One third of the American middle and high school teachers don’t believe in the climate change.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – Climate Change is a serious issue and awareness should be raised among every inhabitant of the planet. But sadly children are learning about climate change from the wrong people in the US.
According to a study conducted by the Pew Center for Research only a stunning 45 percent of Americans consider climate change to be a real and serious issue. And this is not due to the fact that Americans are not taught climate change in schools, it’s rather because most of the people teaching it are incapable of wrapping their heads around the idea.
Eric Plutzer, a political sciences professor at the State University of Pennsylvania along with contributors from the State University of Wright and the Science Education National Center (NCSE) conducted a study based on a survey that comprised more than 1,500 teachers from the entire country. The teachers that were included in the survey taught middle and high schools science.
The results are a bit overwhelming. On one side approximately 70 percent teachers from middle school and 87 percent biology teachers from high school taught climate change to their study.
The bad part of these results is not the act that 30, respectively 13 percent out of the total 1,500 represent huge numbers of teacher that refuse to teach actual world problems to unknown and unformed minds, but that the majority of those who do teach it do it wrongly.
According to Plutzer one in three teachers tell the children that climate change is not real. More shocking than that is the fact that more than half of the teachers let the children debate the existence of the meteorological phenomenon without providing real data.
It seems that the idea of climate change being a natural phenomenon is very common among the people who are in charge of the education of the future generation. More than half don’t even discuss the causes that lead to climate change.
Plutzer believes that this is due to the fact that the teachers are not informed themselves. Most of them (and we are talking science and biology teachers) have no idea about the latest measurements of carbon dioxide from ice cores or how a climate change model works.
A total of 4.4 percent out of the 1,500 that were surveyed declared that they had to deal with pressure from school administrators and parents that were insisting on them not teaching climate change in their classroom.
Teachers may not be responsible for the entire half of the country that lives in ignorance, but some of them are a part of a bigger problem when they should actually represent a solution. Sadly, our children are learning about climate change from the wrong people.
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