Bishop Hill Climate control
Apr 8, 2014 Climate: other Education The following press release was issued by GWPF yesterday:
London, 8 April: A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation is calling for Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, to institute an official inquiry into the way environmentalism and in particular climate change are being taught in schools.
In the report, authors Andrew Montford and John Shade describe how environmentalism has come to permeate school curricula across the UK, featuring in an astonishing variety of subjects, from geography to religious education to modern languages. Passing examinations will now usually involve the ability to recite green mantras rather than understanding the subtle questions of science and economics involved.
The authors review in detail the climate change teaching materials currently used in British schools, with disturbing results. There is ample evidence of unscientific statements, manipulated graphs, and activist materials used in class and even found in textbooks.
The report also describes how activist teachers try to make children become the footsoldiers of the green movement, encouraging them to harass their schoolmates and pester their parents to bring about “behaviour change”.
The use of fear of climate change to alter children’s behaviour is also highlighted. This is undoubtedly having harmful consequences on children’s development and surveys indicate that fear of the future is widespread. The report quotes one child as saying:
"I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die."
Author Andrew Montford says: “The brainwashing of our children for political ends is shameful. Those responsible for education in the UK need to take action and take it quickly”
The report has been the work of many months and I must say I think the results are an appalling indictment of what is going on in schools. I just hope people take notice.
The full text is here.
Reader Comments (86)
RJ asks:
'Is youth suicide a problem in the UK?'
Dunno, but 'Saint' Bob Geldof - that well-known optimist and bringer of sunshine and joy to people's lives, recently opined that humanity would not survive to 2030 because of climate change.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/bob-geldof-the-world-could-end-by-2030-8864186.html
And yesterday came the sad news that his 25-year old daughter had been found dead 'in unexplained circumstances'
Go figure
Yes, Bravo for the enterprise, primarily as a matter of important principle
But I am not at all clear that in practice much 'damage' is being done. Teenagers today are as resistant to accepting anything they are told in school as ever they were. The observed behaviour of schoolkids in the street - I am thinking of the large-scale casual discarding of junk food and its containers onto the pavement - does not suggest any regard for the environment whatsoever.
When I was at school we were supposed to have been traumatised by living under the threat of nuclear war. However when a labour MP came to lecture us on nuclear disarmament, it ended up in a vigorous debate between the pro nuclear 6th form and the dismayed politician. We were not traumatised because we didn’t get reminded of it all the time. We were also encouraged to have our own opinion and allowed to explore both sides of the debate.
Fast forward to today and the same people who decried the mental torture of kids are making things infinitely worse for this generation of youngsters. They don’t get to question whether their lives are doomed or who is to blame.
Well done on the report it’s a real thought provoker. Let’s just hope people like Gove reads it.
What saddens me is that if the teachers need an appeal to authority to back up their AGW propaganda they only have to refer to Julia Slingo. On R4's TODAY this morning she was being interviewed about the IPCC SPM and WGII reports. She quite brazenly went into emissions reduction mode (I paraphrase) '...because we are emitting more and more carbon [sic] into the atmosphere and this is warming the globe more and more, until, by the end of this century we shall see a 4 Deg rise in average temperature - and as that's an average there will be places suffering even higher temps which will make some places on the globe uninhabitable'.
Nowhere in this interview was there any mention of the 17 year 'pause' in T while CO^2 has continued to rise.
Our children are being brain-washed. When they become voting members of society (16 year-olds voting anybody?) they will bend to the will of their global leaders - and those who don't will be informed on. It only needs one more generation.
The question in my mind is whether the story is that CAGW now rules the classroom, or whether it is Cultural Marxism that rules. I suspect the latter is the more important, and the former has simply been hijacked to aid in the task.
One of the other issues that occurs to me is that the school curriculum has been substantially dumbed down in STEM subjects, so the lack of knowledge will make it much more difficult for children to question effectively what they are taught.
Yes but, there's something going on here, 'sinister' as Jimmy Haigh remarked earlier.
Many on our side see this as a convergence of disparate groups of Greens and agenda 21'ers through to energy scammers and Malthusian types that have somehow merged into a force that is propagandizing everything that it can lay its hands on.
I don't take that view.
One only has to watch the video posted earlier with Richard Tol versus two Channel 4 presenters who facilitated Bob Ward's attack and helped him along with statements like 'you're in bed with the Heartland institute aren't you Mr. Tol'.
This was set up by who?
Another case is that the Oxford Dictionary decided that 'Denier' should be reclassified to include people who doubt AGW.
Was that a committee decision, we need to know.
Another fact is that school textbooks are contaminated with more that just this agenda.
Clearly, Maurice Strong, Soros et al cannot micro-manage all this button pushing and that gives weight to the theory that it is indeed a coming together of disparate groups that are pushing the agenda. But I still believe that the only common denominator is the desire to emasculate the western democracies and implement something along the lines of world government. I think there is just one group behind it all and I'm of the opinion that they have 2020 fixed as the date.
"I am thinking of the large-scale casual discarding of junk food and its containers onto the pavement - does not suggest any regard for the environment whatsoever." Nick Drew
That's part of the craziness on environmentalism. Those things kids can do are neglected. They’re trained to think that they need to pester someone else to do some good and that remote things, like polar bears, are more important than littering. I’d have no problem with schools trying to curb some of the wanton consumerism, rife in kids. Banning all labelled clothes and anything but a simple phone call or text mobile would be a good start. Turning down the heat a bit and making them move about more wouldn’t do them any harm either.
DougUk said
"So have faith in the up and coming generation - they will question the dogma.
The more the spin doctors and the believers manipulate the system, the more obvious is their deception - especially to those bright enquiring minds on the receiving end of it! And ultimately the bigger the back-lash against this deception will be."
My seventeen year old daughter is a climate change sceptic along with most of her friends.
@André van Delft
My youngest boy, 6, was genuinely scared yesterday because the KNMI (Dutch Met Office) has issued a yellow alert for 'dangerous weather' during the day. He didn't want to put on a tshirt to go to school, becuase there would be thunderstorms, high winds and hail storms. I told him that they have thunderstorms in hot countries too and he would be warm enough in his tshirt.
In the evenuality it was 21 degrees and quite fine yesterday the said 'dangerous weather' materialised at 10pm in the form of a bit of wind and rain. He is now quite aware of what alarmism is and that it is [mostly] best to simply ignore it!
In Australia, the national school curriculum requires " sustainability " to be taught as one of three " cross-curriculum priorities". I regard this as a disaster for Australia's students.
As Vaclav Klaus points out-
" I have a problem with accepting the term ' sustainable development '. It is not a neutral term. It is in my understanding - an empty, undefined and undefinable, more or less leftist ideological concept. It can't be a good basis for a serious discussion.....to speak about sustainable development suggests a debate about creating barriers or obstacles to rapid, healthy and much needed economic growth.
The term sustainable development can't be turned into an operational concept. The exponents of this term are the prisoners of the ahistorical and anti- economic doctrine of " the limits of growth" advocated since the 1970s by green politicians and their fellow travellers in institutions and organisations of global governance . We should be careful when using such ideologically loaded terms."
A rare moment of trurth.
In her new autobiography, The Bird and the Beeb, the broadcaster Liz Kershaw recalls a surprising moment of honesty on the subject from Tony Blair in 2007.
With the microphones switched off, the presenter was chatting about green issues when Blair suddenly sighed. “Liz, we in the UK could shut everything down and turn everything off,” he said. “And within two years all our efforts would have been wiped out by what’s happening in China now.” Kershaw says she hasn’t bothered to switch off her television since.
You do have to wonder about the political elite when Nick Clegg, in his disastrous debates with Nigel Farage, managed to mention 'climate change' (as in 'fighting it') no less than four times in each debate on - er - EUROPE...
Sherlock 1
Since the EU is planning on spending 20% of its budget on climate change, why are you surprised that Cleggy is banging the drum?
http://www.rtcc.org/2013/11/19/eu-directs-20-of-budget-to-climate-change-on-eve-of-un-finance-meeting/
Well done, both! A ray of hope lies in pupils like our neighbour's daughter - currently doing A levels - who has been subjected to the propaganda at school, and yet said the other day (apropos of nothing in particular), 'It's like global warming. You do wonder whether all this stuff's true, don't you?'
Thank you both for an outstanding, and outstandingly horrible, read. Those of us with a couple of brain cells to rub together have an awful lot of re-education to do before sanity can be restored, and not only in science.
Just finished reading this fine report. In addition to what I explained in subsequent post above about the actual meaning of Adaptation per Chapter 20 of the new IPCC report and its direct ties to education, the report mentions the Tbilisi conference. That UNESCO conference is famous for outlining the cybernetic theory of control using education. I first wrote about that here using Nina Talyzina's book The Psychology Of Learning translated from Russian.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/imposing-cybernetics-control-theory-on-students-while-pretending-the-impetus-is-equity-for-all/
Secondly, game designers and virtual reality theorists have all admitted that a major component of the digital learning push in education is to change student's internal conceptual models to reflect whatever the computer screen model lays out. That becomes the vision of reality guiding perception.
Both are important points to add to this fine report.
The puzzling thing about this is wondering what nonsense we who were educated in fly-over country in the '50s were sold.
Don Keiller: Thank you for the story of the surprising realism of Tony Blair - reposted in Fantasy China.
Yesterday when I checked what was happening with the Cook Lewandowsky circus in Australia, I found that an excellent teacher Kylie Sturgess who won Australian skeptic awards in 2006 & 2007 who showed excellent promise in introducing children to critical thinking, but then became fully indoctrinated into the church of climatology. wrote this on her blog/podcast
- Ye Gods, how deluded is that ? - The Science Communicators are been indoctrinated; the ASC is an Alarmist closed shop and those who control it control much of the Climate Science message in Australia..I wonder that is ?- Failed Here ? Have we ever heard of a young person posting here on BH ? I would very much like to hear their opinions, but let's face it climate realism seems to go hand in hand with life experience. *
- Or Repressed, cos OTOH whenever I talk to them about climate I get "Yes you're right, that's what I think as well, it's all mad, but all my friends believe !"
- Also if you visit Science Experience centres you can see examples of science being stretched way beyond the validated and into Green Dogma like the one in Newcastle, where the kids can make a TV weather report about all the "Weird Weather" we are going to get due to Climate Change. (Not to mention all the exhibits about magic green enrgy,... downsides nevr mentioned)
* like if you are only 12 years old you won't have seen the repeated changes in weather patterns, people have seen in 40, 50, 60 years
Looks like the report struck quite a chord with readers here. Thank you for all the thoughts, recollections, and links, and of course for the generous comments from those who particularly liked/valued the report. I hope we shall also see reactions in less enlightened or less-welcoming locations than this blog!
I was educated at RC schools in the fifties and sixties. By age 14 or 15, I had rejected Catholicism, as had many of my peers, despite the years of propaganda. Let's not forget that adolescence naturally brings rebellion. In my day, that was against religion. Now that conventional religion is waning, environmentalism has become a new kind of religion: it seems it's human nature to need to have some kind of existential threat, and there will always be some influential acolytes completely sold on the dogma of the day who will proselytise it beyond its actual utility.
Such dogma always contains the seeds of its own destruction, purely because of the biological fact of puberty/adolescence and the aforementioned tendency to rebel. Let's not fall into the same kind of pessimism that characterises the doom-mongers. In due course, they'll shoot themselves in the foot.
Will environmentalism (in my view a somewhat less overtly malevolent successor to that other failed religion, communism/Marxism) give way to some new religion that will continue the tradition of using carrots and sticks to try to herd the great unwashed? Well, I'm an optimist. I think we're approaching the end of the era in which this strategy can be effective, and to some extent, felt the need of. As a species, we're inexorably growing up. Call that my own particular faith, if you like.
Martin Larkin: the difference is the Internet and the platform and access it provides to raw datasets and to "citizen scientists" such as Steve McIntyre.
Well done guys. Good work.
forgot to say Tim Flannery is listed in the list of speakers of the Australian National Science Communicators conference 2014
@Larkin good point about Catholic school indoctrination being counterproductive ..yrs always had the highest rates of teenage pregnancies etc.
@thinkingscientist: yes, of course you are right about the Internet. It considerably speeds up the process of being able to combat prevailing dogmas (not just being able to spread them in the first place). In a few decades, it enables us to go through historical cycles that in earlier times might have taken centuries.
Which actually, is something else that encourages optimism in me. At some point, I believe that the structure and operation of doom-mongering campaigns will become so evident that people will become inoculated against them in general.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
1. My 6.45AM rant.
OK then, as of the time of starting to write this, nobody has commented on my earlier rant. In so far that this is because bloggers here think that education must, for one apparently compelling reason or another, be the business of the state, then I observe that the consequences of the surrender of the unalienable right to educate your offspring as you think fit to the state do not appear to have been thought through.
I agree that, in theory, surrender could include or not include determination of the curriculum, but (confessing never to have read any of countless number of relevant Education Acts) deduce that it is evident that the surrender - as it is - includes the curriculum. So I suggest that that is taken as a fact and not as a matter for discussion.
So government has to determine the curriculum and some boffin in the Ministry of Education is tasked with the work. He's a good chap and immediately sees that this is big, important and contentious work He is properly humble and so sets up a committee drawn from the best and most professional available brains to lead the work. They are big wheels deservedly confident that a lifetime's work in the field has resulted in greater relevant expertise than is possessed by (mere) parents. And the Ministry itself knows this and so rests assured that a good job is being done and that the interests of parents are being stewarded in the best possible way. Except that, confronted with this, most such parents would assert (declare) that these committee people and the Ministry are just plain wrong - they do not know what I, parent, want my child to be taught - and this in a situation where I have retained the right to determine what this is, never knowingly having surrendered it. (I know Richard Dawkins has argued that children (say) of a Catholic family are merely that rather than Catholic children, but this is not acceptable to most of us and so effectively only an unenforceable philosophical recommendation - a 'should' rather than an 'is'.)
So how is the committee to work? Let's compare two recommendations it receives: (1) from the Ministry of Justice that killing people is bad and that the young should be taught not to do it, and (2) from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change that mankind is destroying the globe by avoidable activities and that the young should be taught to identify such activities and the necessity of doing without them. So how is the committee to determine what to do? Both come from Government ministries and therefore apparently have equal merit. And so both will, in all probability, come to be included in the curriculum.
As the Bishop points out by raising the matter, this is actually the nonsense that gut reaction says it is. Yet the processes that lead to it were thorough and honest. So where is the mistake? Evidently it is the decision that the choice is a matter for government. It shouldn't be and the situation the Bishop points out is an inevitable consequence of making it one.
My rant stands and IMHO this should be the main reaction to the Bishop's post.
(2) Honesty
I was taught that honesty is the best policy, and Willy S pointed out that difficulties are caused by lies. Purely from a practical point of view and without any sort of appeal to morality or virtue, it's become evident to me that lying leads to problems for the lyer and that I was sensibly educated.
But now I read that children are being taught that one set of answers concerning climate change will earn good exam results although it is widely known that these answers are wrong. So our children are being taught they must lie to get on.
Perhaps this explains much of current politics. Politicians merely behave in the way they were taught at school. No wonder they do not understand why the public is fed up with them - because people do get fed up with being lied to. But it seems that we now have to live with the situation that everybody has been taught to do it.
Never mind climate change, what a world we are building for our children!
Good stuff there, Uncle.
April 2013 petition of 65,000 to keep CC in curriculum.
- A straw man of course, CC should be taught, but not green dogma taught as proved when it isn't.. Bish probably covered this petition, as this clearly manipulated schoolchildren for a political cause
"How Climate Change Conquered the American Campus
The top-paying job for grads last year: petroleum engineer, at $97,000. Yet most colleges seem oddly uninterested."
- April 7th WSJ argued cos of alarmist brainwashing, universities are failing to provide enough oil industry workers they are trying to provide people for cool mostly non-existant green jobs
Fantastic paper, Andrew. Thank you.
In American education, we have the National Center for Science Education, which I think appropriately defended science teaching against religious dogma, now shifting focus to the brainwashing of children in eco-lunacy (and which proudly made Peter Gleick one of it's directors, immediately prior to his document theft from Heartland Institute) http://ncse.com/climate
Kids are being indoctrinated from kindergarten all the way through high school.
http://beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu/issue/climate-change-and-the-polar-regions/lessons-and-activities-to-build-the-foundations-for-climate-literacy
Ecclesiastical Uncle,
In my time it was "True/False? Sociology is a science equal in stature to physics or chemistry." That's it and getting it wrong failed the entire test regardless of how one did on the rest.
I saw this once in secondary school and again in a required semester of the stuff at a "university" I briefly attended while trying to marshal my senses. My grade-point seemed invulnerable at the time so I thought it would be fun to get a perfect zero on the second test. I did, too. It earned me a request to visit the the head of the department who with my instructor wanted to know what I had in mind. I couldn't have had a better lead-in. "Nothing, of course."
They didn't like it and complained to the head of my department that I was not treating my sociology course "constructively." I did ultimately pass the thing, but mostly because I caved-in to the instructor who begged me to quit embarrassing her.
I should point out that these tests were multiple choice.
Comrades!
We can not allow our young leaders-in-waiting to leave school without knowing the correct and official version of how climate works. If science was left for those bright enough to argue their point cohesively, while using accurate real-life measurements as evidence, then only mayhem and chaos will result. Just think of all those unwanted discoveries ruining a fine five year planned outcome.
Also if these young minds were not taught the official version of the truth, how could they grow-up to be good obedient sheeple like their parents?
Bishop Hill, thank you for posting this important discussion and links to the article. Also Delingpole taking it up, it has been linked in Australia and discussed.
it doesn't add up at 11.49
Cultural Marxism = Gramsci's Long March through the Institutions and Gramsci's latter follower Rudi Dutschke would be recommended reading.
My children grew up in a very remote Australian mining town. My daughter was indoctrinated by the fools of the teaching profession. They same fools were aghast when she presented her primary school projects having done her research in a scientific manner and presented her conclusions. The work was always 'student-centred' with a question provided for the 'research homework' over many weeks. Never the teachers imparting factual information. Moving to a high fee paying Christian college in a major capital city for her secondary schooling the same propaganda and style of teaching continued. She did not achieve well there, but now in university is enjoying a science based Applied Science geology course, and remains sensible in her 20s.
If it is lurking around here or nearby accept my apologies if I missed it, but TonyN of Harmless Sky kindly opened a couple of threads on this topic a while ago as a result of concerns I (and others) had. I hope these may be revisited in reminder and be of value in complement:
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=340 - 'What the hell are we doing to our children?'
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=446 - 'Children, schools, and climate change: the next stage'
Can I just introduce a dissenting viewpoint here?
I frankly don't find the "brainwashing" of children by trendy viewpoints appalling or disturbing, mainly because I know that it has always gone on. When I was at school half a century ago, there were whole parts of the world we weren't taught about. China. Israel. Pretty much anywhere controversial. All the history we were taught was strictly from approved viewpoints. Absolute monarchy was bad. Democracy was good. I'm not sure that we were told that the Peasant's Revolt was a Good Thing, but it seems to me we were. It was a bit of a shock to find out Shakespeare's take on it.
It has to be remembered that teachers are not always very bright, that they are almost always conformists, that they are under constant pressure from parents, the media, their own head teachers, and anyone else who cares to take a hand.
The great thing about Climate Change from their point of view, originally, was that it was something they COULD teach the class! It wasn't political. It wasn't controversial. It was believed in by Good People. Nobody could object to it. And of course the kids lapped it up.
The real problem in recent years is not that it is a political orthodoxy, or that it isn't true, but simply that it has taken over so much of the curriculum, squeezing out real science. Much of that may be political, but a large part of the reason is that it is so easy to teach. And of course schools nowadays have targets to reach.