Thursday, September 01, 2011

Propaganda posing as environmental literacy

Kids aren’t the only ones going back to school this week. Powerful environmental advocacy groups are joining them in the classroom. On June 21, the Maryland State Board of Education approved an “environmental literacy” graduation requirement at the behest of organizations that promote their far-left political agenda based on misinformation and anti-capitalist fervor. According to the program’s curriculum, environmental literacy means turning children into central planners. For instance, it instructs students to “*evelop a strategy for fair distribution of a limited amount of energy available within a community” and to create a “plan for the fair consumption of goods” and to “eliminate … unnecessary consumption of goods.” Maryland has not provided funding for the program, so it is very likely that the teaching materials will be provided free of charge by environmentalist groups. One likely such provider is the No Child Left Inside Coalition (NCLI), an environmentalist group that has expressed its strong support for the new curriculum. NCLI advocates “major societal change … in response to global warming” - in other words, central planning and a deindustrialization agenda based on climate alarmism. This dovetails with the Maryland curriculum’s instruction to students to “explain how human impacts threaten current global stability and, if not addressed, will irreversibly affect earth’s [sic] systems.” The only piece missing is a deadline of environmental Armageddon to be proved false in 10 years...more

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Schools have always been a battle ground for ideas and influence, usually (thinly) disguised as "corporate citizenship or philanthropy". You really think Coca-Cola distributors pay for all that signage at high schools out of the kindness of their hearts? In 1962, my social studies class has a module on forestry which basically portrayed trees as an agricultural commodity that builds communities, with lots of jobs, homes, etc. Some of it made an impression, some of it didn't. It was cool to the seven-year-old I was back then. Looks like everyone is in on the action now. Whether it has any influence on actual behavior other than "branding" (the reason Coke pays for those boards) remains to be seen.