Twelve-year-olds in a Birmingham classroom are drawing water cycle diagrams based on observation instead of copying them from a whiteboard. They’re not adhering to a manual. They are sketching what they actually see while gazing out the window at a drainage ditch following a downpour. It sounds almost charming. Researchers connected to Cambridge’s education reform circles also claim that it may be one of the most serious approaches to climate education in years.
For a while now, the phrase “think like Da Vinci” has been used in progressive education settings. It is typically used as a cozy source of inspiration, something you might print on a motivational poster and display over a water fountain. However, something is changing. When it comes to preparing young people for the realities of a destabilizing climate, educators and curriculum designers are beginning to approach it more like an actual instructional framework rather than a metaphor.
In its most basic form, the argument is that Leonardo da Vinci did not acquire knowledge by memorization. He gained knowledge by persistently posing difficult questions and then making connections between disciplines that others kept apart. Instead of following a curriculum, he was studying fluid dynamics, human anatomy, and architecture at the same time because his curiosity knew no bounds. It turns out that the climate crisis doesn’t either.
The fact that the majority of schools continue to send students into this world with the same disjointed, rote-memorization-heavy approach that detractors have been criticizing since at least 1983, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education first announced that American education standards were subtly declining, is what is frustrating, and it is truly frustrating to watch. After about 40 years, the building hasn’t changed all that much. For the most part, students are still expected to learn material, repeat it on an exam, and then forget it by summer.
However, climate change may be compelling a reckoning. The same passive learning approach that finds it difficult to make algebra seem relevant cannot be used to teach children how to deal with something as truly complex as changing precipitation patterns or collapsing ecosystems. Teachers are beginning to realize that the crisis calls for a different kind of mind, not just one that is more knowledgeable but also one that is more connected. Some refer to it as a Da Vinci mind, but they take care not to overpromote the brand.
Contrary to what the name implies, the practical applications being suggested are not as romantic. Schools experimenting with this strategy are asking students to cross-examine causes rather than recite effects, integrating observation-based science with local environmental data, and developing what some educators refer to as “divergent thinking”—the capacity to come up with multiple solutions to a problem rather than search for the one right answer. This ability has long been said to be silently destroyed by standardized testing, which favors a single correct response.
This might still be more of an aspiration than a revolution. District requirements, pressure to prepare for tests, and textbooks that are still mostly owned by four corporations limit the majority of American classrooms. Curriculum changes take time. It takes longer to transform a culture of learning. However, there is a direction that seems correct, or at the very least more realistic about what students will truly require. It’s not just climate education when you see a twelve-year-old draw a drainage ditch and then ask why it floods every spring. That’s a mind that learns to remain inquisitive under duress. Da Vinci would have grasped it right away.
