Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Why I don't agree with putting Climate Change education in schools (as if it's not already there)

I'll recommend watching a movie called "Tomorrowland" to see the flip side of the "let's make it compulsory in schools" argument, from the psychological perspective. It's been out since some years now, had George Clooney in it, and comes on movie channels too now and again, probably also available online. Just the first half hour will show you the effects of the future-less hell we have unleashed on our next generations through the gloom and doom way.

From the perspective of schoolchildren, I'll state that the best way to make someone hate a topic is by making it part of the mandatory curriculum. And there is a major need right now to remove several specializations from compulsory school syllabi, for the simple reason that the specialists who pioneered those fields did so by not having to study 100 other specializations at the same time before they even hit adulthood.

Coming to more inconvenient territory, just got this in the inbox next to the email arguing for putting climate change education in school curriculum (and last time I checked, it's already very much in!) :

And I'll advise using a more neutral search engine that doesn't tinker with rankings when looking it up.. 

It's interesting how in the West, the anti-GMO folks have been saying all this time that the attention lavished on climate change has seriously distracted from the much-needed attention on environmental toxins, GMOs, heavy metal contaminations, cancer-causing pesticides, additives, fluoridation of water supplies, etc. NaturalNews is one source that I see consistently breaking the demonization I've been taught in our circles, that anyone who objects to climate change agenda must necessarily be a pro-pollution pro-fossil-fuel person and they must be doing it because they're being paid millions by evil polluters. Reality, in my experience, is a bit more nuanced. 

Instead I now see billions in taxpayer as well as billionaire funds being spent on a small (and by now quite priestly) class of scientists and career NGOs to focus completely and exclusively on CO2, and nothing is left for investigating much more tangible issues of pollution. There is no intergovernmental panel or all-world-leaders-summit to investigate and legislate at the global level against harmful pesticides or toxins in our environment.. that part we've been told only penny-less grassroots activists and mothers of disabled children have to deal with and governments will back the polluter side only as far as that topic is concerned. No action for change needed there apparently. Resources that were meant to be dedicated to combat pollution have been diverted en masse to climate change, and the polluters have been given a free pass. So much so that major polluters like Monsanto are getting away with claims that their products are helping in combating climate change.

There's also the problem I have with folks thinking that destroying democracy and bringing in more laws and tightly controlling each and every thing that moves and censoring 99% of humanity to only let qualified phd's call the shots (aka technocracy) is the best way to solve any problem. I see a lot of those tendencies in the climate change world, and I can confidently say that the whole skeptic movement exists primarily because of these technocratic urges that people who have spent much their lives behind ivory gates in privileged institutions (non-reality that is being paid for by others) of academia seem to be more prone to. This is even why I don't see the left-wing as a satisfactory counter to right-wing politics. "My dictator will be better that your dictator" doesn't quite ring a bell for me, sorry. So the push to target children to teach about climate change to.. let's remove the rose-tinted glasses of innocence and nobility and break this down to what it really is:

It's a more gullible population that is under your absolute psychological and physical control and doesn't have the ability or agency to question or walk away from what you are telling them. Its a population that will gladly mirror back your opinions in exchange for grades and artificially magnify your self-righteousness, where brown-nosers will win your favor and free-thinkers will get into your bad books. It's a component of the human population that is much easier for you to indoctrinate (well, at least that's what it appears) as you need not worry about feedback mechanisms. Their only means of countering your onslaught is disinterestedness in life itself which is reportedly on an extreme rise. That's the reality of schools, and increasingly of colleges too with bans on diversity of thought on either side of the spectrum. They are dictatorships. That you prefer shifting your discourse from democracy to dictatorship, from grownups to minors, from the real world to gated institutions with captive audiences, is an indication not of democracy being bad but of your discourse and possibly your ideology itself being too weak to survive reality.

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This came as a response to an article shared below. I couldn't help but notice that a side that has been pushing their side to millions are complaining about the other side 



Climate  Olivia Rosane
Apr. 13, 2018 01:18PM EST
iStock
Majority of Americans Want Climate Education in Schools

In a rebuke to efforts by the Heartland Institute and at least 10 state legislatures, a large majority of Americans believe climate change should be taught in schools, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) reported Wednesday.


When the YPCCC asked Americans, "Should schools teach our children about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming?", a national average of 78 percent either somewhat or strongly agreed that they should.

Moreover, a large majority shared that view in all of the 50 states and more than 3,000 counties surveyed, whether or not they favored Republicans or Democrats in elections.


Yale Program on Climate Change Communication


The results suggest that efforts in at least 10 states to alter how climate change is addressed in state educational standards are out of step with voters.

For example, YPCCC holds up the case of Idaho, where state legislators argued that no section on human-caused climate change should be included in state science standards, but instead arguments for and against a human role should be presented. Scientists and educators successfully argued that such a move would damage the education and futures of students by presenting a scientific consensus on an urgent issue as up-for-debate. The final decision was in line with the majority of Idahoans views, since, according to YPCCC data, 76 percent of them support climate education.

The same is true for the residents of other states debating their science standards, including Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky.


Yale Program on Climate Change Communication


National Center for Science Education Deputy Director Glenn Branch told Business Insider in 2017 that, when it comes to determining state science standards, "the two topics that arouse the most discontent and controversy are climate change and evolution."

But the YPCCC data suggests that that controversy is manufactured at the political level and not felt by most Americans.

One key controversy-monger, according to YPCCC, is the climate-denying think tank the Heartland Institute. In March 2017, the fossil-fuel-funded group sent out 25,000 copies of a book called Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming to science teachers nationwide.



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