An important consideration for advancing an agenda in which educators prepare for a world of increasing turmoil is identifying the most critical skills for inclusion in curricula. Acknowledging that access to education may be increasingly scarce as world events prevent equitable dissemination, one approach is to select curriculum targets that will have the most generative and wide-ranging impacts or are foundational components of other concepts and higher-level synthesized curricula. The ubiquity of the consequences of global warming to be faced by future generations is a mandate for educators to develop and adopt curricula that equip students to create a more sustainable future.

The rapid adoption of more effective instructional practices in schools will not only stop the downward spiral of educational outcomes but will also position schools to play a potent role in our societal battle against the causes of climate change. In a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publication, Gibb (2016) advocated for school-wide approaches to climate change and provided an array of actions schools can take to “participate in the transition to more sustainable lifestyles, green economies, and sustainable, climate-resilient societies” (p. 2). Gibb’s school-wide approach incorporates climate awareness throughout school governance, facilities/operation, community partnerships, teaching, and learning to support an overall school culture of sustainability. Readers are guided step-by-step through a checklist of activities organized into three phases: Plan, Take Action, Reflect and Review.

The Plan phase begins with a self-assessment of a school’s current climate actions and impacts, informing goal setting and prioritization and providing a baseline against which success can be measured. The school develops an action plan from the self-assessment to identify specific tasks, results, and timelines. The specific roles and responsibilities of faculty, administrators, custodians, community partners, and especially students are also clearly delineated in the planning process.Footnote 1

In the second phase, Take Action, the plan is brought to life, and the assignees carry out their various tasks throughout the school. Active collection of quantitative and qualitative data is essential to the execution of this phase. Suggested dependent variables include energy audits, biodiversity counts, transportation surveys, community attitude surveys, attendance records, electrical bills, teacher observations, campus photographs, student work samples, and more. Sourcing data from diverse sources is recommended to capture the wide-ranging impacts of school-wide action plans fully.

The third phase, Reflection and Review, is an opportunity to evaluate the overall plan and its constituent components. The school uses data collected during the implementation of the Take Action phase to evaluate the effectiveness of the action plan. Using data, schools may adjust ongoing projects, develop new initiatives, and discard ineffective practices. Communication is heavily emphasized during this phase to facilitate learning, accountability, and motivation. Gibb (2016) recommends publicly celebrating the school’s accomplishments to sustain the momentum of successful projects.

Gibb’s (2016) paper provides a list of suggested “areas for action,” identifying specific projects to be taken up throughout all aspects of a school’s operations and culture. For example, one suggested area for action is “teach climate change in all subject areas.” The current prevailing practice in schools is to relegate lessons about climate change, if taught at all, to particular science courses. This practice does not align with the severity of the pervasiveness of climate change impacts in the world outside of science class. Constraining the topic of climate change to the context of a particular class or subject area risks leaving students without a sufficiently generative repertoire for navigating the economic, social, cultural, ethical, technological, and political impacts of living unsustainably. Figure 1, reprinted from Gibb (2016, p. 12), provides examples of assignments that imbed lessons about climate change across all subject areas. A curriculum designed in this fashion more accurately reflects the present and future of today’s students for whom the changing climate is an omnipresent factor.

“Teach climate in every subject area” reprinted from Gibb (2016, p. 12)

An audience segmentation analysis conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Action identifies six distinguishable groupings among American citizens regarding their positions on climate change (Roser-Renouf et al., 2009). The six groups spanning the spectrum of concern and engagement are labeled: “Alarmed” (18%), “Concerned” (33%), “Cautious” (19%), “Disengaged” (12%), “Doubtful” (11%), and “Dismissive” (7%). This Six Americas study suggests that one’s beliefs about the existence of climate change and its causes can dramatically influence their engagement with climate-relevant actions. As expected, those most alarmed by climate change will likely engage in sustainability efforts. Conversely, those most dismissive of climate change are not only far less likely to support sustainability efforts but also most likely to engage in actions to actively undermine climate change mitigation efforts in their communities. The highest levels of engagement are found at opposing ends of this spectrum.

Among the many demographic and historical variables analyzed that distinguish these six groups, a notable variable is their educational attainment and information-seeking behavior. The reported educational attainment across the six groups aligns with their likelihood of engagement with climate change, whether for or against it. The Alarmed and the Dismissive groups report the highest educational attainment. The two center groups, the Cautious and the Disengaged, amount to nearly one-third of the U.S. population and report the lowest educational attainment. Being more educated is correlated with higher engagement with the issue of climate change, and being less educated appears highly predictive of inaction.

In surveying the beliefs of the low-educated, Cautious and Disengaged, Roser-Renouf et al. (2009) found that many in these groups reported that they would benefit from more information to solidify their positions, indicating the potential for plasticity in their views. Moving this large swathe of the population toward engagement with sustainability will require not only providing them with basic academic skills to consume information but also the critical thinking skills needed to parse valid information from misleading sources or intentional disinformation. Evidence for this assertion lies in what the six population segments report as their primary sources of information about climate change. The Alarmed acquire most of their knowledge on the issue via print media from scientists and environmental organizations, whereas the Dismissive are most likely to trust friends and family or conservative commentators for their information. The Dismissive are notable for their above-average preference for media sources that strongly align with their pre-existing political stance and distrust of scientists relative to other groups. The ability to insulate one’s belief systems from well-known biases prevailing in the human condition is precisely the sort of skill that curricula for critical thinking can provide to the populace, as noted by Gibb (2016).

Critical thinking is a verbal repertoire wherein an individual can evaluate the quality of an argument, consider all relevant sides of an issue, be persuaded by disconfirming evidence, make inferences from available information, and evaluate the quality of supporting evidence (Willingham, 2008). This skill is a fundamentally important aspect of comprehensive education. Thinking critically empowers individuals to evaluate the quality of information they encounter independently, protects them from rhetorical misinformation campaigns, and applies to all aspects of life regardless of education level.

A critical thinking curriculum teaches learners to weigh the relative viability of information independently as they encounter large amounts of content in daily discourse. Extracting the most significant parts of the information will allow them to make meaningful, effective, and pragmatic decisions about contemporary issues. For instance, students educated in skeptical evaluations will ask questions that unveil the relative veracity of claims made by corporations or agencies of governing bodies. In a sense, this is a problem-solving strategy analogous to the scientific method: making observations, forming ideas about those observations, developing ways to test their ideas, and evaluating the outcome of that process.

Research indicates that many students do not demonstrate critical thinking skills by the time they have finished high school or the equivalent (Willingham, 2008). Many children in the U.S. only complete primary education, 4–8% do not complete primary education (Fry, 2014), and 8% do not attend school (New Methodology Shows That 258 Million Children, Adolescents and Youth Are out of School, 2019). Further, college attendance has declined by more than 9% since 2010 (Hanson, 2022). Alternatively, students pursuing higher education in college or graduate school are significantly more likely to develop critical thinking skills (Huber & Kuncel, 2016). Projecting out these observations, we can calculate that only 42.1% of consumers and the electorate are likely to have had any education in critical thinking and analysis by attending college in the United States (Hanson, 2022). These numbers cannot account for those raised in households where critical thinking is valued, nor those individuals who are conditioned against logical argumentation by anti-intellectual rhetoric such that they do not obtain critical thinking skills even when exposed. More research is needed to evaluate strategies to implement and evaluate critical thinking curricula earlier in students’ academic experiences. Such an effort may increase the likelihood that these future leaders will be informed participants in the effort toward climate action, and the vanguards who will defend the education (and thus, climate actions) of subsequent generations.

The most significant categorical barrier to sustainability is generally understood as the “overconsumption” of natural resources. Grant (2010) provides both support and nuance to this idea in his analysis of consumption behaviors, which he organizes into “skilled” and “unskilled” types. The importance of this distinction lies in the fact that not all consumption is equally resource intensive. For example, luxury fur coats and T-bone steaks are far more resource-intensive commodities than singing or playing board games with friends. This distinction brings needed specificity to the problems of consumption: we over-consume resource-intensive commodities and under-consume resource-light commodities.

Moving the public from resource-heavy to resource-light consumption habits is more complicated than just asking for it, educating people about it, or making resource-light commodities more available. This is because many resource-light commodities require skilled consumption, whereas many resource-heavy activities require little to no skill. For example, environmentally friendlier activities such as reading books or playing the harmonica require literacy and music skills. In contrast, resource-intensive practices such as yachting or riding on a private jet require little to no consumption skills. Those lacking sufficient skills to consume resource-light commodities should not be reasonably expected to abstain from economic participation. Nor should we expect people to “self-correct” their lack of consumption skills. Even if they could, contingencies may not support doing so as the difficulty of learning new skills stands in stark juxtaposition with the immediacy of reinforcement from unskilled consumption habits. Instead, it falls on our educational systems to ensure that the skilled consumption repertoires for all citizens are the product of our school’s efforts.

At present, our educational system is primarily focused on workforce preparation. As such, being “more educated” by this system may produce a more skilled laborer, but, by the state of our degraded environment, we have no evidence to assume it will produce a more skilled consumer. The linkages between wealth, educational attainment, and resource consumption are clear and discouraging. While there is a vast gap in educational attainment between the rich and the poor (Filmer & Pritchett, 1999; Pfeffer, 2018), the rich are responsible for far more negative environmental externalities. According to Gore (2020), 52% of global carbon emissions were attributed to the wealthiest 10% of the population, whereas the poorest 50% were responsible for only 7% of carbon emissions during the same period. To summarize, more wealth may beget more education, but more education and/or wealth does not beget more skilled consumption. That more education does not result in better environmental stewardship exposes a systematic failure in teaching skilled consumption.

Grant (2010) rejects prevailing patterns in our educational systems in which “increasingly narrow and specialized job training has displaced a broader liberal education that includes general intellectual and esthetic content” (p. 22). Reading, telling stories, creating art, playing music, acting, meditating, gardening, and physical education are all essential components of a broad curriculum to promote skilled consumption and draw our collective behavior toward sustainable reinforcers. According to Grant, “(t)he recognition that the arts are a potential means of furthering sustainability dramatically reframes education and other public-policy priorities” (p. 36). Arts education programs aimed at improving skilled consumption of resource-light reinforcers are therefore perfectly suitable for inclusion in school-wide sustainability plans such as those promoted by Gibb (2016) and are likewise amenable to effective instructional frameworks such as the Scientist Educator Model (Newsome et al., 2021) or the Model for Generative Instruction (Johnson & Layng, 1994; Johnson et al, 2021), for example.

The maximization of our educational system to produce skilled consumers can be envisioned as a catalyst for change in the global economy and the policies that regulate it. A current barrier to regulatory progress is that fighting environmental regulation is a core competency of global corporations and industry groups supplying unsustainable goods and products. In 2016, U.S. companies spent over $3B on lobbying expenditures (Rivera & Patnaik, 2017), and the biggest polluters spend the most (Delmas et al., 2016). The collective demand for unsustainable products undermines political efforts to stem their supply. However, lessening the future demand for such commodities is achievable if today’s students are provided with the skills needed to establish sustainable reinforcers. The creation of skilled consumers is a critical catalyst to advancing pro-environmental regulatory and economic conditions. Notwithstanding the many available policy recommendations for regulating the supply of resource-heavy commodities, our focus here is on the role of educational systems in shaping the forces of economic demand in a sustainable economy.

Delmas et al.’s (2016) analyses of corporate lobbying expenses related to environmental policy revealed a U-shaped curve in relation to corporations’ environmental performance, indicating that the group of organizations spending the most on lobbying comprised both the dirtiest and the cleanest. Their investigation showed that the cleanest corporations found a competitive edge by spending to advance pro-environmental policy (see also Rivera & Patnaik, 2017). By being “greener,” those companies could gain faster access to newly regulated markets, benefit from a pro-environmental reputation, and suffer fewer compliance costs than their environmentally adversarial competitors. If our public schools can produce socially conscious skilled consumers, greater economic demand will be reallocated toward resource-light commodities. In response, we can expect corporations to act in their best financial interests by accelerating the trend of pro-environmental corporate advocacy in accordance with changing consumer demand and relative market competitiveness.