Hidden Values in Climate Lessons: What Spain and the Netherlands Teach

Balearic Shearwater

07-11-2025

“Wild is not chaos. Wild is rhythm unmeasured.”

In Kingfisherish Wandering [1]

© Wix

How should schools prepare young people for a warming world? The study of Duindam and colleagues [2] compares how secondary-school geography curricula in Spain and the Netherlands address climate change, focusing on not only what students should know but also how they should feel, value, and act—the often “hidden” affective goals that shape real-world behavior.

Using the EU’s GreenComp framework—four areas of sustainability competence: Values, Complexity, Futures, and Acting—the authors conducted a qualitative content analysis of national curriculum documents. They distinguished cognitive goals (knowledge/skills) from affective goals (attitudes/values), drawing on Bloom’s taxonomy to clarify the learning processes [3,4].

Spain’s curriculum offers a broader, more guiding package of climate-change education (CCE), explicitly weaving sustainability values and action-oriented goals throughout—and frequently embedding “hidden values” (e.g., “conservation” or “global citizenship”) inside goals on other topics. By contrast, the Dutch curriculum emphasizes cognitive goals about Earth systems and risk, with relatively few explicit values or action-oriented outcomes and a weaker alignment with GreenComp (e.g., sparse coverage of Values and Acting). In lower-secondary, CCE occupies a larger share of Spain’s geography curriculum than the Netherlands; in upper-secondary, the Dutch syllabus expands climate content but remains largely cognitive and exam-oriented.

NQ—our capacity to perceive ecological realities and act wisely—requires more than facts. It grows when students connect knowledge with values, emotions, and agency, learning to navigate complex systems while internalizing fairness, care for nature, and responsibility for future generations. The Spanish approach may better cultivate NQ by pairing systems thinking with explicit norms and opportunities for action. The Dutch approach builds strong conceptual understanding but risks leading to knowledge without compass if affective aims and value clarity remain implicit [5]. The authors recommend making values explicit across content areas and balancing cognitive with affective goals so that climate education empowers informed, ethical action.

To raise a generation ready for climate challenges, curricula should integrate what we know with what we value and how we act—turning hidden values into visible guides for learning and life [6,7].

References

[1] Nguyen MH. (2025). Kingfisherish Wandering. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVLLLXNW/

[2] Duindam Y, et al. (2025). Grasping “hidden” values: exploring affective climate change goals in the geography curricula of Spain and the Netherlands. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2025.2559803

[3] Bianchi G, Pisiotis U, Cabrera-Giraldez M. (2022). GreenComp: The European sustainability competence framework (EUR-30955-EN) (M Bacigalupo, Y Punie, Eds.). Publications Office of the European Union.

[4] Krathwohl D. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212–218. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2

[5] Chang CH. (2022). Climate change education: Knowing, doing and being. Routledge.

[6] Tran TT. (2025). Flying beyond didacticism: The creative environmental vision of ‘Wild Wise Weird’. Young Voices of Science. https://youngvoicesofscience.org/?p=1963

[7] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH, La VP. (2022). The mindsponge and BMF analytics for innovative thinking in social sciences and humanities. Walter de Gruyter GmbH.