Climate
Change: Is Education Enough?
Climate change and environmental damage are key issues
for modern society. For both, often overlapping issues, education is usually
viewed as one of the key ways to help to solve these problems. The thinking
seems to be that by increasing people’s awareness of the issues, by educating
them as to the causes and impacts of actions then they will better understand the
magnitude as well as their role in producing environmental damage and so act to
change their behaviours to reduce or even eliminate their impacts. But is such
a view a reasonable one, is it one that is likely to produce effective results?
The current cabinet of the UK government has numerous
individuals who have had the best education that money can buy as have a great
many world leaders. Other key politicians, business leaders and decision makers
have had the benefits of a degree-level education. So the political and
economic leaders with the power to implement changes are also, for the most
part, highly educated. A large number of these leaders do not seem to believe
in climate change or at least he magnitude of the problem. So education in the
case of these individuals seem to have no impact on their understanding of environmental
damage and seems, In some cases, to have resulted in the denial of such damage
being the fault of humans at all.
Moving from this power elite to more ‘ordinary’ people
does education have any importance for resolving climate change and its impacts?
A lot of policies for resolving climate change focus on the individual and the steps
individuals can take to reduce such things as their carbon footprint, . This
may not be a surprise in a market -focused economy as the individual is meant
to be the key entity that makes decisions and acts within the market. The
reasoning seems to be that if individuals change their behaviour then the issue
can be solved. It is the individual who must change and if they are more aware
of the problem, if they understand their role in the problem more fully and if
they can be shown key actions to resolve the problem, then they will act. The solution
to the problem of climate change, in this reasoning, is to change the actions
of the individual within the current political and economic framework. Education
provides the ‘nudges’ to change individual beliefs and behaviours. If this fails
then it is the fault of individuals not understanding or educators for not sending
out the appropriate, targeted message.
If this really the case though? Can climate change really
be solved without tackling the pollical and economic system that has produced
it? Is it individuals who need to act or is it larger entities such as businesses,
governments and large corporations that need to take action? Is the scale of
the problem beyond the scope of nudging slight changes in the behaviours of individual
consumers? Individuals and education are
vital for resolving climate change but the nature of that education needs to
widen beyond the identification of the problem and nudges of current behaviours.
Hard as these are to achieve, the even more difficult aspect is to educate individuals
in how the whole economic and political system is involved in producing climate
change. Understanding this could persuade individuals to take more concerted political
action to change the views and behaviours of larger entities such as governments
and corporations. This is much more difficult to achieve as such understanding would
force individuals to question the political and economic basis of their current
lives. Such fundamental questioning is one of the hardest thing anyone can do, but
questioning is a key feature of education.
