting "Climate Action" in the Public School System
As outlined on the website of Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), a new Leaving Certificate subject, “Climate Action and Sustainable Development,” will be introduced for fifth-year students across Ireland in September 2025. The new subject “aims to develop students’ capacity for informed and meaningful action for a just and sustainable world as they engage with key sustainability challenges, including the climate crisis.”
If you are a climate activist or just happen to accept ideas now in common currency about the need to fight “climate change” and throw everything at it from carbon taxes to the involuntary expropriation of farmland, you might just celebrate the fact that taxpayer-funded schools will be uniformly alerting teenagers across the emerald isle of the impending “climate crisis” and teaching them how to “demonstrate, using secondary data, the evidence for human-induced global warming,“ and how to “plan and design a potential action to address (a) problem (related to the issue of climate justice).”
But then again, maybe you shouldn’t be celebrating this curricular change, even if you happen to be on the front lines of the “climate justice” movement. The national school system is potentially good for some things, and not for others. When it works well, it is good for teaching basic skills like mathematics, reading comprehension, writing, public speaking, elementary history, arts and crafts, and maybe some basic civics, like the nature of a constitution. A national educational system is not the right instrument for advancing the goals of political lobby groups, or persuading students that they must take urgent action to avert a climate catastrophe.
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Why not? Because these sorts of goals are closely tied to reasonably contested political ideologies, whose tenets are unproven and possibly unprovable. While these sorts of political ideologies are perfectly licit as contributions to democratic debate, they are not appropriate subject-matter for a national curriculum. A national curriculum shapes the minds and hearts of young citizens, and for that very reason, needs to be respectful of a reasonable plurality of diverse standpoints that parents and communities may subscribe to.
Using a national educational system to promote “climate action” will prove needlessly divisive and alienating to a significant number of citizens who either do not share the fundamental premises of prevailing theories of “climate justice,” or object to how climate policies, from the regulation of carbon emissions to the move away from nuclear energy, are being formulated and implemented.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that (a) average temperatures across the globe have significantly increased in recent centuries, (b) human behaviour, especially industrialisation, played a significant role in the process, and (c) global warming imposes significant costs on society, none of this settles the politics of climate change, which citizens, not technocrats, must work out through the democratic process.
For example, the degree to which climate change constitutes an international “crisis” - with all the sense of political urgency and gravity that word connotes - as well as the extent to which we can actually stop it or slow it down through human interventions are matters of lively debate among citizens as well as scientists. They are certainly not the sorts of things you just teach with a straight face as universal “facts” alongside arithmetic and reading comprehension.
A national curriculum that includes a “climate justice” module will impart a politically slanted narrative about the gravity of climate change and the types of “actions” that can be taken to avert the “climate crisis.” This is clearly a project of political indoctrination, not liberal education. Liberal education, at its best, is not an ideological “bootcamp,” but a training in intellectual and moral freedom. It is about promoting a well rounded imagination and a disciplined mind, and helping students realise the best version of themselves.
It is one thing to give students the tools to analyze and interpret public debates critically, and quite another to teach students one rather controversial and politicised version of reality.
A nation-wide curriculum can teach about the climate debate as an object of critical analysis, but it cannot teach the “climate crisis” as a self-evident “fact” and then use this “fact” to promote “climate action.” For this pre-emptively closes off important debates about the underlying causes of climate change, how it should be ranked compared to other “crises” like the breakdown of family life or below-replacement birth rates, and the degree to which weather patterns are actually susceptible to human manipulation.
If public education, instead of advancing broadly accepted educational goals like the promotion of critical thinking and literacy, is co-opted by political activists or their allies in government to advance a widely contested view of “climate justice” and to shut down, delegitimate or marginalise dissenting voices, then we are effectively giving up on the ideal of a broadly non-partisan, politically inclusive educational system.
If political campaigners can use the national educational system today to advance their “climate justice” goals, what can we expect tomorrow? Perhaps a course encouraging students to abandon “biological” markers for gender identity? Or a course on “toxic masculinity” to militate against the “patriarchal” structures of our society? Or perhaps a course on why religion is the “opium of the people”?
Those who politicise and ideologise our educational system, even if they think they are making the world a better place, are actually sowing the seeds of social strife and division in the classroom and beyond, and needlessly alienating citizens who do not understand why their taxes are being re-purposed to further the controversial ends of this or that political movement.
Insofar as a national education system becomes a spearhead for political campaigners, it will attract political activists like bees to the honey, eager to mold young and impressionable minds in their own image and likeness.
And God forbid they succeed. For that would be the very death of liberal education.
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