What kids learn in school can sway their parents’ beliefs.

Pedro_P

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Teaching children about the reality of global warming may be one more way to convince folks.

Kids are our future
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▼ Bob Inglis served his district in South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives for six terms before losing a bid for a seventh, largely because of his new embrace of human-caused climate change. Now, he travels the  countrygiving talks on why other conservatives should join him. But what swayed his mind wasn’t hard science or a politician’s pleas. According to an interview, he first started to flip his beliefs on global warming when his son told him: “I’ll vote for you, but you have to clean up your act on the environment.”
Inglis isn’t alone. A new study, published Monday in the journalNature Climate Change, shows just how powerful children can be in shifting their parents’ deeply-held positions. In the study, parents of middle school students enrolled in a climate change curriculum grew more concerned about climate change, and the effect was especially strong in conservative parents who started out with little concern. “Basically, kids are giving us this ability to work together towards solutions,” says Danielle Lawson, who studies climate change communication at North Carolina State University and is the study’s lead author. “It's almost as though when the child is reading the thermometer, parents are willing to listen in a different way.”
Politics are more powerful than scientific literacy or direct experience in shaping climate change beliefs, which tend to split along party lines. In a recent  survey, 92 percent of Democrats agreed that climate change was causing extreme weather and sea level rise, while only 64 percent of Republicans did.
The scientists at North Carolina State University wondered if the trust between children and their parents might be able to disrupt even this staunchly-held view. Previous studies had shown that such “intergenerational learning” was effective in motivating parents to care about other environmental issues.
So Lawson and her team enlisted 238 middle school students and 292 parents living in coastal North Carolina to find out. The treatment group of the children attended schools where instructors were primed to teach a hands-on climate curriculum, while the other students, a control, didn’t get this curriculum. The curriculum was tailored to the coastal North Carolina environment and how climate change might affect the area. Instead of threats to polar bears in the Arctic, the middle schoolers learned about threats to the northern flying squirrel. Students in the climate curriculum also joined field-based learning projects, such as helping survey plankton abundance.
The students in the curriculum were also given tools to talk to their parents, including a structured interview that asked parents if they’d seen the weather change or sea level rise over the years. But, Lawson emphasizes, “that interview was really just structured to hopefully encourage conversation between the child and the parent.” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

This is good. Now knowledge imparting is reversed in roles

DDG73

What's fantastic about an education is that you have the ability to imprint your knowledge onto the future generation; if successful they'll take an element of yours into the future.