How climate extremists took over America’s classrooms

America’s education system is facing a growing list of challenges — from plummeting test scores and the lingering hangover from COVID-era remote classes to teacher shortages and mounting public frustration over gender ideology.

But take it from a former teacher: Another grave problem is haunting our classrooms. Climate extremists have infiltrated American schools, and they’re indoctrinating our children in radical ideology. It’s time the Department of Justice took action to stop it.

I worked for many years as a teacher and saw firsthand just how deeply rooted this climate ideology is in our classrooms.

Fortunately, they’ve taken the first step. In May, the Justice Department filed lawsuits against four states for allegedly funneling public funds into unconstitutional climate litigation. Attorney General Pam Bondi called the litigation “burdensome and ideologically motivated,” and she’s right. The troubling part is: It’s happening in our public school classrooms too.

If the Trump administration is serious about rooting out taxpayer-funded climate extremism, the next logical step is clear: Launch an investigation into the climate ideologues flooding our education system with fearmongering and pseudoscience.

Indoctrinated K-12 classrooms

Just look at what’s happening in New York City. In the summer of 2024, Columbia University partnered with NYC Public Schools to hold a four-day workshop for teachers called “Integrating Climate Education in N.Y.C. Public Schools.” The aim should be clear from the name: Teachers were guided on how to interweave climate hysteria into their lesson plans.

A reporter later visited a public school in the Bronx where a teacher was reading her students a book about flooding in Africa. “And what’s causing all these rains and storms and floods?” she asked. “Carbon,” an 8-year-old answered.

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This isn’t isolated to New York. In 2020, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to mandate that climate change be taught at all grade levels. It begins in kindergarten, where even the lighthearted activity of dancing is used to “examine global issues, including climate change as a topic for dance.” And it’s integrated into every other school subject — from computer science to physical education.

Other states are working to incorporate climate change into their curricula. California’s Assembly Bill 285, passed in 2023, requires science teachers to instruct students beginning in the first grade “on the causes and effects of climate change, and on the methods to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

This isn’t science; it’s political conditioning masquerading as curriculum.

Take it from me: I worked for many years as a teacher and saw firsthand just how deeply rooted this climate ideology is in our classrooms — and that was before state governments began passing their mandates. What I witnessed wasn’t education but indoctrination, and it proved very successful.

Radicalized universities

Later, I left K-12 to teach as a college professor, and what I found was troubling. My freshman students widely believed the world was going to end within their lifetimes and were emotionally paralyzed by it. They didn’t want to debate other students or hear the other side of the argument. Instead, out of anger, they wanted to shame and cancel those who thought differently.

Even the most milquetoast of pushback was met by my students with confusion and contempt. This is what happens when children are indoctrinated from a very young age.

The effects of climate brainwashing are so widespread that psychologists even have a term for it: climate anxiety. The New York Times recently profiled the case of a woman paralyzed by mundane activities, like eating nuts.

They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.

In 2021, the first study on climate anxiety was released. It found that young children all over the world had been affected. Of those surveyed, more than half reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, and guilty over the climate, while a full 75% said the future looked frightening.

Leading academic institutions like Yale and Harvard have since accepted that climate anxiety is inevitable and sought to provide therapy to their students. But this is like an arsonist claiming fires are inevitable and investing in more garden hoses. Climate anxiety isn’t inevitable; it’s a direct result of convincing our children that a made-up apocalypse is inevitable.

Root out climate hysteria

Teaching kids how to care for the environment is not wrong. I was part of a generation taught to recycle, respect nature, and preserve the land for future use. But today’s curriculum isn’t about stewardship — it’s about shame. It’s not about science — it’s about fear.

It’s time for the Justice Department to broaden its investigation into the public education bureaucracies, state curriculum mandates, and activist organizations pushing climate panic in the classroom. Climate extremism shouldn’t be government policy, and it certainly shouldn’t be taught as gospel to our kids.

Let’s stop the fear, stop the brainwashing, and bring common sense back to the classroom.