By the beginning of the next term, Italy will be the world’s first country to introduce and enforce climate change education for all the state schools in the country. The curriculum would be launched by September of the next year when the next term will start.
This was a major announcement made by the Italian Minister of Education, Lorenzo Fioramonti. Besides this, he announced that it is mandatory for every school to include a minimum of 33 hours of climate change education in a year. This would be approximately one hour per week.
Climate change education to be the center of education model
In a statement, Minister Fioramonti added,
The whole education ministry will now be dedicated to climate change education and sustainable development.
Other subjects that are taught in schools like Physics or Geography will also be taught in such a way that they promote sustainable development. The curriculum would be completely revised.
In Delhi, which is one of the world’s most polluted cities, the government has made climate change education compulsory for the schools. In other countries, like Australia, the government has given schools the liberty to decide if they want to include climate change education in their curriculum or not.
Minister Fioramonti was the Italian government’s biggest supporter of green policies and was heavily criticized when he asked the students to skip school for the climate change movement in September. Many proposals by him which were in favor of the climate change were rejected, but now they are being implemented countrywide.
His proposals included that higher taxes should be levied on airline tickets, plastics, and sugar-based food products. The taxes collected would directly go towards the education of students in the country. But these proposals were heavily criticized by the opposition party.
With this, the Italian education system will be the first system that puts the environment and climate first before anything else.
