Australian children as young as five are being taught emotionally charged lessons about “climate change” in schools as part of the National Curriculum, a new report has found.
The report, titled Climate of Fear: How the National Curriculum Drives Climate Anxiety Among Children, was released this week by conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs and found the curriculum is skewed towards ideological environmental instruction.
Third-party providers, such as Cool.org, the World Wildlife Fund, and the ABC’s Behind the News program, disseminate a range of alarmist teaching materials for children who don’t have the cognitive or emotional maturity to understand and process climate content, according to the report.
At the same time, NAPLAN results show one in three children in Years 3 and 5 are failing to meet minimum literacy and numeracy standards.
Colleen Harkin, Director of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Schools Program, said it was “irrefutable” the curriculum had been “designed to sow fear into the minds of children” and risked causing “long-term emotional harm”.
“We are creating a generation of Australians who are both academically underprepared and psychologically burdened by climate activism,” she said.
“From the moment children enter the education system, they are taught to be anxious about the future of the planet and the climate.
“Urgent reforms are needed to safeguard both student wellbeing and academic integrity. This requires removing the Curriculum’s politically motivated cross-curriculum priorities, prioritising essential literacy and numeracy skills, and restoring subject integrity.”
Clare Rowe, educational psychologist and Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, said she had deep concerns about how early children were being exposed to messaging that could cause climate anxiety.
“What this report clearly shows is that climate content is not being taught in small doses, nor in an age-appropriate way. It is embedded across the curriculum – in art, humanities, English, even into early literacy tasks – and much of the third-party material used by teachers is explicitly alarmist,” Ms Rowe said.
“We delay teaching children about war, terrorism, cancer, or adult political issues for a reason. We have guidelines for everything else – screen time, online safety, playground equipment, explicit content. Yet we have no guardrails around the emotional impact of climate education on young minds.”
The report recommends delaying the introduction of emotionally charged topics until after primary school, confining climate-related instruction to science classes, introducing national guidelines on age-appropriate environmental education, and the prioritisation of literacy and numeracy.
The sustainability cross-curriculum priority that enables third-party providers to provide materials should also be abolished, and non-core subjects should be audited for ideological content, the report recommended.
The report comes amid a huge increase in the popularity of homeschooling, and after it was revealed that children in Victoria are being taught about “transgenderism”, and the state’s curriculum soon set to include anti-Australian history lessons as a result of the new treaty with aboriginals.
Header image credit: Caleb Woods on Unsplash.
