Starting 2020, Italian school students in every grade will be required to study climate change and sustainability. Italy attempts to position the country as a world leader when it comes to environmental education. Lorenzo Fioramonti, the education minister of Five Star Movement, said that all public schools would include 33 hours every year in their curricula to study issues that are related to climate change.
Importance of knowing about climate change
Vincenzo Cramarossa, the spokesman of Floramonti, said that the lessons on climate change would focus on the existing civics classes, which will have an environmentalist footprint from September 2020. He said that the idea is that the citizens of Italy will know the need to be ready for the climate emergency that we may face in the future.
In addition, sustainable development will also appear in more traditional subjects, like maths, geography, and physics. Cramarossa said that there would be more attention to climate change when teaching those traditional subjects.
Lorenzo Fioramonti is a professor at South Africa's Pretoria University's Economics Department; he said that the entire ministry is being changed to make sustainability and climate the center of the education model. He said that he wants to make the Italian education system to be the first education system that puts the environment and society at the core of everything that is learned in school.
Cramarossa said that a panel of scientific experts, including Jeffrey D. Sachs, who is the director of Columbia University's Center for Sustainable Development, and American economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, will help the ministry redevelop the national curriculum to pay more attention to sustainability and climate change.
Cramarossa said that it is a world's first to have compulsory national education in climate change and sustainability. The Five Star Movement has a history of environmental concern and grassroots activism. Fioramonti has been criticized by his right-wing opponents since he became the minister; it is because he supported striking students who were protesting climate change and backing taxes on plastic and sugary drinks.
Saving the environment
In reality, a lot of educators are already facing pressure from topic-packed curriculums, and they are pressured to teach students in a way that earns them the best scores. It is easy to understand why some teachers might be hesitant to add another curriculum and teach climate change. The discussion on climate change is filled with a lot of viewpoints, and it is a wide spectrum to cover, some of the viewpoints are even in direct opposition with one another.
So why should we still teach climate change in school? While the controversy of content related to climate change poses a challenge to teachers, it is also one of the great strengths of the said topic. The fact that climate change can be viewed not just on a local level but on an international level, too, provides students with the chance to create critical analysis skills and synthesize information. It can also be viewed through civic, scientific, and cultural lens.
The essential element of the global response to climate change is education. It can help people understand and address the impact of global warming, and it increases climate literacy among young people. It also encourages change in the attitude and behavior of the people, and it helps them adapt to climate change-related trends. Education and awareness-raising enable informed decision-making, play an essential role in increasing mitigation and adaptation capacities of communities, and empower men and women to adopt sustainable lifestyles.
