SCIENCE science.org 17 DECEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6574 1451PHOTO: ALEKSEI GORODENKOV/ALAMY STOCK PHOTOBy Ashley HudersonH
ow you gonna win when you ain’t
right within,” sings Lauryn Hill in
“Doo Wop (That Thing),” a track
that appears on her 1998 debut solo
album, The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill. This lyric singularly captures the
essence of Katie Worth’s new, similarly titled
book, Miseducation: How Climate Change Is
Taught in America, which provides a detailed
account of the intersection between educa-
tion, politics, policies, personal beliefs, and
the power of information and argues that US
public school curricula leave the country’s
citizens ill-prepared to win the fight against
climate change.
Worth is a US journalist who has spent
her 15-year career winning awards for both
breaking news and long-form investigative
narratives. With Miseducation, she uses
her journalistic skills to examine the evo-
lution of the climate change discussionover time. She provides evidence from all
sides of the debate, describing teachers
who unsuccessfully walk the line between
curriculum requirements and their beliefs
and policy leaders who have personal and
professional stakes in the issues at hand.
In the US, there are about
50 million children enrolled in
100,000 public schools who are
taught by 3 million teachers.
However, there are no national
standards for a curriculum on
climate change. In her research
for this book, Worth assembled
a state-by-state database of vari-
ous curricula and reviewed doz-
ens of textbooks used in school
systems across the country.
Despite an overwhelming sci-
entific consensus that climate
change is “real, it’s us, it’s bad,
and there’s hope,” Worth writes, the US
has created an educational environment in
which “children in some places are required
by law to learn about the phenomenon...
while in others, students may not hear the
words ‘climate change’ in class at all.”
Worth writes of an Advanced Placement
science teacher in Oklahoma who refusesto teach anthropogenic climate change be-
cause her family is in the oil and gas busi-
ness. Another teacher, who does not belie ve
in climate change, chooses to discuss the
topic but refuses to cite any scientific data
and laces his teaching with his own per-
sonal beliefs, casting doubt in the young
minds he has been charged with molding.
Many districts and states forbid the in-
clusion of climate change in the curricu-
lum. These states are filled with teachers
who cast doubt on the concept of human-
induced climate change, textbook publish-
ers eager to avoid upsetting school boards,
and editors who rewrite commissioned sci-
ence pieces to fit political formulas. “These
patterns are no accident of history,” Worth
concludes. “Rather, they are the product of
successful disinformation campaigns, ani-
mated not by science but by ideology.”
Such practices create adults who strug-
gle to understand the current state of af-
fairs surrounding climate change and have
resulted in a political divide, argues Worth.
“Classrooms have emerged as a battle-
ground in the American political war over
climate change because what kids learn
about climate change now will directly
impact the speed and ambition of action
taken for decades to come,” she notes.
Worth attributes the origins of the cli-
mate debate to long-standing tensions
between science and religious fundamen-
talism, tracing the roots of these tensions
back to Darwin’s theory of evolution,
which fundamentally shifted how we view
the environment and our role in it. Dem-
onstrating how people from different back-
grounds can be presented with
the same facts and interpret
them differently, she reveals how
variations in our worldviews fur-
ther expand the political divide,
playing out in how we vote and
who we vote for.
Miseducation is a cautionary
tale of the wide-ranging impacts
that political agendas can have
when deployed in educational
settings. Taking lessons from
earlier debates over evolution
and tobacco, oil corporations,
state legislatures, school boards,
think tanks, lobbyists, and textbook pub-
lishers are now sowing uncertainty, confu-
sion, and distrust about climate science.
Until we confront these wrongs within the
US educational system, the battle to miti-
gate climate change will never be won. j10.1126/science.abl9313In the absence of national curriculum standards,
some students may never learn about climate change.Miseducation:
How Climate Change
Is Taught in America
Katie Worth
Columbia Global Reports,- 184 pp.
The reviewer is at the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers, Washington, DC 20036, USA; the Department
of Biology, University of the District of Columbia,
Washington, DC 20008, USA; and STEM Innovation
Consulting, Washington, DC 20018, USA.
Email: [email protected]“
EDUCATIONInconsistent and agenda-driven K–12 curricula leave
US citizens ill-equipped to confront environmental problems
Climate change in the classroom
BOOKS et al.