How modern STEM education fails to teach climate action

Is modern education fit to prepare STEM university students for the Herculean task of addressing the environmental crises confronting humankind?  

The short answer is: by and large, no. For the longer answer, we need to examine the purpose that modern education was designed to serve – and whether that purpose still holds.  

Modern higher education, as we know it, was shaped in the 19th century by industrialists who used universities as engines of industrial efficiency, emphasising the importance of specialised knowledge in engineering, business, and the sciences. By the early 21st century, the rise of advanced industrialisation and the information age further cemented the integration of STEM fields into curricula, as knowledge economies demanded ever more specialised, technical workers.¹ 

Today’s factories operate globally, depending on the seamless movement of standardised logistics, processes, and materials.² What’s true for materials is also true for people: schools and universities prepare students to embody a narrow set of standardised competencies, training them to slot into predefined roles within global supply chains and advanced economies. 

The perceived superiority of STEM

STEM disciplines are perceived as the engines of innovation, fuelling competitiveness in global markets.³ As a result, they are often perceived as superior to social sciences and humanities disciplines (SSH) in addressing environmental, social and economic challenges.⁴ However, this assumption –  that STEM fields are inherently more “practical” and “useful” for economic advancement – is a fallacy, and stems from a convergence of ideological, economic, and epistemological forces rather than objective truth.⁵  

STEM disciplines excel at solving well-defined technical problems. But this focus leaves little room for cultivating the kind of critical thinking and contextual awareness needed to grapple with ambiguous, complex challenges – challenges at the heart of climate change.⁶ SSH fields, by contrast, situate questions of power, justice, and historical responsibility at the centre of sustainability debates, considering both technical and societal dimensions. A forward-thinking approach would, therefore, go beyond knowing what and how to do something to include an understanding of why and when to perform a particular technical procedure – an awareness that is well developed in SSH.  This holistic approach addresses systemic problems alongside technical challenges, exemplified by systems thinking skills.  

The failure of modern education 

Modern utilitarian education shapes students’ approach to environmentalism with a transactional perspective. To understand how to equip STEM students with relevant SSH skills, we ought first to examine how the current educational system affects students at the cognitive, psychological, and social levels. 

1. Cognitive effects

Environmental stress often clashes with attitudes that contradict these values, creating unresolved cognitive dissonance, i.e., holding strong environmental beliefs yet practising environmentally destructive behaviours.⁸ A specific bias that was studied as a contributor to this inertia is the positive illusion bias, i.e., the impression that ‘everything will be okay for me’.⁹ Biases like this reinforce the ‘bargaining’ of higher-impact actions, like the choice of a career in the climate sector, with low-impact personal actions, such as recycling habits, partly because they lack knowledge about the extent of the former. 

2. Psychological effects

The climate crisis, as an existential threat to humanity, has a severe psychological effect on young people. Students frequently experience profound grief and stress when they grasp the reality of climate breakdown.¹⁰ Specifically, when confronted with data on planetary boundaries and the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet, their worldview fractures. This isn’t just an intellectual shift; it’s an emotional and identity-level rupture – one rarely addressed in STEM classrooms.²  

To understand how systems thinking can reshape the cognitive and psychological effects of environmental education in students, we can study the critical pedagogical elements of the German philosopher and critical social theorist, Oskar Negt. Negt’s educational theory is grounded in his critical theory of socialisation and exemplary learning. ¹¹ In the Negtian pedagogy, exemplarity is vital for connecting learning to personal experiences and societal structural forces, revealing systemic patterns and problems. In practice, by centring the lived experience, with the learning material, students can engage with power, ethics, and contingency, thereby transcending fragmented curricula and ultimately challenging the myth of STEM.  

3. Individual (academic) effects

These psychological and cognitive struggles are exacerbated by academia’s structural bias towards the technical prowess of STEM disciplines,  while treating SSH courses as mere freshman-year requirements.¹² This design strengthens student preferences for STEM, and reinforces the notion that STEM is more valuable than SSH when addressing societal issues.^{13, 14, 15} These consequences ripple into professional life: early-career engineers, for example, lack knowledge of non-technical topics e.g., societal, justice and ethical considerations of their work, leaving them ill-equipped to question the limits of their own expertise.¹⁶ 

4. In-group (academic) effects

Modern education also fails students through the competitive individualism it cultivates. Binary assessment methods frequently fail to capture students’ individual understanding of the complex socio-ecological dimensions of climate change. ^{17, 18, 19, 20}  Additionally, while students recognise the importance of group work for developing communication skills, they often become frustrated by personality conflicts, unequal contributions,²¹ and are driven by individualistic attitudes towards education.²² As a result, students miss out on enhanced decision-making and communication skills that would bolster their professional development.^14, 23 

Another critical pedagogy that can help address the individual and in-group effects of current approaches to environmental education can be traced back to the Brazilian pedagogue and activist Paulo Freire, whose work influenced the theological liberation movement of the 1970s. ²⁴ In Freirean pedagogy, students become co-creators of knowledge, dismantling hierarchies between teachers and learners, and humanising learning through praxis-oriented learning, theoretically grounded action. At its core, praxis-oriented learning combines critical reflection and dialogue with learning by doing and the application of knowledge in real-world contexts. This learning-by-doing approach has entered mainstream educational methods through problem- and project-based learning, but Freire’s radical insistence on dialogue remains crucial for teaching positioning, historicity, and plurality in STEM classrooms. 

Conclusion and A way forward

Identifying the pitfalls of the modern educational system is only the beginning of a long transitional path. Equipping students for the climate crisis requires a fundamental reassessment and redesign of STEM education – both in content and in delivery. This means rejecting fragmented disciplinary lenses and embedding systems thinking throughout STEM. It requires integrating transversal skills from SSH, such as those found in sociology, anthropology, politics, and ethics, into STEM curricula, so students develop a holistic understanding of the climate crisis.^{, 15}    

In the “Is STEM education failing our students, our planet or both?” brief we dive deeper into such a STEM reform, as well as foundational pedagogies, frameworks, methods and tools, tested by academics and university educators on how to integrate social studies and humanities (SSH) in STEM programmes to encourages students to intertwine concepts across disciplines, understand their networked structure, and comprehend how social and ecological systems are interconnected and influence one another.  

References

1. Polanyi, K. (2002). The great transformation. Readings in economic sociology, 38-62. 
2. Servant-Miklos, G. (2024). Pedagogies of collapse: A hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it. Bloomsbury Publishing. 
3. On 5 March 2025, the European Commission presented its STEM Education Strategic Plan as part of the Union of Skills. The initiative aims to address key challenges in STEM education and increase its attractiveness and quality to help counter the shortage of skilled labour in STEM professions in Europe. For more, see: European Commission. (2025). STEM education strategic plan. European Education Area. Retrieved from: https://education.ec.europa.eu/document/stem-education-strategic-plan-legal-document 
4. Spracklen, K. (2016). The Attack on Social Sciences. In Making the Moral Case for Social Sciences: Stemming the Tide (pp. 8-29). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. 
5. Olmos-Peñuela, J., Benneworth, P., & Castro-Martinez, E. (2014). Are ‘STEM from Mars and SSH from Venus’?: Challenging disciplinary stereotypes of research’s social value. Science and Public Policy, 41(3), 384-400  
6. Josa, I., & Aguado, A. (2024). Exploring Perceptions of Social and Generic Competencies among Engineering Students, Professors, and Practitioners. Journal of Civil Engineering Education, 150(4), 04024002. 
7. Josa, I., & Aguado, A. (2021). Social sciences and humanities in the education of civil engineers: Current status and proposal of guidelines. Journal of Cleaner Production, 311, 127489.  
8. The Psychology of Denial Concerning Climate Mitigation Measures: Evidence from Swiss Focus Groups’, Global Environmental Change 11, no. 2 (2001): 107–17. 
9. For further information on the positive illusion bias, as well as the other three studied biases, including, fundamental attribution error, prospect theory and the in-group/out-group bias, read more in: Johnson, D., & Levin, S. (2009). The tragedy of cognition: psychological biases and environmental inaction. Current science, 1593-1603. 
10. Goldman, L. (2022). Climate change and youth: Turning grief and anxiety into activism. Routledge. 
11. Negt, O. (1971). Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen: zur Theorie und Praxis der Arbeitbildung. Europaische Verlagsanstalt 
12. Lee, H. R., von Keyserlingk, L., Arum, R., & Eccles, J. S. (2021, March). Why do they enroll in this course? Undergraduates’ course choice from a motivational perspective. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 6, p. 641254). Frontiers Media SA. 
13. Gammon, D. E., Namaste, N., Darby, A., & Giovanello, S. (2021). Undergraduate Perceptions of the three branches of the Arts and Sciences: An empirical study of both stated and revealed preferences. The Journal of General Education, 70(1–2), 111–132. https://doi.org/10.5325/jgeneeduc.70.1-2.0111    
14. Amelink, C. T., Grote, D. M., Norris, M. B., & Grohs, J. R. (2023). Transdisciplinary Learning Opportunities: Exploring Differences in Complex Thinking Skill Development Between STEM and Non-STEM Majors. Innovative Higher Education, pp. 1–24.,  
15. Scholkmann, A., Stegeager, N., & Miller, R. K. (2023). Integrating the Integration: The Role and Challenges of Problem-Based Learning in Bringing Together Social Science and Humanities (SSH) and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 11(1), 98-123.  
16. Flening, E., Asplund, F., & Edin Grimheden, M. (2022). Measuring professional skills misalignment based on early-career engineers’ perceptions of engineering expertise. European Journal of Engineering Education, 47(1), 117-143. 
17. Gray, S., Sterling, E. J., Aminpour, P., Goralnik, L., Singer, A., Wei, C., … & Norris, P. (2019). Assessing (social-ecological) systems thinking by evaluating cognitive maps. Sustainability, 11(20), 5753. and  
18. Arikan, S., Erktin, E., & Pesen, M. (2020). Development and Validation of a STEM Competencies Assessment Framework. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 20, 1-24 
19. Tolppanen, S., Kang, J., & Riuttanen, L. (2022). Changes in students’ knowledge, values, worldview, and willingness to take mitigative climate action after attending a course on holistic climate change education. Journal of Cleaner Production, 373, 133865. 
20. Kolmos, A., & Ryberg, T. (2023). PBL in a Digital Age. Aalborg Universitetsforlag 
21. Rajabzadeh, A. R., Long, J., Saini, G., & Zeadin, M. (2022). Engineering student experiences of group work. Education Sciences, 12(5), 288. 
22. Telling, K. (2024). Why do students resist assessment by group-work? Hearing critique in the complaint. European Educational Research Journal, 23(5), 745-763. 
23. Pavlica, M., Babić T., Cuculić P. (2020). Effective Decision Making: the Added Value of Including Humanities in STEM Studies. IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9245347 
24. Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum, 356, 357-358. 
25. Ching-Chiang, L. W. C., & Fernandez-Cardenas, J. M. (2020). Analysing dialogue in STEM classrooms in Ecuador: A dual socioeconomic context in a high school. Journal of new approaches in educational research, 9(2), 194-215. 

Ready for more?

Dive deeper into how STEM education can be redesigned in the brief “Is STEM education failing our students, our planet or both?”, which outlines concrete pedagogies, frameworks, and tools for integrating social sciences and humanities into STEM. It complements this article’s critique by translating systems thinking and interdisciplinarity into actionable approaches for equipping students to navigate complex climate challenges.

Déspina Kortesidou (author) is a Senior Consultant at UIIN and holds an MSc in Behavioural Neuroscience Sciences and a BSc in Molecular Biology. In her work, she supports institutions on topics relating to social innovation, institutional transformation and strategic partnerships.