Ocean blindness refers to the widespread lack of awareness and understanding of the ocean’s importance to life on Earth—and to human societies in particular. It describes a cognitive and cultural bias in which people overlook the ocean’s role in regulating climate, producing oxygen, supporting biodiversity, and sustaining economies, largely because most human activity takes place on land. In the European Schoolnet analysis, this phenomenon is reflected in education systems: despite the ocean’s central importance, it is underrepresented, fragmented, and often implicit within school curricula rather than taught as a coherent subject. European curricula reproduce ocean blindness by scattering ocean-related content across subjects like geography and science, where it appears only indirectly (e.g., climate, water cycles, ecosystems). While some countries include explicit marine topics, overall coverage is inconsistent and rarely framed as integrated ocean literacy—leaving students with partial, disconnected understanding rather than a systemic view of the ocean’s role.
