It is encouraging that climate change education would be incorporated into the learning experience for early childhood education (ECE).
Ministry of Education director primary education Hem Chand, while speaking during the annual ECE national conference at the Fiji National University’s Lautoka campus, said ECE teachers would be the best agents to transform the minds and attitudes of their students to be proactive to climate change-related issues.
He spoke about the social, cultural, economic and environmental impact such practical classroom lessons would have on young minds of our ECE students who later become future leaders, policy makers.
For students to transform into champions of our environment and our future, ECE teachers, he said, had to play a part in their learning experience. More than 300 teachers attended the conference.
Climate change is a touchy issue.
We’ve said this before.
It draws emotional responses that can weigh in on different spectrums of the thought process.
Let’s take President Donald Trump for instance.
Sceptics will insist the man some already tag as the leader of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, has a lot to say about climate change.
In the lead up to the US elections in November 2016, Mr Trump made no bones about what he believed in.
On the campaign trail, his views were clear over the issues of energy and climate change.
He was on record suggesting climate change science was a “hoax”.
He even suggested it was part of a plot to undermine the US economy.
He made it clear he would scrap President Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas policies, and the Paris Agreement.
Mr Trump continues to remain an aggressive critic of climate change. On one end of a divide sits the notion that climate change is a “hoax” as Mr Trump and his supporters insist.
It is the other side of this divide that has a great impact on our people. Some of our villagers are been forced to relocate. The sea is slowly creeping into their villages.
For some of them, it is already splashing right onto homes they have lived in for decades.
It isn’t even part of their imagination.
Their situation is real.
Every day the waves run up the sandy beaches, past coconut trees, over what used to be soft grass, and sometimes straight on to the walls of homes.
It is a fact of life now.
Call it what you want.
Believe what you want to.
Those affected certainly believe something is not right.
This is why our children should understand about the environment, and about leaving behind a footprint that will not negatively impact our world.
It really is our business.
