Of course the usual suspects are livid about this, a proposal to eliminate education on climate change in British schools or up to age 14. This is in the draft guidelines of a national curriculum.
Where will the Greens be if they can’t have cohort after cohort of children indoctrinated into the Faith?
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.
The move has caused alarm among climate campaigners and scientists who say teaching about climate change in schools has helped mobilise young people to be the most vociferous advocates of action by governments, business and society to tackle the issue.
Maybe the less young people they teach the Great Global Warming Racket to the better. Otherwise too many may turn out like this.
Problem with that link. Try this. Scroll to the video.
Do they teach the merits of capitalism in history classes.
Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
(Vladimir Lenin)
It seems the science is settled.
Does it really matter one way or the other? Kids have good bullshit detectors especially in this “information age”. I’m with the UK commenter who said -
When I was at school I was taught don’t do sex, don’t do drugs, don’t smoke and don’t drink alcohol.
Done ‘em all.
These would be the same people who complain about TV ads that get kids to pester their parents for stuff.
Thanks Grant, now I can stop being concerned about school education. I suppose uni students have good bullshit detectors as well, so it is ok to teach Marxism and POMO. So much for my silly concerns about the universities. And the ABC.
blogstrop: zactly. Advertising to kids bad, indoctrinating them explicitly because they’re so politically useful? Good.
This is terrible news. How will kids get to be educated about the immense damage humans are perpetrating on the planet if they’re not properly educated?
Plenty of indoctrination still happening here though.
Why does a company like Target think it has a place teaching our kids to become eco warriers?
http://www.kidsteachingkids.com.au/images/2013TVCKTK%20FINALOnline%2030.mpg
Rafe – my (rather minor) point was that we shouldn’t assume high school students are idiots. You can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink. That sort of thing.
As boy on a bike commented on the open thread, the liberals are attracting a lot of new blood, the more active ones in their 20′s. They’ve had years of CAGW mass hysteria overtly and covertly shoved down their throats at school and it hasn’t affected them.
Catweazle would be a useful addition to any child’s education or Christmas stocking.
And an expose of ‘evidence-based’ policy.
If Dalrymple is correct, that has worked a treat in the UK.
Meanwhile the British Conservative Party are starting their national carbon tax on 1 April.
This is so screwed up I have no words. At least the date is appropriate.
Rafe is right to be worried about school education. As someone that meets them at university I can tell you that their ‘bullshit detectors’ are calibrated during school education and those calibrations are consistent with left-liberalism.
Ah, yes. Catweazle, Episode One – The Sun In A Bottle.
Trivia: Bud Tingwell played the dad.
This is a tragedy for education in Britain. How will kids now get to understand the disaster that human beings are perpetrating on this planet?
It’s a mistake to treat any cohort as homogenous. Some buy the propaganda, some have better BS detectors. Both of mine (13 and 16) are very cynical about da gerbil worming an der carbin tax. Maybe they caught it from me.
Geez, dropping (a branch of) leftist propaganda in schools — it’s the thin edge of the wedge. If we don’t watch it there’s a danger the kids might be properly educated.
My grade 7 kid’s science text’s ‘energy resources”section is all about how coal is bad, renewables good. Sort of mentions the economic and reliability issues, but sunnily suggests these will soon be solved. The bulk of the section is on renewables.
At the end it shows where there is high solar radiation, high winds, high geothermal and high tidal potential.
Australia lucks out on all those things where its population centres are, but there is no discussion of this.
Overall I was depressed that this upper level private school uses such shallow pap. I hope more senior level texts are more instructive.
There will always be the ‘leaven in the lump’ of smart kids, but I wouldn’t be wildly optimistic, judging by the number of supposedly educated, informed adults I meet who hold religious convictions about climate change, while being utterly ignorant of the most basic data parameters of the debate.
In a funny way, I was more cheered by seeing lovable enviro-loon David Attenborough recently discussing the geological factors which cause the Galapagos Islands, like most other volcanically formed oceanic islands, to subside over time. And not one word about ‘man made’ rises in sea levels.
They should be well indoctrinated by the time they reach grade 7:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/the_kid_is_one_year_younger_than_earth_hour/
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/abc_takes_money_to_turn_children_into_warmists/
But Cato, you need to cover the range of left-liberal shibboleths, not just the one.
Out of the mouths of babes and suckers…
I dunno. If you really believe that the whole climate caper is going to fizzle out and turn into nothing; then having kids discover for themselves that a lot of what they are taught in school is not only wrong, but serves the purpose of other people — I think that’s a very useful lesson. Perhaps on of the most useful lessons.
This is why the cirriculum has to be privatised, not just the schools.
It’s only a proposal. Will it get up?
It should. It’s about time the scam was dismantled.
Being forced to watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ twice within 6 months certainly didn’t help mobilise my son or any of his friends. If anything it did the opposite.
Tel – yes
Well, DB
They both had a good old laugh about the circus in Canberra this week, so far as I can see they haven’t caught any part of the leftie disease yet.
Of course, they both still want to know me and neither is at uni yet, so I play it one day at a time
It should be moved to religious studies.
Educationalists who inserted morally loaded climate alarmist activism (as opposed to dispassionate climate science) should be held responsible for the demonstrated mental harms caused to children by their campaign of fear here and here.
Placing even small amount of responsibility on children for something they can’t really influence as kids and which will apparently destroy the world before they have a chance to grow up is pretty monstrous psychological abuse.
What lasting effects will there be to the next generation’s general psyche either if they continue to believe or realise they’ve been lied to all their childhood?
In contrast, when I grew up – Star Trek Enterprise was exporting human values around the universe. Today kids are bathed in self-loathing, depicting humans as vermin fouling a beautiful planet that would apparently be better off without humans. How sad.
I disagree Tel; kids are impressionable; people don’t mature, if at all, until well into their 20′s, past voting age.
AGW propoganda could influence elections and policy; currently $billions are being spent on AGW, RET and other peripheral black holes; science is being tainted and the MSM being corrupted [stop laughing].
AGW science is WRONG; it should not be allowed to fester as a general principle. That it is being promulgated unfettered in schools is a bad thing; especially since it was judicially whacked around the head in 2006.
AGW has done terrible things to kids and continues to provide AGW agitprop to them.
It’s time to give AGW and its shithead supporters zero tolerance and not say she’ll be right.
I am amazed. Some people on this list don’t care about lies being taught to primary school kids. No wonder we have got some problems.
The first 30 minutes after your kiddies return from the induction camps should be spent reprogramming them and disabusing them of the bullshit they’ve been taught.
This disaster (I am sure they will use this word) for the activist caste will be dealt with activist logic.
They will teach that the reason the AGW theory is floundering is not because the premises are defective, the models flawed or conclusions inconsistent.
They will teach that the reason AGW fails is because we do not build enough 200 metre tall orange plastic parabolas. The problem is more serious than we thought – we must first turn 50% of GDP over to building thousands of these parabolas to make AGW a problem, and then build more windmills to solve the problem.
Post modernism means never having to say 1+2 equals 3. (They would be struck by the inequality between 1 and 2, and demand legislation to produce social equality.)
I too am amazed Rafe!
The problem lies with those children whose parents, either don’t have much dialogue with their kids into what happens at school and those who believe in the AGW where their beliefs have added emphasis from the school teacher.
Those children whose parents are concerned and do their best to discredit the AGW story are still a minority.
The indoctrination of school children into the AGW nonsense has no place in our schools. It must be stopped completely.
Education in aust does have a leftist flavour . Regardless of wether humans caused it ,the climate always changes if you wait long enough ,and, oil is mostly in foreign hands and supply will drop below demand sometime ;- so i rekon its a good idea to teach about how to cope with change and about alternatives to the reliance on oil anyway .Nothing wrong with having the choice in case we need it one day .
Excellent approach! Now go and stick a fork in your nose, just to get used to it, in case it happens one day.
Meh, I re-educate my kids when they get home from school, I teach them that meat is good, salad is what your food eats, climate change is natural and lots of people during your life will try to control you.
The nanny state is a passing phase and every so often we have to correct and swing the other way.
They don’t believe enough of the gloomy doom news from the women’s misery collective at primary school (where there are zero male teachers now) to give up TV or personal electronic devices anyway.
My three children finished primary school with a large number of leftist delusions but the two biggies were climate change and the practical application of the family law act. That is, re the latter, that father’s tenuous biological connection to family is an inconvenient truth.
The kids then went on to high school where they did advanced studies on these and other topics.
The indoctrination by mental midgets that passes for education is of concern but I suppose they have to talk about something now the three R’s are unfashionable.
Rafe – I should have read further. I wasn’t aware it referred to primary school students. Although 14 year olds are surely out of primary school. I agree, no need for “education” on climate science at that age but I have few problems with it being taught in later high school years.
However you talk about “lies being taught”. What lies specifically? Unless you can articulate these lies you are no better than Lewandowsky, Hamilton and “Dr” Cook who would rate your “facts” as denialist lies. So if it is taught, as it should be in high school, who sets the curriculum? Difficult question and I don’t have the answer although I have my views which may not sit well with the 97% of climate scientists who think otherwise.
Throwing a hissy fit about whether climate science should be taught to school students is leaving you behind the eight ball. The opposition is miles in front of you already.
Effing EXACTLY. If the Barrier Reef is dying* it’s our problem, not our kids!
*It’s not.
It gives me time to sight-in.
Grant B, I have friends who are teachers and they are having to teach climate science to grade threes. The problem is that at the base level there are only three fields of natural science. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Climate science is really just the study of the way the climate works using physics, chemistry, and biology. I find it doubtfull that young children without a firm understanding of science at a base level will be able to understand anything that they are taught. Also it should be considered that climate science is an immature field with new papers coming out on a continuous basis that clearly show that the hypothesis that CO2 and other so called green house gases are the main driver of climate change is flawed. Students in primary and secondary school should really just be taught the basics of science in physics, chemistry, and biology with more specialization introduced at university. Anything else is just an exercise in indoctrination.
GrantB, tell us how you think AGW works.
It bloody is wreckage. I know it is.
Ben Cropp said so back in the second half of the ’70s, on television, in a special documentary.
A lot of university people have said the same thing about every 3 or 4 years since. University people with arts degrees. Some of them even had environmental science degrees. I don’t know whether that means they study physics, biology or chemistry, but they are always very passionate and alarmed, like Ben Cropp was.
CyrilH – if you have friends that are teaching climate science to grade threes that is beyond the pale. Quite stupid. Presumably there are course notes or at least a generic curriculum they are working to. Please obtain these and publish them. If these don’t exist these teachers should be taken to task.
Cohenite – “GrantB, tell us how you think AGW works.” Well I’m not a “climate scientist” but I think I’ve got a good handle on radiative physics, pre-hitran, pre-modtran, in fact I started back in the days of card reading lowtran. Remember those – 5a, 5b etc? So I believe that an increase in atmospheric CO2 will lead to an increase in “global temperature”. If such a thing exists, given that temperature is an intensive variable. But that’s a different debate. What I don’t believe is that the theoretically postulated feedbacks are both theoretically sound or observed. I do believe that there are competent climate scientists and some that are zealots. Eg Mann, Trenbath and our own Gergis et al. Marcott isn’t looking too flash either. My only point was that I don’t have a problem with climate science being taught at high school. It should be, an agreed syllabis is the issue. That’s for others. I’ve got my views, I’ve got a 1st class honours and a PhD in theoretical physics, but as I said I’m not a climate scientist.
I just do calculations at Modtran.
Yes, maybe, but how; is it due to isotropism? What about saturation, Beers Law, the decline in emissivity in the overlapping spectrum between CO2 and H2O, Hottel’s principles; can backradiation actually heat the oceans?
It seems to me that while it is indisputable that CO2 is photoluminescent, it’s contribution to the ill-conceived and described greenhouse effect is initial and effectively unmeasurable at concentrations above about 100 ppm.
With your qualifications you would be as well entitled as most ‘climate scientists’ to call yourself a ‘climate scientist’.
They are teaching obedience to grade threes and climate science happens to be a convenient topic where everyone outside a small clique of self-anointed “experts” is expected to just accept the consensus. The methodology is to take note of who would question this state of affairs and weed out those people with inquiring minds because they are of no use to the State.
Tell that to the people selling government bonds.
Tell that to the entire banking cartel.
The Climate Change mandate has been a component of the Global Citizenship standards for more than 10 years. I explained it here including the fact that Australia got the same standard about the same time. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/mandating-global-citizenship-mindsets-by-assessing-whether-students-adopt-social-altruism/
I know UK is not giving up on this and the use of OECD pushed formative assessments make them the prime driver in the classroom, not standards anymore. Also my experience with accreditation standards is that you only get specificity when the standard is first introduced. Later the requirement stays in place with an Orwellian code word that is a reminder that the previous criteria has not been altered but no longer is being graphically pointed out either. To understand the drivers then you have to read the series of standards.
In the US, for example, the accreditors were driving Diversity with specific obligations 10 or 15 years ago. Now with compliance code words are enough.
The original article in the Grauniad is a model of how to mislead while apparently observing journalistic standards.
Different points of view are quoted, which gives the appearance of balance. But no one is quoted who does not believe in the global warming tale, or who thinks it absurd for little children to be taught as fact the hodge-podge of theory, hypothesis, guesswork and speculation that make up received opinion on this topic.
The “appeals to authority” are also prize examples of misdirection:
“Independent not-for-profit” is the way E3G describe themselves, and gives the impression they are unbiased and have no financial stake in the issue. But in fact they are “agenda-driven…change agents for sustainable development” who depend on funding from government and private organisations with fixed positions on climate change, including the activist groups Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council and WWF.
- “International expert” being a more than generous description, as Ms Born is actually an intern at the UKYCC, who “recently graduated with a Bsc in Geography”.