Bishop Hill Education cuts
Mar 17, 2013 Climate: other Education Greens The Guardian is reporting that someone has decided that global warming propaganda might not be the thing for small children, in England at least.
Debate about climate change has been cut out of the national curriculum for children under 14, prompting claims of political interference in the syllabus by the government that has failed "our duty to future generations".
The latest draft guidelines for children in key stages 1 to 3 have no mention of climate change under geography teaching and a single reference to how carbon dioxide produced by humans impacts on the climate in the chemistry section. There is also no reference to sustainable development, only to the "efficacy of recycling", again as a chemistry subject.
Many activists are quoted as opposing the move - David King, John Ashton are the most familiar ones. The views of parents were apparently not of interest to the Guardian.
Bishop Hill
Reader Comments (55)
@jamspid
Exactly right, and being in a branch of Dixons robs them of imagination and attention span.
Sandy got a question for Entropic
So Entropic do you and your family buy each other Carbon Credits for Christmas and Birthdays instead of HMV Vouchers?.
And did Zed get his Mrs a singing sustainably made Valentines day card with a Carbon Credit and a Condom in it (Control the population and all that)?
PS Most people dont use Ebay now.They go in Cash Converters .Depressing place where you see peoples lifes that have unraveled .Cheap place to buy DJ Mixing Decks.
Comments from the article in the Graun:
"What you seem to have is a major political interference with the geography syllabus," said the government's former science adviser Prof Sir David King. He said climate change should be taught alongside the history of – successful – past attempts to curb chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which is blamed for the depletion of the ozone layer, and air pollution caused by coal fires and cars.
"If all of these aren't issues for geography classes, then where should they be taught?" asked King. "It would be absurd if the issues around environmental pollution weren't core to the curriculum.I think we would be abdicating our duty to future generations if we didn't teach these things in the curriculum."
Anyone who thinks that reducing politically motivated interference in education is major political interference has to have a seriously twisted mentality. But one has to make allowances. This is after all someone who has long had a major influence on policies governing the lives of sixty million people and from experience it would be highly presumptuous of us to expect anything better nowadays.
Should climate change be a school curriculum subject? When I was at school in a marginally saner age no one would have considered such a notion any more than spending five minutes on the finer nuances of day following night. So what has changed since then? Certainly not the climate, that's still doing pretty much what it's been doing for the past four thousand million years or so.
What has in fact changed is the advent of politically driven mass hysteria on a scale never before attempted in the free world. The main lessons to be learned from the AGW phenomenon concern politicisation, corruption and the dire consequences of politicians with scant knowledge of science and technology let alone economics making policy in an industrialised society. But I'd probably have to agree with anyone who said that's a bit too contentious and worldly to teach school children about. Why not simply go back to concentrating on giving them a sound grounding in basic science subjects such as physics and chemistry regardless of trendy fads? Or would that be deemed boring and old fashioned and indeed dangerous on H & S grounds?
So on the one hand we are told that climate change is too complex an issue to be commented upon by the lay peasantry.
On the other hand, it's apparently simple enough to teach to schoolchilren.