Climate change has become an omnipresent thread woven through the entirety of the Australian National Curriculum, stretching across subject areas from geography to English and even the arts and physical education.
We are told it’s required to teach children to care for the environment. But feel-good framing belies true intentions. Indeed, elevating climate change education to a cross-curriculum priority under the umbrella of ’sustainability’, particularly in primary schools, is developmentally inappropriate and pedagogically unsound.
How many primary school teachers even understand the science behind climate change? How many are comfortable with concepts such as radiative forcing and equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates? Most primary teachers are trained to deliver literacy, numeracy, and foundational content across disciplines. They are not geologists, physicists, or statisticians.
Australia’s education system increasingly demands teachers to become agents of ideological instruction. Climate change is complex, yet we expect schoolteachers to confidently teach it to children as young as five, often with materials that simplify or distort the scientific process into a set of moral directives.
Worse still, is the cognitive mismatch between climate narratives and the developmental capacity of young learners. Primary-aged children simply do not possess the cognitive ability to digest what is presented as an unsettling topic. After all, they are still mastering basic mathematical concepts such as numbers, fractions, and measurement.
The key premise behind anthropogenic climate change is that the average global temperature is increasing due to human activity. It is nonsensical to teach this concept to children, who have not even been taught what an average is.
The mathematics and foundational science required to meaningfully engage with the climate debate include understanding statistical variability, electromagnetism, and high-school-level chemistry at the very least. These are concepts that reside firmly in secondary and tertiary education – to be taught by educators with formal scientific training.
In the absence of any solid scientific foundation, climate education in early primary school years invariably becomes filled with exaggerated and speculative claims. Worse, children are being asked to write persuasive texts, design protest posters, and imagine a dystopian future based on these alarmist claims.
Research by clinical child psychologist and IPA Adjunct Fellow, Clare Rowe, has found the current approach in the National Curriculum is cognitively inappropriate for preadolescent children. Exposing children aged 5 to 12 to alarmist climate narratives contributes to the rising prevalence of what psychologists have termed ’climate anxiety’: a form of clinical anxiety rooted in fears of an environmental catastrophe.
Some defenders of the current curriculum argue that early climate education is about values, not science. They suggest that teaching children to ’care for the environment’ is universally beneficial.
But even this seemingly benign goal is fraught with problems. What and whose values are actually being taught in the classroom? If children are instructed that human activity is inherently destructive, that the future is bleak unless radical changes are made, and that their personal lifestyle choices carry moral weight disproportionate to their understanding, then we are no longer in the realm of values education – we are in the realm of indoctrination and moral manipulation.
There is also the issue of educational crowding. Time and resources in the school day are finite. When hours are allocated to climate-themed projects and cross-subject climate integration, they are taken away from core foundational skills – reading, writing, numeracy, and evidence-based reasoning. These are the very tools students will need if they are to become thoughtful citizens capable of engaging with complex issues, like climate change, as they grow up. Ironically, by overemphasising climate content at the expense of general education, we may be creating a generation of students less equipped to deal with the problems for which we are apparently so eager to prepare them.
We must reclaim a sense of educational humility and intellectual honesty. Let us teach young children to observe nature, to appreciate ecosystems, and to understand basic scientific concepts – without burdening them with adult fears. Let us empower teachers with the freedom to focus on what they are trained to teach, rather than forcing them to become reluctant ambassadors of a politicised cause. And let us acknowledge that critical thinking, not early indoctrination, is the best preparation for future citizenship.
Australia’s primary school students deserve a curriculum rooted in truth, transparency, and trust in their capacity to learn. They do not need to carry the weight of the world before they have even mastered long division.
Colleen Harkin is the Director of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Schools Program, and Dr Kevin You is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
