This year Tolerance Day is focused on climate change. For some this may seem an odd choice but one of the central tenets of tolerance is to give others the rights you demand for yourself. In a world where the developed and developing worlds are at odds about taking responsibility or providing funds, where the most vulnerable to climate change impacts are those who did the least to drive climate change, we need to think about rights and about equity.
 
This year’s climate negotiations brought an unprecedented number of activists, NGOs, businesses, academics and people of every age together to drive action on climate change. While there were many calls to action, one of the most exciting was the recognition that education, one of the last bastions of the old approach, is moving forward on climate change.
 
Earthday.org is leading a growing call for every school in the world to have integrated, assessed climate and environmental education with a strong civic engagement component. As Earthday.org President Kathleen Rogers says, “With the proper tools, knowledge, and attitudes, this will enable the next generation to develop into informed and engaged environmental stewards, capable of tackling climate demands.”   To do any less is to fail to equip our children with the resilience and knowledge that they need to thrive in an evolving world.
 
The UK’s Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi announced a new draft strategy to implement climate education in the UK. He said, “Teachers will be supported to deliver world-leading climate change education through a model science curriculum, which will be in place by 2023, to teach children about nature and their impact on the world around them.”
 
In the UK, children and young people will also be encouraged to get involved in the natural world by increasing biodiversity in the grounds of their nursery, school or college by taking small steps like installing bird feeders. They will be able to upload their data onto a new, virtual National Education Nature Park – which will allow them to track their progress against other schools in the country, increase their knowledge of different species and develop skills in biodiversity mapping.
 
This is a great start but, like so many issues, the government seems to have missed the point. Climate change is about so much more than science and sustainability means thinking for the long term, thinking about complexity, thinking in a systems way and understanding the importance of actions and consequences. Science is critical and fundamental but teaching in such a siloed approach is exactly what we need to avoid. Climate change is about science, technology, policy but its also about people, justice, equity and the next generation. We need to learn to think in different ways about our relationship with nature, our relationship with each other and our relationship with ourselves.
 
We need to help children build their own resilience in a changing world. Eco-anxiety is on the increase and we need to find ways to support children to manage their fears. That means helping them to think about the world in new ways, and finding ways of empowering them to take action and be present in their own world in their own way.
 
At COP26 this year there were children everywhere, activists, journalists, strikers. It’s the young that are going to bear the brunt of what’s coming and its only right we do something about it.  We need to stop using fossil fuels, but what right do countries that have been exploiting fossil fuels for centuries to drive growth have to tell developing countries that they can’t use the same approach to bring their populations out of poverty. We can’t just demand action, we have to find ways of making it fair.
 
Critical thinking is a skill that will help children understand the complexity of what is to be faced. Our lesson plan the Knotty Tree helps to work through some of the complexities of use and responsibilities and we hope you find it useful. In the coming year we’re going to provide further tools and resources to help you address climate and sustainability issues and, as ever, help you support the children around you in becoming creative, critical and compassionate thinkers. A generation that could do things better than we have.

Download the climate change worksheet here to help children understand the importance of tolerance.

Tolerance Day video assembly here, with James Bridge, chief executive and Secretary General of UNESCO UK

Research by education campaign Teach the Future found that 70% of teachers feel they haven’t received adequate training to educate students about Climate Change. Yet as a subject Climate Change doesn’t sit easily anywhere – it involves Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geography, History, Politics, and Economics, and the perceived issues and solutions are changing all the time.  
 
Italy in 2020 was the first country to make Climate Study compulsory in schools but putting it into practice in the classroom has been patchy. The tackling of climate change is a Wicked problem - complex, difficult to solve, crosses many disciplines and affects many people. When ‘facts’ and knowledge are constantly evolving it’s thinking tools - the ability to view information with a critical eye, research widely and consider multiple perspectives - that will serve our pupils best for the future rather than overwhelming teachers and pupils with conflicting data and apocalyptic forecasts. 
 
At the end of October, the UK Parliament held its first-ever debate on climate education. The Westminster Hall Debate, tabled by Nadia Whittome MP, the youngest sitting MP, in partnership with students aged 13-18 from the Teach the Future campaign, was intended to examine sustainability and climate education in the UK curriculum. To highlight how diverse the subject is, the debate covered a range of topics, including disparities in climate education around the world, education for girls and women, ensuring the right climate change information is included in the UK education syllabus, and how to provide career guidance on green jobs.
 
Earlier this year, the largest study ever conducted into the effects of the climate crisis on the mental health of young people revealed nearly half (45%) of young people globally feel climate anxiety negatively affects their daily life. It also found that almost two-thirds (64%) of young people around the world believe governments are not doing enough to protect them from climate change.
 
Teach the Future is a youth-led campaign, composed of secondary and tertiary students from all four nations of the UK, aiming to rapidly reorientate the education system around the climate emergency, social justice and sustainability. Scarlett Westbrook, a 17-year-old organiser with the Teach the Future campaign and UKSCN said, “Our approach to climate education urgently needs to change: the current curriculum is failing young people and causing escalating levels of climate anxiety.”
 
If our leaders are unable, or unwilling, to take the necessary action to address climate change, then children need to feel empowered. It’s no longer useful to equip our children with what they need to thrive in a world that no longer exists. The reality of extreme weather, as well as economic and social change driven by the impacts on the systems that sustain us, requires that we integrate critical thinking about climate change into the curriculum, and now.

Resilience is something that most people recognise we need, even if they don’t exactly agree what it means. Is it surviving things that happen to you, adapting to challenges, the capacity to recover quickly, or simply ‘keeping calm and carrying on’? As our children face an increasingly transforming world, how can we teach them the skills to be resilient in the face of change?
 
Complexity is something that we don’t talk about often enough. Teaching itself is a complex process, as teachers must communicate with children with a range of interests, motivations, fears and understandings. Yet while we accept that different children might require different support, we haven’t really changed the way in which we approach the subjects that children learn. Complexity engenders excitement but it also makes the brain use different thought processes including problem solving and creativity.
 
Children between five and eight have been proven to be able to comprehend scientific theories like natural selection (in Deborah Kelemen’s work), which are not only complex but help us understand why the world is the way it is. Children often ask how what they learn will matter in their futures, whether they’re talking about maths, geography or history – we need to show them how every part of their education matters for their ability to face the future.
 
Teaching complex ideas, the interconnections between different disciplines and the interactions between topics can educate children about human values while providing a tool set enabling them to engage with complex ideas and situations as they grow. This helps to build resilience, which may be key to surviving 21st century challenges, and enables the application of knowledge to ‘wicked problems’ which means, using Rittel and Webber’s theory, problems that are difficult to define and maybe even unsolvable. That doesn’t mean we stop trying though
 
At Learn2Think we are using Tolerance Day 2021 as a focal point to explore how the way we think affects climate justice, and the kind of world in which we want to live. We need to embed questioning and critical thinking at the heart of learning, combined with empathy and creativity so that we can not only imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, but also imagine new ways of solving someone else’s problems
 
It’s no longer enough to educate in isolation, in silos, as that approach is responsible for so many of the ‘wicked problems’ the world faces today. Whether it’s climate change, racial injustice or covid vaccinations, we need to teach a new way to approach problems. In terms of vaccinations for example, the phrase “no one is safe until everyone is safe” seems wholly self-evident. And yet 60% of the world’s population hasn’t even had its first vaccination: supplies are not reaching the poorest. This is not only a moral failing but a system one, which provides more opportunity for new variants to arise and bring the pandemic storming back.
 
It’s the same in education – how do you solve a complex problem? We know that improving literacy is linked to improved educational attainment but how best do we achieve those positive outcomes? Is improving literacy child by child the best approach, or should we deal with the impacts of poverty, racial inequality, budgeting issues or other wider social issues?
  
So many of today’s biggest challenges are system wide and ‘wicked’. To tackle them effectively, our children must learn differently in order to think differently. We have talked about radical empathy and its importance in developing children’s thinking in ways that make them adaptive and resilient, able to respond to an increasingly changing environment – technologically, socially and environmentally. And the first step is to recognize that children understand complexity. If we encourage them to think about complex issues from an early age, we may be giving them the resilience and power to change their own futures.
 
This article first appeared in the May 2021 edition of Education Today www.education-today.co.uk

Everyone accepts that there is a generation of school children whose lives have been affected by the pandemic. Whether it is a lack of socialisation, negative impact on their learning progression, mental health issues arising from the uncertainty and insecurity driven by the pandemic, there are a lot of challenges to overcome.  In wider society, we see increasing inequality, political and philosophical polarisation and a refusal to engage across the divide. Given these it is becoming increasingly important that we teach them to engage with empathy.
 
Radical empathy encourages people to actively consider another person’s point of view, even in the fact of strong disagreement, in order to connect with them on a deeper level.  That connection is a fundamental element of building a strong social fabric. The recent controversy in Batley regarding the use of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed shows how badly things can escalate when there isn’t proper engagement and understanding between parties about meaning, intent and process.
 
While the school has apologised for the use of offensive cartoons in a religious studies lesson, a deeper understanding of the context – both the offence taken by the community and the intentions of the teacher, need to be considered.  While the Department of Education issued a statement condemning the protests, doing so without addressing the concerns of the community only serves to build greater rifts between groups.  People should be allowed to protest, but other people should also be allowed free speech.  That is a hard line to walk in a country that is becoming increasingly divided. The scars of Windrush, Islamophobia, Brexit and the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric are damaging within schools but also within the fabric of our society.
 
The recent publication of the UK’s recent report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has only complicated matters, with a report that suggested that Britain is not structurally and institutionally racist, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary. The report caused an uproar but the findings were not that Britons could not be racist, but that the structural problems society faces are not necessarily racist. What the report does say however is that there are impediments and disparities but that ‘ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism’.
 
For some this is proof of a post-racist Britain, for others proof that the status quo always wins out. What’s interesting though is the idea that it might be issues of education, health, language, religion, culture, that are both helping and hindering in how they play out. These may be interwoven with race in a number of ways but taking a new approach may provide new opportunities to change outcomes.  The report says, “The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism.”  That means that we need to find new ways of talking to each other across a number of different divides.
 
In order to effectively drive systemic cultural change we need to find new ways of opening debate about debate about the challenges faced within the system. That means engagement with opinions across the spectrum and the use of radical empathy to inform that engagement. One of the ways in which we can encourage this is the use of tools that provide an opening for discussion and the beginning of a more significant debate about how we embed fairness, empathy and understanding within our society.
 
As part of that process, Learn2Think is donating free copies of a book which helps to promote understanding across religious differences, by getting the conversation going within the curriculum.   ‘Journey to the Beginning of the World’ is aimed at children aged 6-10 and explains a range of beliefs that people have about how the world was made, and that that is ok.   For younger children there is another book available called ‘the IKADOOS and the Making of Planet IK’ which provides the same message in a highly colourful and fun way.  If you’re interested in receiving free copies you can email us at info@learn2think.org.uk" info@learn2think.org.uk.

This article first appeared in the April 2021 edition of Education Today www.education-today.co.uk

There has been increasing debate about cancel culture, the idea that right-wing individuals are being unfairly sanctioned for expressing opinions. This has meant pushback against the word ‘tolerance’ as if it infers that we should put up with negative ideas and approaches. At the Learn2Think Foundation we think the opposite – that tolerance is about providing the same rights to others that you demand for yourself, about standing up to injustice.
 
There is a massive difference between ignorance and the promotion of hate speech, whether it’s racism, sexism, transphobia or something else. Over the last few years there has been an increasing focus on nationalism, as politicians have stoked fears of the ‘other’ in order to maintain power. Whilst increasingly wealthy societies have historically seen an expansion of liberal ideas about social tolerance and inclusiveness, this has often fallen away in times of adversity.
 
We’ve seen this clearly in the advent of protectionism around vaccines for COVID-19. Wealthy nations are paying to get primary access to vaccines, hoarding millions of vials while poorer countries still wait. But this is not a situation where borders can be protected. Unless everyone is vaccinated, those pools of infection are likely to provide a home for virus mutation and reinfection. The science suggests that current vaccines provide protection for a limited amount of time – that means we need it regularly, and we need to minimise mutations to ensure global protection. By approaching the problem as a global one, and sharing the resources we have, we find a better overall solution.
 
It is this notion of looking at everyone’s rights as the same and seeing how things work as a global system that lies at the heart of tackling climate change.  We’re not talking a debate about climate science, which has at last gained mainstream acceptance. The challenge we face is how we go about mitigating and adapting to climate change in a world with finite resources, a growing global population and a growing wave of nationalism around the world.
 
Whether it’s managing water and pollution, energy and consumption, biodiversity and waste, every action has an impact. Those impacts become cumulative and they don’t stop at borders. Every change to the water cycle eventually affects everywhere in the world. That’s why this year the Learn2Think Foundation is making ‘Be Climate Clever’  the theme for Tolerance Day 2021.
 
If we are going to effectively meet the climate challenge, we need to find a new way to address the problem: we have to balance the responsibility of generations of action exploiting fossil fuels against countries that still need to bring people out of poverty; we have to find new ways of ensuring that individuals and communities aren’t damaged by corporate activities; we need to think about how to balance fairness and justice with action and cost, when some small island states are already sinking.  We need to explore the rights of indigenous people, the rights given to the poor and the extent to which they are even enabled to engage in decision making in democracies around the world?
 
At Learn2Think we believe that teaching children to be critical, creative and compassionate thinkers is necessary to equip them to navigate a world that is constantly changing. We need to educate our children to see the bigger picture, and to understand the dangers of ‘otherisation’ or putting yourself in a superior position to others by accident of birth, nationality, gender or race. The inference of nationalism is of a separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the ‘us’ being better, deserving more. That thinking is what keeps our system so unequal, that supports discrimination and doesn’t provide opportunities for everyone to reach their fullest potential.
 
Thinking about people as ‘them’ and ‘us’ lies at the heart of sustainability and work to address climate change. Free markets are about efficient allocation of resources but free markets don’t really exist because they don’t include the cost of actions that damage the environment or society and people. We need to find new ways to share what we have, to use markets to drive innovations for solutions to the problems we face, but in such a way that our societies become regenerative rather than destructive, based on rampant consumption.
 
Something indefinable happens when we work together towards a common goal. The first step is ensuring that every child is aware of how the changing climate is changing every part of the world around us. In January we talked about the Earth Day Network’s campaign for climate literacy and we’re supporting the Network this year in promoting Earth Day on 22nd April. Climate change can be explored through topics from maths, geography, history, art, science, English and more. We’ll be putting together some specific lesson plans that we hope that you’ll find useful for that, and later this year we’ll be providing free support in teaching children how to think about the climate in different ways, how to find their voices and help make the world a better, fairer place.
 
As ever, we hope you find them useful. You’ll be able to download them for free at www.toleranceday.org

This article first appeared in the March 2021 issue of Education Today www.education-today.co.uk