Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Is Climate Indoctrination Coming to NJ Government Schools?


I have long observed that Environmentalist ideology has been snuck into our schools. Now the wife of Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy wants to make it official: She proposes to mandate a course on climate change in NJ’s grade schools. Does anyone actually believe that an administration that belongs to a party that has embedded climate catastrophism into its national political platform will formulate an objective course on the subject of climate? Just isolating climate change as an independent course is bias. Anyway, here are some excerpts from Everyone’s talking about climate change. Now, New Jersey’s first lady wants that conversation to happen in every class, too by Devna Bose. You decide: 

As young people around the world are taking to the streets to show their concern about climate change, New Jersey’s first lady wants them to engage on the issue in school, too.

Tammy Murphy, the wife of N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy, is pushing for climate change to be written into the state’s official academic standards, which outline what students should learn in each grade. Murphy, who is a longtime environmental advocate, said in an interview she was inspired by seeing students’ reaction to the activism spurred by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.

“I think students are yearning for this,” Murphy said. “The level of enthusiasm these kids have — they’re super excited about what they’re doing and learning. We are educating the future generation of leaders.”

Environmental justice advocate and former Newark school board member Kim Gaddy said she hoped Murphy would tap the expertise of locals in designing climate change curriculum.

“It’s a great first step in trying to engage and inform students,” Gaddy said. “Climate change is the next crisis that, unfortunately, our youth is going to be faced with.”

Yes, that Greta Thunberg, the ranting 16-year old sociopath who demands that the world’s governments put aside all other concerns, including freedom and prosperity, to “do something” about climate change. Yes, those demonstrators, the climate strike children who are taking to the streets rather than stay in school to demand an end to all reliable affordable energy, if not capitalism itself, to save the climate from human progress.

If the climate change curriculum starts with the premise that human-caused climate change is a crisis that requires the subordination of every other human concern to the goal of avoiding a planetary catastrophe, then the debate is over. It is the end of objectivity. It is the explicit expulsion from the schools of education, in favor of Soviet-style indoctrination.

I posted these comments, slightly edited for clarity: 

“Climate change” is obviously about political indoctrination, not education. Proof of political motives? Gaddy’s use of catchphrases like “climate change crisis” and “environmental justice”. The exalting of Greta Thunberg and her biased “climate strike” ilk as inspiration. Murphy as “a longtime environmental advocate,” which means anti-fossil fuels, anti-nuclear, nature over human well being.

“Climate crisis” is a political tactic for a totalitarian socialist agenda, as activists repeatedly tell us. Thunberg’s emotional authoritarian rant against freedom and progress is the new face of the anti-capitalist, energy starvation, statist Environmentalist movement that demonizes any dissenter as a “climate denier.” 

In a real classroom, a subject is the means to an end, which is to give kids the mental tools of objective evaluation so they can assess the facts and draw conclusions based on proper hierarchy and context. It’s about proper thinking methods. Education is about teaching kids how to think, not telling them what to think. 

In the current environment, climate change is the last subject that should be “taught” in schools. Its politicization has foreclosed almost any possibility of intelligent discussion on the subject. Murphy wants kids to “make well-reasoned arguments based on the evidence.” Then she admits that her “vision” “aligns with her husband’s clean energy push”; i.e. his political agenda. Whose “evidence” will the kids be given? Will Murphy’s scheme give “deniers” the prominent place in the classroom curriculum that the children deserve to consider? Government schools are by their nature political institutions. A climate change curricula would only double down on politicization. 

Climate change, objectively framed, is an important subject—too important to be “written into the state’s official academic standards” for young children. Climate change is a subject for adults with ample life experience, including experience observing the political process. It’s not for children. Thunberg climate hysteria has no place in the k-12 classroom. That would be educational malpractice. Teach kids how to think. Later, as adults, they’ll be equipped to do their own research and make their own conclusions about climate.

Kim Gaddy is half right. “Our youth” will have a “next crisis” to deal with. But it won’t be climate change. If Gaddy and her Thunberg fanatics get their way, the crisis our “future generation of leaders” will have to deal with will be a return to the days when humans had to face the ever-present climate dangers without a modern, advanced, progressive energy-driven free industrial economy. 

Related Reading:












Related Listening:

What climate protesters really want | Don Watkins and Steffen Henne

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