Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No29
Newsletter Themes: environmentalism, teaching geography, and stolen youth
Gates of Hell, Auguste Rodin
It’s been a rather dull, sunless school holiday in Scotland, but according to UN chief António Guterres, we have entered the era of ‘global boiling’. Of course, our everyday experience and scientific understanding are often very different things, but many Scots will be forgiven for exercising a bit of scepticism regarding the idea that the entire world is approaching a boiling point. Guterres’ ‘global boiling’ announcement has very little to do with science; it was about getting the ‘optics’ right, setting a cultural and media mood. According to the chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, Guterres was searching for ‘an even more compelling and sensational wording to try and get people’s attention’. He certainly grabbed our attention, but what did we learn? For some of us, it has become clearer that there is a growing gap between how Guterres and the UN understand the world, and our own experience. We’ve noticed that government and corporate bodies, and news organisations, seem to have lost any sense of perspective on the issue of climate change.
We don’t expect SUE supporters to all agree on the climate science or crisis, but we suspect that many are concerned about the impact of this collective doom-mongering on our children. It seems that when it comes to climate issues, adults have forgotten how to fulfil their normal role in relation to children. When adults collectively throw our arms in the air and scream ‘global boiling’, is it surprising that our children express very high levels of anxiety? As adults, and parents, its time to get a grip on the environmental debate, to introduce an element of reason into the discussions at home and at school. Environmental issues that need to be addressed can and should be addressed primarily through science and engineering, politics and adult society at large. Schools should not be used as engines of change.
We need to stop telling children that we are completely powerless in the face of a climate emergency. Children are powerless – lack of power is in the very nature of childhood – but adults are not. In the past, adults normally tried to put on a brave face when confronted with problems so that children were protected from fear of events that they have no capacity to stop. Adults were expected to take responsibility for the world, not to burden children with that responsibility. Today, we seem to want to share our worst fears with our children. It’s a strange way to exercise adult responsibility, and when it happens in school it’s very rarely educationally useful.
Over the next few months, SUE would like to encourage parents to talk to their children’s schools about the teaching of environmental issues and to suggest ways in which to discuss the measures used to control and regenerate the natural world. Many parents and teachers do not believe that the ‘end of the world is nigh’ approach of Guterres and friends is truthful or helpful. Where this approach is being used, we should like schools to stop teaching this apocalyptic outlook as if it were fact.
In this week’s Substack, we kick off this important discussion on the environment and schools with an article by Alex Cameron, a father of three, SUE editorial board member and Substack producer. We are republishing a useful article Dr Alex Standish, a senior lecturer in geography education at the UCL Institute of Education, on the impact of the overheated media coverage on teachers trying to grapple with the complexities of climate change and natural disasters. Finally, we are launching a new strand in the Substack: the book review. This week, Kate Deeming, SUE board member and parent group co-ordinator, finds comfort and camaraderie in the work of Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz.
Stretching the truth on climate
Alex Cameron is a member of the SUE editorial board and producer of the Substack. He is a father of three school-aged children.
The indoctrination of children in Scottish schools has, to a large extent, been introduced by stealth. The upending of the core values of a consensual liberal education – ‘the best that has been thought and said’ – is being replaced by educational and political activists whose purpose is not education for education’s sake but a desire to reconstitute educational institutions as centres for social engineering. Whatever the perceived faults of a Western liberal education throughout history, we can surely agree with the aspiration of exposing students to the great canonical works of politics, the sciences, literature, art and their critics in an engaging and open-ended pursuit of truth and reason?
But what we are now beginning to see are the low-hanging fruits of a politically motivated and dogmatic intervention in education. Parents are being exposed to, and are beginning to react to, the negative and destructive consequences of indoctrination in schools – from the promotion of social transitioning of children [1] to the divisive teaching of so-called ‘white privilege’ [2]. The three pillars of educational indoctrination today might be classified as:
the re-racialisation of education in the form of the new ‘anti-racism’ based on critical race theory [3],
the promotion of the hyper-sexualisation of sex education [4], and
the fortification of environmental sustainability across the curriculum [5].
While both the racialisation and sexualisation of education have ignited the minds of many parents, prompting them to question and protest against the harmful effects of this kind of activism, environmental sustainability has received less scrutiny and attention from parents. Indeed, few groups critical of the sustainability agenda exist, despite the fact that it has become more entrenched in the curriculum over many decades.
That said, parents have publicly noted with horror that kids are being ‘scared witless’ [6] through the teaching, as fact, of the coming ‘environmental apocalypse’. But it is the yet-unseen consequences that really should alarm us. A new generation are being schooled in a political ideology that preaches the setting of limits on future development – both at home and abroad – in the name of ‘saving the planet’. It is, of course, a difficult question to tackle, mainly because, on the surface, who would disagree with having a conscientious attitude to the planet’s resources? But as is so often the case, things are not what they seem. To begin with, it is worth considering two of the main themes in the environmental sustainability vision: ‘settled science’ and behaviour change.
Settled science is not good science
Much is made of the notion that the ‘science is settled’ on the question of climate change. However, within this scientific milieu the notion of climate change, and what that means, is an elastic concept; it is on a spectrum that begins at the idea that the climate is indeed changing but that humanity has proven in history that it has the capacity to adapt to and harness change, to the extreme claims that humanity is facing ‘extinction’ [7] and ‘global boiling’ [8].
That there is a consensus – almost entirely – among the global political and cultural elites should be a cause for scepticism rather than acquiescence. Arguably, we have a political and cultural class that has given up on any materially transformative ideas for the advancement of society, justifying this stance with apocalyptic visions of the future and the need for material constraint. While we are constantly told that the ‘science is settled’ on the ‘climate emergency’, it is worth remembering – how could we forget – that politicians, scientists and experts can and do get things spectacularly wrong. Much of the ‘settled science’ during the Covid pandemic was motivated by a desire to strike fear into the population to control it, rather than scientific evidence [9, 10]. That there is consensus is even more reason for a critical and dissenting approach to the question. The so-called settled science has been weaponised to crush any dissent. We are all familiar with the accusation of ‘climate denier’ levelled at anyone who questions the authority of the settled science and the consensus, and yet those who are at the forefront of its promotion are not averse to stretching the truth [11, 12, 13].
Behaviour change
In a democratic society, positive and enriching change is predicated on the existence of an engaged and active public. But this is not what is happening around the question of environmental sustainability. Rather than mobilising the public around a national conversation, governments, supranational and non-governmental organisations, environmental activists, and pressure groups are bypassing the public. Rather than seeing them as agents of change, they view them more as the problem, a ‘pox on the planet’, that should be nudged, cajoled and restricted in their behaviour. The only role they see the public playing is that they must consume less, travel less and expect less. This generation are the first in modern history to be told that they will be materially worse off than their parents and grandparents – and that they should welcome it!
The environmental sustainability agenda is less about saving the planet and more about setting limits on economic and productive growth while telling the public that they should welcome impoverishment. It is worth noting that the 1%, the elites in business and our political and cultural class, will not be affected by the policies of sustainability; their living standards will be unaffected, and indeed they will consume more and continue to travel the world on private jets to attend meetings to discuss further restrictions on the lives of the mass of the population [14]. Accepting that the climate is changing is not the same as agreeing to the measures proposed that will impoverish people’s lives and values.
We mustn’t accept the extreme, though tirelessly amplified view – from Greta to the Guardian – that humanity is heading towards extinction or that the planet is ‘boiling’. Neither view is scientific, nor is it rational; indeed, it is deeply antisocial. Such a fearful and malevolent moral outlook should not be foisted on the young in school or elsewhere. We should reject the wholesale promotion of environmental sustainability in schools, because it is terrifying our children in primary schools – about an issue they are ill equipped to comprehend, never mind do anything about – and in secondary school education and beyond because it is a political intervention that promotes a culture of limits on the future and demands that the next generation become activists in the promotion of a poorer society, both materially and morally. It is anti-educational because it is closed to scrutiny and is taught as fact. No space is given to humanity’s demonstrable ability to adapt to change [15].
In Scotland, one of the drivers of the environmental sustainability agenda – alongside the Scottish government and the Educational Institute of Scotland – is RCE Scotland, a ‘United Nations University-recognised Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development’. More than just a mouthful, RCE Scotland is a collection of environmentalists who come to the question of education solely from that ideological perspective. You will read on their website that they ‘support and enable the co-facilitation and co-delivery of Learning for Sustainability (LfS) across all aspects of learning, to strengthen the understanding of LfS and to advance the practice of LfS so that it reaches its full potential across Scotland’ [16]. In other words, they are advocating that Scottish education be absorbed into a ‘global’ (read elitist) political agenda. Such third-party organisations are having a profound impact on policy, beyond both their numbers and their educational expertise. It is an existential threat to Scottish education.
This is what a sustainable future will look like for our kids if it goes ahead unchecked – an act of educational sabotage. Rather than politicising Scottish education for ideological ends, educational institutions should be resistant to politicisation, but for now, indoctrination is winning out over education.
References
1.
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AN1g4LcVlYpn8GI&id=4D910C6B39793FF1%21229&cid=4D910C6B39793FF1&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
2.
3. https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/i/101715408/schools-are-being-reracialised
4. https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/i/123462482/the-brave-new-world-of-scottish-primary-education
5. https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/p/scottish-union-for-education-newsletter-4b3#§young-people-are-concerned-about-climate-change-we-need-to-teach-hope
6. https://financialpost.com/opinion/bjorn-lomborg-suppressing-good-news-is-scaring-our-kids-witless
7. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-extinction-event-already-underway-scientists-warn
8. https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/31/global-boiling-dont-be-ridiculous/
9.
https://gbdeclaration.org/
10.
11. https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/08/what-settled-science-decades-of-research-only-widen-guesses-of-temperature-change/
12. https://www.johnstossel.com/the-fake-climate-consensus/
13. https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/09/scotlands-covid-inquiry-is-destroying-the-case-for-lockdowns/
14. https://nypost.com/2021/11/01/world-leaders-slammed-for-taking-private-planes-to-un-climate-summit/
15. https://scottishunionforeducation.substack.com/i/114371681/young-people-are-concerned-about-climate-change-we-need-to-teach-hope
16. learningforsustainabilityscotland.org/about-us/
Climate change: shrill reporting is making life harder for geography teachers
Dr Alex Standish is a senior lecturer in geography education at the UCL Institute of Education and coeditor of What Should Schools Teach: Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Knowledge (£25, UCL Press)
Engaging with contemporary issues, both here in the UK and around the world, is important for understanding the nature of a place, its interconnections, and the challenges its people face with respect to their location and environmental interactions. So how should teachers approach topics that are political in nature, and often reported in frightening terms? In 1979, writing in the context of television becoming increasingly influential in young people’s lives, American educator Neil Postman distinguished between what he called the ‘media curriculum’ and the ‘school curriculum’. He surmised that the school curriculum must take students beyond the media curriculum and ‘Make visible the prevailing biases of a culture’. He suggested that intellectual and cultural advance is made not through argument, but through argument and counterargument, since ‘The counterargument makes the deficiencies of the argument visible, and makes improvement and synthesis possible’.
In the online age, where reporting is often agenda-driven rather than committed to accuracy and neutrality, making sense of the news and getting to the truth of the matter can be highly challenging for young people and adults alike. I expect most teachers and parents would want to see schools provide opportunities for media and critical literacy in the curriculum – but what does that mean in the context of media reporting around weather and climate-related events? The recent floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh, for example, California wildfires, or heatwaves affecting Australia, Europe, China and the UK?
Apocalyptic framing
In the UK, most weather-related hazards are typically reported as evidence of climate change, and indicative of us being on track to a climate disaster induced by human greed and modern lifestyles. In 2018, the Guardian highlighted a warning from the UN that we have ‘12 years left to limit climate catastrophe’. The COP27 summit was opened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres proclaiming to the world that we’re on a ‘highway to climate hell’. There is growing evidence that young people have been (understandably) frightened by the shrill nature of media reporting, and often apocalyptic narrative framing of global warming discourse. A recent survey of the attitudes towards climate change held by 10,000 young people across 10 countries found that 76% of respondents agreed that ‘The future is frightening’. 56% thought that ‘humanity is doomed’, while 39% were ‘hesitant to have children’ of their own. Hype and scaremongering aren’t conducive to constructive discussion of how best to mitigate and live with climate change, which is why schools need to move away from lessons that present issues and hazards in simplistic and moralistic terms – such as those that entreat children to reduce their carbon footprints. Instead, they should do more to close the gap between the way climate change issues are discussed in the media, and the complex reality of climate science and human responses.
Statistically significant
One obvious authoritative source for teachers to draw upon in place of media reporting is the IPCC. In its report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, it’s stated that: ‘Globally, in many (but not all) regions with sufficient data there is medium confidence that the length or number of warm spells or heat waves has increased since the middle of the 20th century. It is likely that there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events ... in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and subregional variations in the trends’. This fits the recent pattern in Europe, with hotter summers, milder winters and a slight increase in heavy precipitation events. With warmer oceans, we can expect to see more moisture in the atmosphere as the water cycle intensifies, but precipitation won’t be evenly distributed. For other weather phenomena, such as tropical cyclones, however, the trend is less clear: ‘There is low confidence that any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust’.
Highlighting the differential regional patterns of climate change gives students a better understanding of its complexity and impacts on people and wildlife. Warming has actually had beneficial effects in some high-latitude countries, in the form of long growing seasons and milder winters, resulting in fewer deaths from cold. Conversely, the effects in mid and low latitudes are widespread and adverse – more extreme heat and heat-related deaths, increased water and food insecurity, as well as greater spread of disease via food, water and other vectors. Indeed, in the IPCC’s assessment, ‘Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems’. Quotes like this can help explain the true extent of climate change and its impacts. Yes, there’s cause for alarm – but also a recognition that much of our extreme weather is down to climate variability rather than climate change, and that humanity has a long history of dealing with it.
Environmental management
Teaching young people about the geological history of the planet, cycling between glaciations and interglacial periods over thousands and millions of years, will enable them to view recent warming in the context of past change. They should be taught about how Homo sapiens lived through the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene) and survived when temperatures were 5°C to 10°C cooler than today, while using primitive technologies and working as communities. When examining more recent history, students can study how societies have used environmental management, infrastructure projects and other technologies to reduce people’s vulnerability to extreme weather and climate. This includes drainage basin management, flood defences (rivers and sea), central heating and air conditioning, water storage and irrigation, improved transportation safety, and advances in weather forecasting and warning systems. In the 1920s, on average almost half a million people each year died from a combination of storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. As the Danish academic Bjørn Lomborg observes, thanks to human development and environmental management, this has since dropped in the 2020s to 18,000 people a year – a decrease of 96%. Even as the climate has warmed and populations have risen, fewer people are dying, and we’ve continued to increase agricultural production. Though given that thousands of people continue to experience the effects of storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts, more clearly needs to be done to improve the resilience of people and ecosystems.
Open debate
Looking at historical trends and outlining for students the progress countries have made in improving public safety, access to education and healthcare, sanitation and life expectancy, illustrates the benefits of modern societies and provides a counterbalance to the doom-mongering of the media curriculum. Finally, I would argue that teachers have a moral obligation to offer their charges hope for the future – to show them how we will live with, and manage, climate change. That means teaching students about the steps that have already been taken by countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the development of alternative energy sources – like nuclear fission and hydrogen – that can potentially produce the cheap and abundant energy modern societies require. This should be an open debate to which young people should be encouraged to contribute.
Books: Stolen Youth
Kate E. Deeming runs SUE’s Parents and Supports Group, she is also a solo mother to a P6 child, a dance artist, a child advocate and a community organiser. She has developed dance programmes with children in educational and community settings globally for three decades. Originally from Philadelphia, USA, she has been based in Glasgow for 23 years. Parents wanting to get involved with SUE at a local level should contact Kate on PSG@scottishunionforeducation.co.uk
Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz, DW Books, 2023
If you are like me and feel like you are in a constant state of WTAF (!?!?!) regarding your child and his or her life in school and beyond, then Stolen Youth is the book for you. No, you are not crazy: your instincts were right – there has been a steady assault of politically motivated content into your kid’s life which is stripping them of the very things that make childhood, well, childhood. And you are not alone.
Authors Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz, both mothers and journalists, dive deep into the ‘woke phenomena’ overtaking children’s lives. They interrogate the subjects of gender and critical race theory, climate activism and Covid lockdowns, asking vital questions about their motivations, role and efficacy. They look at how these things are in schools, libraries, the doctor’s office, and on your screens. They trace the roots of these movements, drawing parallels to other politically motivated (and ultimately violent) educational reforms in China and Russia.
Karol Markowicz emigrated from Soviet Russia when she was a child and lived happily in the liberal enclave of Brooklyn, New York, for the next two plus decades, becoming a wife, mother and journalist. When lockdown happened, she started to experience cognitive dissonance with the world around her. Why were all her ‘liberal’ neighbours taking off to the comfort of the green Hamptons while campaigning for schools to stay closed, which kept her less well-off neighbour’s children locked up?
Then came the online lessons. The undercurrent of social justice shared too many resonances with the Russia she and her family had escaped from. This awakening led her to use her journalistic skills, partnering with Mandel to write a forensic and impeccably researched book into the myriad ways in which childhood is being eradicated in America. Looking at the roots and aims of everything from Covid hysteria to gender theory, so-called ‘anti-racism’ and climate justice, she found a shared undercurrent – the aim of societal transformation at the expense of the child. In it, she makes a compelling case for our collective robbery of children’s lives and the imminent damage we are doing to not just the children, but society. Towards the end of the book, the authors provide examples of what parents can do to protect their children.
An easy (but not) read for those looking to pull the pieces together about the hard activism taking shape in children’s lives. Although told from the American lens, it unfortunately is a familiar story of how education is being directed in western societies.`
News Round-up
A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12302919/Almost-half-millennials-think-misgendering-CRIMINAL-offense-new-survey-finds.html James Gordon, Almost half of millennials think misgendering a transgender person should be a CRIMINAL offence, new survey finds. 16/07/23
https://sex-matters.org/posts/schools-and-safeguarding/why-is-the-government-getting-in-such-a-mess-over-the-schools-guidance/ Sex Matters, Why is the government getting in such a mess over the schools guidance? 19/07/23
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66448424 Pauline McLean, Edinburgh Fringe: Anything goes or cancel culture? 09/07/23
Frank Furedi, Education: Has Discipline Become A Dirty Word? 19/07/23
Law, Health and Technology Newsletter, How is Gillick protecting the innocent? Gillick exposes our most vulnerable to the ill-conceived whims of their own immaturity. 05/08/23
Malcolm Richard Clark, The Truth About Jazz. Jazz Jennings is held up as proof that affirmation of a trans identity in kids is a success. The truth is far darker. He was misled by ghoulish parents and a culture that celebrates them. 13/08/23
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23720092.schools-set-strikes-unison-warns-sustained-action/?ref=ebbn&nid=1388&u=3113c1b3a77b3e25e409aaa02c22166f&date=140823 Kathleen Nutt, Schools set for strikes as Unison warns of sustained action. 14/08/23
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-2023/asking-the-right-questions-about-race/ Inaya Folarin Iman, Asking the right questions about race. If racial disparities don’t equate to racism, then what does explain it? July 2023
https://substack.com/inbox/post/136076424 Rob Lyons, The disaster in Hawaii has been blamed on a warming world. But are there better ways to tackle such events than phasing out fossil fuels? 15/08/23
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12232799/Teachers-fear-disciplinary-action-self-identity-pupil-tells-school-Im-fox.html Mark Howarth, Now a pupil tells their teacher they identify as a FOX: Union leaders warn staff are fearing disciplinary action and schools are a ‘toxic’ environment for them. 26/06/23
https://archive.is/2023.06.27-075247/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/27/trans-patients-gender-dysphoria-younger-age/ Joe Pinkstone, Gender dysphoria emerging five years sooner than in 2017. Study reveals number of people seeking medical advice about gender identity is on the rise while their average age is decreasing. 27/06/23
https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/anger-male-stripper-booked-family-30415242 Ben Boreland, Anger as male stripper booked for ‘family-friendly’ Pride Event at Burrell Collection. 07/07/23
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