(LifeSiteNews) — Starting in fall 2026, indoctrination into climate activism will become an official part of every public school curriculum in Illinois, according to a bill signed in August by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
HB4895 states that, starting in the school 2026-2027 school year, “every public school shall provide instruction on climate change, which shall include, but not be limited to, identifying the environmental and ecological impacts of climate change on individuals and communities and evaluating solutions for addressing and mitigating the impact of climate change and shall be in alignment with State learning standards, as appropriate.”
“The State Board of Education shall, subject to appropriation, prepare and make available multi-disciplinary instructional resources and professional learning opportunities for educators that may be used to meet the requirements of this subsection,” the bill adds.
The University of Illinois student newspaper The Daily Illini reports that the bill was the work of a young climate activist, University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences freshman Grace Brady, and Democratic state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr. Celebrating the bill’s passage, Brady said openly it was a “big step for creating more advocacy and student agency around climate change.”
“Thanks to Governor Pritzker and my colleagues in the General Assembly, Illinois will soon offer fact-based coursework and teacher preparation programs on the history and future of climate change,” Rohr added.
The new law leaves it up to state education bureaucrats to decide exactly what the new climate teachings will look like, but given Illinois leaders’ left-wing extremism in areas such as abortion and sexuality, it is certain to promote a one-sided presentation of “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet.
That view, which has long been an unquestionable tenet of left-wing ideology, is based in large part on manipulated data. Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.