A Teachers’ Guide To Miseducating The Young

The national primary-school English teachers’ association has launched a climate propaganda blitz on the 5- to 14-years-olds placed in their care.

The teachers’ just-released manual spruiks intermittent wind and solar and demands an end to coal-fired electricity and fossil fuels.

As notes to the manual say:

Chapter 9 is a call for action. Without students taking personal action to mitigate climate change, there is no point to this book.”(P4)

It’s an error-ridden 174-page blueprint that quarantines kids from any acknowledgment that costly wind and solar farms must be backed up by 24-7 baseload power.

The blueprint would have kids chanting North Korean-style “an Earth-focused school or class ‘anthem’ at assemblies. (This) is a great way to build emotional attachment to the planet” (P154). The authors suggest such lyrics as:

Earth is getting warmer, oceans rising higher
Storms are growing stronger, floods and fire
We know about the dangers, know there must be changes
The future is in our hands

The blueprint is called Teaching the language of climate change science and is issued by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia (PETAA) for its 3,500 members and teachers generally.

One author is Julie Hayes, retired principal of Cowandilla Primary School, SA, which has been “a Climate Change Focus School” for the past 20 years. The co-author is Dr. Bronwyn Parkin, a literacy-linguistics specialist at Adelaide University. Both are listed as PETAA directors.

The indoctrination was poorly vetted by a 20-person academic panel. Its only card-carrying climate scientist was Professor Chris Turney of UNSW.[1] Turney’s wife, Annette, a tutor and Ph.D. student at Wollongong University, was a co-panelist, which seems a bit in-group.[2]

Turney is famous for leading the “ship of fools” expedition to the Antarctic in 2013 to spruik global warming there. The ship got stuck in the ice that wasn’t supposed to be there and the climate scientists and joy-riders had to be extricated by a series of rescue vessels at huge expense and disruption to real science down there.

The authors excuse their simplified claims on the ground that kids are too young for hard science.

But they are happy to indoctrinate kids with nonsense about climate-caused starving polar bears (see below), the (non) warming and (non) melting Antarctic,[3] the (non) drowning Pacific Islands, and (not) worse droughts and (not) worse tornados.

The book even includes earthquakes on the roll-call of warming-caused extreme weather! (P103).

The authors’ view is that training pre-schoolers as climate activists is a little premature, but they can at least be taught that climate scientists are beyond reproach. And kids can be softened up for the coming indoctrination in primary school (P155):

Action at the Preschool level: The book doesn’t suggest developing a class action plan for young children. Instead, at this influential stage, educators have the opportunity to model care for the environment, conservation of resources and respect for the work of scientists.

Spheres of influence: In the middle and upper years of primary school, the spheres of influence widen … Older students can influence others in the school, from younger students, to staff and the governing council. They can also involve parents and family in their actions. The highest year levels extend their spheres of influence to the wider community, to local shopping centres and the local council.

By Years 4-6, kids are trained to write persuasive texts to parents/carers against using petrol, a paradox in light of parents’ chauffeuring kids to and from schools creates ghastly morning and afternoon traffic jams. (p154, 160).

“Teachers’ involvement and enthusiasm signals to students that acting on climate change is important and that we are all in this together.” (P159).

Other supplied book notes re 9- to 10-year-olds:

Parents become an important audience for students as they begin to take on the scientific mantle, with growing attachment to the scientific community.

It’s another question whether parents, including power-station workers and coal miners, appreciate lectures from their teacher-indoctrinated sub-Greta offspring.

For kids 11-12yo notes say,

They begin communication with students in other parts of the world who are also advocating for the Earth.

I wonder, who are those? Greta’s acolytes or Extinction Rebellion teens?

At years 7-8,

They can take leadership roles in their school, working with students, staff and governing council to audit and reduce energy use … They may advocate for and support changes from peers, the local community, local businesses and the local council. Their voices can be shared with our political leaders. (P115)

The book provides a template letter for 13- to 14-year-olds to pester and wedge their school principals, the notional “Ms Ashwin”:

We are worried about the future and how climate change is going to impact on our lives. We see documentaries and news items [especially on the ABC – TT] that paint a bleak picture of Australia in the coming decades. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed. Instead we are determined to use Greta Thunberg as our inspiration and get together with other students to do things that really make a difference. Could we please make an appointment to speak with you about our ideas? Your support is important to us…(P166).

Presumably, they will ape Greta and decamp on school strikes.

These same kids are to write “pro-renewable tracts, make videos, write songs, report at assemblies, create works of art or engage in discussion with decision makers”. (P161).

This includes inviting local, state, or federal politicians to explain their energy policies, after which students and teachers combine to write “a follow-up letter with recommendations to the politicians” – and doubtless chiding them for any wrongthink. (P162).

While the authors are careful not to name their favored political party, only hard-line Greens politicians and the likes of Extinction Rebellion could ever make a favorable impression on PETAA-led classes.

The book’s big theme is warming causing “extreme weather”, which kids are to be harangued about from age 7. (P33-34).

The authors then write curious material like (P43), “When the weather forecast is extreme, the teacher can introduce that word to students, ‘Today we are having extreme weather.’”

Teachers are to rally the class with extra water bottles and dog bowls, by shading the vege patch, watering the plants, and promoting suitable clothing. This has been commonsense since the first settlement, if not Neolithic times, but kids are now warned that CO2 emissions are the real culprit.

The authors hew to this line despite the IPCC’s 2013 report (fine print sections) playing down climate-change attribution to weather disasters.

Taking the most obvious aspect – heatwaves – the IPCC said mildly, referring to the US, “Medium confidence: increases in more regions than decreases, but the 1930s [dust bowl] dominates longer-term trends in the USA.”[4]

The manual’s theoretical underpinning is cited as Canadian professor Maria Ojala on “hopeful transgressive learning”.

Consulting that study, one finds among the academic gobbledegook that “transgressive” means exactly what it says.

“People can transgress or disrupt deeply held and taken-for-granted norms, norms that are at the roots of oppression and unsustainability, by acting in surprising, creative and boundary-crossing ways.”

Climate hope, Ojala quotes, requires a “disruption of the stubborn neoliberal worldview that we live in the best of societies, a society that furthermore has no alternative and thereby can’t be changed.”[5].

PETAA author Julie Hayes claims to have “closely followed the science of climate change since the mid-1990s”. The booklet’s fruits include pages of yet-more nonsense about polar bear peril from climate change, disseminated by the activist group Polar Bears International.

Even the International Union for Conservation of Nature put the bears’ population in 2015 at 22,000 to 31,000 when warmists earlier had forecast them expiring from lack of ice to prowl en route to their prey. (A bear perched on an ice floe was poster-boy for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth).[6]

The book harps to kids that human-caused global warming is responsible for worse drought and bushfire intensity. The CSIRO, grilled in Parliament by Senator Matt Canavan, admitted 18 months ago that  “No studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed at this time.”

Even warmist icon Professor Andy Pitman has agreed there is no link between climate change and drought.[7]  The PETAA authors actually score an own-goal, recommending to kids a series of weather-disaster books by Jackie French and Bruce Whatley (fun reading, kids!).

The book Drought subverts PETAA’s narrative by saying, “There is no malice in a drought. It is perhaps the way the Australian bush prunes itself down to the toughest and hardiest, recycling nutrients for new growth.”

Although there is material on the needs of plants (P34-35), in the entire tract there is no mention that CO2 is a life-giving gas for plants, let alone that it is greening the planet.

I noticed only one mention of China, and certainly not its vastly increasing emissions nullifying all costly cuts of the West. This single fact illustrates why the complex, heavily politicized, and uncertain field of climate science is inappropriate for small kids’ classrooms.

Read rest at Quadrant Online