The Climate Emergency and the Transformed School

Education in frugality is less important for young people in the climate emergency than pressurising governments to act. Schools can help in this directly, as well as indirectly by passing on the necessary understanding. This understanding is interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary, but schools in England at least have always been too attached to the latter – as shown by the meagre attention given to climate change in the National Curriculum. A wider problem has been the teaching profession's attachment to traditional ways, a problem shared by other professions. Internet learning, for instance, is challenging the traditional assumption, also found mutatis mutandis in law and medicine, that teaching is face-to-face. The urgency of climate change means that significant changes in traditional professional attitudes may first occur in education. One way young people in England can act is by campaigning to take the National Curriculum out of ministers’ hands and setting up a National Curriculum Commission. On climate change, we might expect it to favour a mix of (1) disciplinary and interdisciplinary, (2) face-to-face and internet-based, (3) top-down and collaborative learning and (4) whole-class and personalised learning.