My son spent his first few years of school in the nearest public school, and a number of
reasons led us to educate him at home for the 3rd through 12th grades. One factor
in our decision was the leftist propaganda that he was being taught, including the idea that
he could "save the earth" by picking up litter in his spare time and avoiding the use of
styrofoam. That was only a small part of it, of course, and we figured the
politically correct nonsense was bound to get worse – with later grades learning
only the humanist side of evolution, environmentalism, animal rights, and birth
control – and there was no point in sending him to school every day only to
un-teach him at night, so we pulled him out of the public school system.
This page is about the specific issue of environmentalism in American schools. It is my
goal to provide enough anecdotal evidence to show that the schools are being used as more to
indoctrinate kids than to give them the ability to make wise decisions and sort out truth from
fiction.
This is a spin-off from the page about Liberalism
and Political Correctness in schools. You may also find interesting material on my
page(s) about Environmentalism.
'Avant-Garde Sustainability
Curriculum' to Replace Three R's. A recent Boston Globe story reveals the destructive effects
that Al Gore and global warming activists are having on American education. According to the story,
["A]fter a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth" three years ago, [students in the Youth Climate Action Network]
started brainstorming ideas for transforming the nation's oldest public school into an energy-efficient building
with an avant-garde sustainability curriculum.["]
L.A.'s
green schools: Propane buses, solar panels and environmental education. In March, hundreds
of decades-old buses will be upgraded to less-polluting, more-energy-efficient propane models. Eight
schools, out of a planned 250, will have solar power installed. Still others will be outfitted with
"smart" irrigation systems to reduce the millions of gallons of imported water the district guzzles each day,
more than half of which is used for outdoor watering. "One of our goals is to be the No. 1 greenest
school district in the country," said Yoli Flores Aguilar, an L.A. Board of Education member who co-sponsored
the Green LAUSD resolution in 2007.
The Editor asks...
Why not try to achieve the highest graduation rate, or try to be the most economically efficient
school district, or the safest school district in the country? Not a chance? Okay,
perhaps becoming the "greenest" school district is their only achievable goal.
More
about Spending More to Get Less.
Inconvenient
Facts About Inconvenient Youth. [Scroll down] It's harmless stuff, except that these teens
are getting a very one-sided version of a complicated issue. After all, An Inconvenient Truth is hardly
an unbiased documentary. A judge in the United Kingdom found numerous, significant scientific errors in
the film, including that it exaggerates even the most dire predictions about global warming's potential
harm. Yet most students have accepted Al Gore's perspective as undisputed fact: one study
reported that three in four kids think global warming is a "a threat to all life on the planet," and about
two in three feel that global warming is "a threat to my future well-being and safety" and "feel afraid of
what might happen."
Environmental Mush: An Ethical Abyss.
Parents are often appalled to discover that their children's school books are full of misinformation or have an agenda
that has little to do with the supposed subject. The rise and the maintenance of the Green movement have a great
deal to do with the infiltration of school systems and textbooks with often deliberately misleading information.
Many Green programs are aimed at the youth here and around the world.
Why I Am Enlarging My
Carbon Footprint: As a psychotherapist, I try my best to calm down my anxious clients. But
in this case, I inadvertently triggered a panic attack. My twenty-something client Emma, a survivor of
the Berkeley public schools, had a coughing fit during our session. I helpfully got up to get her some
water. When I handed her a cup, she looked at it, incredulous. Her voice quivering, she asked, "Is
this Styrofoam?" I said yes. She stared at the cup, mesmerized by this forbidden fruit. When
she finally found her words, she said, "I've never seen Styrofoam before. We learned in school that it
kills baby birds."
Pay
Attention Parents: It's Almost Earth Day! Few adults may know it, but kids across the
country are about to celebrate a holiday: Earth Day, which is April 22. Schools will take a
break from normal instruction to discuss the importance of preserving the environment. That may sound
like a harmless activity, but too often Earth Day becomes a platform for pushing an ideological brand of
environmentalism.
Global Warming Goes to School. A
national campaign was launched today to get public schools that have shown Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"
to give equal time to the opposing view of global warming. The Independent Women's Forum ... hopes
to have the 2009 documentary "Not Evil, Just Wrong" shown in classrooms around the country. "Not Evil,
Just Wrong" claims to expose erroneous claims about global warming.
Texas and the
Textbook Alamo: [Scroll down slowly] Rather than majoring on the disciplines of biology
or chemistry, science textbooks morphed into treatises for the environmental movement. Since the '70s,
American students have been deluged with politically correct concerns over population control, the rain forest
and the ozone layer. So, after a history of being taught the theory of evolution as fact, students are
now besieged by so-called evidence of man made global warming.
UKIP
would ban Al Gore film in schools. Global warming 'propaganda' like the Al Gore film Inconvenient
Truth will be banned in schools and public authorities will not be allowed to spend money on climate change initiatives.
Global Warming Update:
It's deeper than just money. Schoolteachers have created polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our
children when in fact there are more polar bears now than in 1950. They've taught children about melting glaciers.
Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit that their Himalayan glacier-melting fraud
was done to "impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."
Get Global Warming
Out of Our Schools. Because of the recent revelations of "Climategate" (see source materials
below) and my experience raising two children in private and public schools in California, I believe we
need to start a nationwide campaign to get "global warming" immediately removed from the curriculum of our
schools. We cannot wait for politicians or activists to do any more damage to our future generation.
"Global warming" is not just an objectionable and discredited scientific theory. Teachers are grafting
the loony climate-change premise onto lifestyle, religion, and politics in "science" classrooms. It
cannot stand.
Climategate
in the Classroom? The mainstream media has for too long dominated the information being
disseminated about global warming. Some people have long-term loyalty to television news programs,
newspapers, or magazines. Any opinion that varies from their source is unacceptable. Some
people have been so completely indoctrinated with the climate catastrophe story, they can't stand to
hear anything else. For them my story of global warming will be met with closed doors and
deaf ears.
Emails,
schmeemails, look at the polar ice caps. [Scroll down slowly] The result is
that you, the public, your children in school, are getting only half, or less than half, the
picture: the glass half-empty half. The warming half. In this way, the popularizers
of man-caused global warming can tell the "truth" while presenting the bigger lie. They tell
only half the truth — the warming half.
Save the Planet
by Banning Ice Cream. It is disturbing how kids are being brainwashed into supporting global
warming. ... Try telling kids to walk to school carrying their books and a reusable cloth sack full of raw
vegetables for lunch — as opposed to riding on a bus, with a backpack, a cell phone, and
an mp3 player, to a heated and cooled school that has a cafeteria — and see how eager they
are to join the movement.
Teachers promoting environmental biases in
classrooms. My grandson is five years old. After his second week in school, he asked his
father what he was doing about global warming. Think about that for a moment. Does anyone believe
that a five year old can even understand the controversy surrounding the science of global warming, let along
question what he is being told? Rather than teaching my grandson the knowledge he will need to succeed
academically — analytical skills and open mindedness, among others — his
teacher is spending time indoctrinating him with her beliefs on global warming.
Global
warming propaganda infiltrates schools. Scientists see no temperature increase (on average) in
the oceans or on the surface of the Earth over the last decade. That hasn't stopped an activist group
from infiltrating high schools with the panicky message that we are on the verge of a "planetary emergency"
due to global warming. These alarmists are the recently formed Alliance for Climate Education, an
Oakland, Calif., nonprofit created by wealthy wind energy entrepreneur Michael Haas. The organization
has targeted five metropolitan areas and now is opening a Washington office.
Sense and sustainability: "The earth is the
Lord's and the fullness thereof," but you could have fooled the 648 college presidents who have signed the
American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) since 2006. The earth is theirs,
to make or break.
Stop
scaring kids about global warming. In the United States, the ABC television network recently
reported that psychologists are starting to see more neuroses in people anxious about climate change.
An article in the Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal
extinctions from global warming. In her words: "I don't like global warming because it kills
animals, and I like animals." From a child who is yet to lose all her baby teeth: "I worry about
(global warming) because I don't want to die." The newspaper also reported that parents are searching
for "productive" outlets for their eight-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears.
Marketing
Solar Panels to Fifth-Graders. Employees of the Sharp Electronics Corporation were at Joyce
Kilmer Elementary School in Mahwah, N.J., recently to teach a lesson on climate change and renewable energy.
The cartoon image of an ailing Earth — a thermometer sticking out of its mouth — was the
opening slide in their presentation.
Can a
sad polar bear make you turn off your lights? Maybe a cute polar bear can do what all the good green
intentions in the world can't: Get people to consistently conserve energy. That's what Brooks School, a North
Andover boarding school for grades 9-12, is counting on. Instead of using graphs to show students how much
energy they collectively use in each of the school's 10 dorms, a "bear-o-meter" displays the information on a
public screen — with the bear's wellbeing tied to how well students are conserving.
Save The Children (From
Global Warming Propaganda). Green schooling was surreptitiously introduced years ago when
teachers began espousing benign environmental distractions like "Earth Day." But trendy nontoxic
slogans like "reduce, reuse, recycle" eventually opened the door to the destructive propaganda of teaching
Al Gore's scientifically-challenged movie in science classes. Which soon facilitated a California
Law mandating unbalanced Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theories be included in public school curricula.
And that paved the way for today's second installment of a malignant little program cleverly crafted to
indoctrinate our impressionable youth on a chillingly massive scale.
California State Senate Approves New Global Warming
Curriculum. The bill was controversial in the Senate because it simply requires "climate
change" to be taught, without requiring balance between the positions of alarmists and skeptics. "I
find it disturbing that this mandate to teach this theory is not accompanied by a requirement that the
discussion be science-based and include a critical analysis of all sides of the subject," state Sen. Tom
McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), said during the Senate debate, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
The
Children, and the Alarmists' Strange Qualifications Game. Alarmists constantly whine that
eminent physicist Freeman Dyson and thousands of other scientists are simply unqualified (usually adding
much worse things than that) to express their skepticism on climate alarmism, and yet frightened children
who have been goaded into expressing their opinion are voices that the alarmists insist must
be heard on this topic.
Globally Warm Schools: As Global
Warming becomes an issue in people's lives, it has also become part of school's curricula. I recently learned that my
boss's son had an assignment and quiz in his Spanish class on Global Warming. In many of the questions students had to
translate sentences from Spanish to English but with a Global Warming theme. They even had to watch Al Gore's
movie, "Inconvenient Truth," which has been a part of several school courses.
Obviously a public school student.
Climate change
takes a mental toll. Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit
at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to
climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors
wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."
Letters from Sixth Grade Students Reveal Global
Warming Indoctrination. If you doubt some teachers are trying to brainwash schoolchildren with
global warming alarmism, take a look inside the sixth grade classroom of teacher Michael Steria at David A.
Brown Middle School in Wildomar, California. Twenty-five sixth graders teamed up to write eight letters
to The Heartland Institute describing what they had been taught about global warming. Steria sent the
letters to the institute in March.
Is classroom Global Warming preaching
indoctrinating the next generation? Do you know what your children are learning in school about
climate change? Have you ever looked at their textbooks? Is it education or indoctrination? How
accurate are the facts? How much is it an ideological or a political message? Is it a balanced
curriculum offering options or one imposing a singular view? How much is fear the vehicle of
indoctrination?
Do kids learn junk environmentalism in
schools? Johnny can't read, write or do math. But he may know how to save the Earth.
Johnny knows about global warming, acid rain, nuclear power, deforestation, big oil and capitalism.
Johnny knows all this because his teachers have told him so. And they got help from interest groups,
the Environmental Protection Agency and green textbooks that purport to explain these Earth-in-the-balance
issues.
Junk Science: Why do teachers so often
force-feed kids one-sided facts and theories about the world? Wouldn't education be much more stimulating
if schools focused on broad underlying debates, instead of assumed dogma? For example, over the years my
children have all gotten scary lectures on "global warming." They learn that global temperatures could
rise 5 to 10 degrees celsius in the next fifty years mostly because of burning fossil fuels.
Polar ice-caps could melt. Oceans might flood coastal cities. No wonder kids want to be tucked
in at night!
Why is Public Education Failing?
Social, political, multicultural and especially environmental issues are rampant in the new
math programs and textbooks. One such math text is blatant. Dispersed throughout
the eighth grade textbooks are short, half page blocks of text under the heading "SAVE PLANT
EARTH." One of the sections describes the benefits of recycling aluminum cans and tells
students, "how you can help." In many of these textbooks there is literally no math.
Instead there are lessons asking children to list "threats to animals," including destruction
of habitat, poisons and hunting. The book contains short lessons in multiculturalism
under the recurring heading "Cultural Kaleidoscope."
All Wet:
P.C. in the Heartland. [Scroll down] A more egregious example is Application B on the same
page, which instructs students to use what they've been taught "and other research, [to] write a letter to your
legislator arguing against the sale of DDT to Third World countries when it is banned in the U.S." This
requirement is both stupid and cruel. Malaria, which is transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, is one of
the worst scourges on the planet, particularly for the inhabitants of poor tropical countries.
Students
Urged to Focus on Their 'Carbon Footprints'. Attention, class: This is National Environmental
Education Week, a time to actively engage K-12th grade students and teachers in "an inspired week of
environmental learning" before Earth Day on April 22. … The theme of this year's Environmental
Education Week is "carbon footprints." The lessons and activities are "designed to infuse environmental
education into everyday learning."
Bill would require California's
science curriculum to cover climate change. Reading, writing and … global warming? A
Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the
science topics that all California public school students are taught. The measure, by state Sen. Joe
Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would mandate that future science textbooks approved for California public
schools include climate change.
Al Gore, the United Nations, and the Cult of Gaia (1999):
[Scroll down] The concept [of Earth worship] is also being promoted in some schools. Education analyst Eric Buehrer,
president of Gateways to Better Education, says: "The Gaia theory is another New Age idea that springs
up every so often in science curriculum. This is the idea that the Earth is a spiritual entity, that all
life on the planet is part of that entity — like cells in a global brain. For instance, I came
across an outdoor activity in which children were taught that trees had spirits we could talk to. At
the top of the student worksheet the activity was titled 'We are one with nature.'"
Alaska Teachers Indoctrinated with Misleading
Global Warming Materials. Schoolteachers across Alaska are being fed exaggerated and false global
warming alarmist materials to distribute to their students, thanks to the taxpayer-funded University of
Alaska-Fairbanks. This summer, approximately 60 teachers attended the university's Science Teacher
Education Program, during which they were given global warming propaganda that has been thoroughly rejected by
sound science.
The Global
Warming Goons Want Your Little Ones. I bet Jim Jones is tooling around hell right now green with envy over
the mind manipulation the global warming greenies are wielding upon our culture. ... Here's the rationale behind their
brainwashing our young 'uns: A lot of thinking adults (as in the multiple millions) think that the greenies are
pretty much off their rocker. Since the greenies can't have us arrested (yet), they have decided to get their
agenda going via our children, primarily through the agency of the public school system.
RI Students Must Watch 'Inconvenient
Truth' to Graduate. To receive a degree from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, students
are being forced to watch "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on global warming produced by former Vice
President Al Gore. The science class requirement has prompted one conservative student to declare
that "we should stop calling these schools 'bastions of knowledge' since they're really bastions of leftist
thought."
Gore's
Inconvenient Truth required classroom viewing? First it was his world history class. Then
he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In
total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth
shown to him by four different teachers this year. "I really don't understand why they keep showing it,"
says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used).
Public Schools are Not Accountable to
Parents. The past several decades have witnessed the systematic "dumbing down" of public
education: the curriculum got diluted with non-academic subjects and frivolous activities; proven
methods for teaching reading, writing, math, science and reasoning got replaced with unproven, inferior
methods; and objectivity got sacrificed to "political correctness" propaganda, such as socialism,
environmentalism, multiculturalism and moral relativism.
Environmental Disinformation
101. By every conceivable measure, the environment is getting better, not worse, with
time but most college professors are reluctant to acknowledge the improvement, particularly on their
own campuses.
Environmentalist Propaganda for
Kids. The Future of the Earth may be the most insidious of all because its target audience
is young people between the ages of 10 and 12, who are susceptible to big pictures, big print, and
oversimplified concepts. Young persons who have yet to grasp a significant perspective of our history can
be easily taken in by the excellent prose and attractive pictures and drawings in this book.
America's pristine myth: Next
week my daughter will go back to elementary school, and I will be faced with a choice. At some point the
curriculum will cover the environment, and she'll be taught that before Europeans settled the Americas the
Indians lived so lightly on the land that for all practical purposes the hemisphere was a wilderness. The
forests and plains, the teacher will explain, were crowded with bison, beaver, and deer; the rivers, with fish;
flights of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. The continent's few inhabitants walked beneath an endless
forest of tall trees that had never been disturbed.
"Earth Day
Every Day" proclaims the official sign for Merrill Middle
School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The school [has an] apparent emphasis
on environmental activism instead of academics. Imagine what our
kids could do and learn if every day was math day, history day, science day,
and reading and writing day?
Photo
courtesy of Jeff
Lindsay, used with permission.
Talkin' Trash: Two
new reports charge that American school children are being manipulated and frightened by a
steady stream of politically motivated educational materials that distort the facts about
environmental issues.
Saving the Planet
Without Scaring Kids to Death: Parents need facts to counter
environmental extremism in the classroom.
Colleges
Foster Radical Environmentalism. There is nothing wrong with studying ecology or how the
environment works. Thousands of students learn important scientific facts each day, which allows our
nation to make technological advances. There is a problem, however, when faculty use theories and propose
solutions that are radical and unchallenged by alternative views. Environmental studies coursework often
lends itself to this type of unanswered, radical, progressive thought, much like women's studies, peace studies
and postmodern studies.
UT professor says death is imminent. A
University of Texas professor says the Earth would be better off with 90 percent of the human population
dead. "Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine," Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests
at St. Edward's University on Friday [3/31/2006]. Pianka's words are part of what he calls
his "doomsday talk" — a 45-minute presentation outlining humanity's ecological misdeeds and
Pianka's predictions about how nature, or perhaps humans themselves, will exterminate all but a
fraction of civilization.
UTA
Scientist wants 90% of you to die horribly. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eric Pianka?
No? Well you might want to learn a bit more about him. Why? Because he reportedly
wants you to die. Specifically he wants you to die of Ebola virus. You might also be
interested to know that he is the Denton Cooley Centennial Professor of Zoology at the University
of Texas at Arlington.
Parents,
Schools Urged to Create 'Eco-Conscious' Kids: As a new school year begins, one environmental
activist group is urging parents and schools to make concern for the environment part of the younger
generation's mindset and "lifestyle." For starters, kids should use "post-consumer, recycled"
notebook paper and cedar pencils — and they should know why they're doing it.
Editor's Note:
The story above is an example of a government school being used for leftist indoctrination
instead of education. If the curriculum included more of the basics — reading,
writing and responsible citizenship — with less emphasis on environmentalist
propaganda, we would all benefit.
Paul Bunyan Meets Sierra Sue Happy
and the Democrats: The politically correct and powerful Sierra Club is having a contest for
America's schoolchildren. The idea is to give Paul Bunyan a makeover. No, what it really amounts to
is re-education camp a la the Chinese Red Guard's Cultural Revolution. The idea is to deconstruct and
remake folk heroes like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Sunbonnet Sue, Mike Fink and others by reconstructing them
into politically correct green icons.
Green zombies: Are our
schools producing green zombies? Ask any student in any grade what causes global warming; odds are that
their reply will be cars, or fossil fuels or "human activity." Take, for example, the workbook
entitled Vocabulary Workshop, published
by Holt, Rinehart and Winston for middle-school English students. Among the 29 lesson
titles, consider these:
Down to the sea with Jacques Cousteau
What is the forecast for Brazil's rain forest?
Jean of the environment
Balancing society and the environment: Global warming
Catching the sun for energy
This in an English workbook?
Group
Cries Foul Over Alleged Liberal Agenda Textbooks: "By omitting important facts and by distorting
others, these textbooks do not prepare students to think critically about important environmental issues,"
said Chris Patterson, Director of Education Research for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Among the
issues most disputed are acid rain, pollution, species and rain forests, Human population growth, and climate
change. In one instance, Patterson said each textbook gave different numbers for the remaining size of
South America's rain forest. "Glencoe says that 75 million acres of rain forest has been destroyed,
Holt says 32, Prentice Hall says 15," Patterson said. "None of them cite where they got the information,
but in fact, according to a NASA study, 7.5 million has been destroyed."
Other countries' experiences:
Indoctrination at school really works.
Children losing sleep over global warming.
Half of children between the ages of seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming and often lose
sleep over it, according to a new report. A survey of 1,150 youngsters found that one in four blamed
politicians for the problems of climate change, while one in seven said their own parents were not doing
enough to improve the environment.
Gore
film made free and convenient for schools. All Australian high school students will be conveniently
able to get their hands on a copy of the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, with the movie
to be given to schools free of charge.
In England, they take it one step further:
Every British teen to see Gore's An
Inconvenient Truth. The British government will send a copy of Al Gore's film about global
warming, An Inconvenient Truth, to every secondary school in the country, the U.K. environment minister
announced Friday [2/2/2007].
School row over Al
Gore film. Parents who claim that an award-winning film on climate change is inaccurate and
politically motivated are threatening a legal challenge over the [British] Government's decision to send
it to every secondary school.
Update:
Father
in High Court bid to stop Al Gore's 'sentimental climate mush' being shown in schools.
Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth was described in the High Court
today [9/27/2007] as containing "serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush".
The attack came as father-of-two Stewart Dimmock, a Kent school governor and a member of The New Party,
challenged the Government's decision to provide the film to every secondary school in England.
Updated again:
Schools
must warn of Gore climate film bias. Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils
Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday. The move follows a
High Court action by a father who accused the Government of 'brainwashing' children with propaganda by showing
it in the classroom.
A convenient fraud now
being exposed. Be aware that a judge this month instructed British teachers showing the film to
tell their pupils that [Al] Gore makes at least 11 false or unsupported claims. I hate to think it is
necessary to remind our own teachers to do likewise, but I fear the worst. Every school in [Australia]
has now been offered free DVDs of An Inconvenient Truth, by Paramount and Jackgreen International,
which makes money from the global warming scare. Even the Environment Protection Authority is urging
schools to show it.
Al Gore's
inconvenient judgment: An Inconvenient Truth won plaudits from the environmental lobby
and an Oscar from the film industry but was found wanting when it was scrutinised in the High Court in
London. Mr Justice Burton identified nine significant errors within the former presidential
candidate's documentary as he assessed whether it should be shown to school children.
Some Inconvenient Truths For Gore:
Al Gore's documentary on climate disaster has been ruled a work of fiction by a British judge. In legal
terms, his global warming hysteria has been assuming facts not in evidence.
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