Teaching Climate Change, Maybe

WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL the term "climate change" was never mentioned, because, like the wheel, it hadn't been invented yet. Actually, various scientists, including Einstein, had mmentioned it throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but few paid any attention. Just for the record, Einstein was strongly in favor of it. The expression "global warming" took hold in the nineteen eighties, then morphed into "climate change" as the second millennium waned, and the third began. My teaching career was in social science, lasted well into the twenty first century, and no textbook, lesson plan, or state or local school board requirement required that I mention climate change; every time I mentioned it, which was often, I deliberately tried to scare the crap, so to speak, out of the students, thinking that so doing might slightly increase the number of people in their generation who would grow up and actually try to fight climate change. My great contribution to saving the world. I hope it works. A new monograph by journalist, researcher and writer Katie Worth, "Miseducation: How climate Change Is Taught In America" explores a topic of vital interest to all. She scanned through hundreds of textbooks, interviewed hundreds of teachers, parents, and administrators, sat in on classes in dozens of schools across America, and compiled an extensive data base. The most evident and somewhat shocking conclusion from all this was that the fossil fuel industry and conservative America have for years worked together to supress the teaching of global warming-climate change in public schools, primarily by emphasizing the economic benefits of the fossil fuel indistry, and by emphasizing the false notion that the scientific consensus remains uncertain about whether climate change exists, and if so, what its causes are. Teaching scientific reality, that climate change is human made and that it seriously threatens the future of the human race and all other life on Earth is often painted by corporate and conservative interests as mere progressive propaganda, rather than demonstrated reality. A psychological process called "preference denial" comes into play. Children of conservative climte denying parents are told at home that climate change is a lie told by liberals to justify big government, and to simply cooperate with the teacher at school, and to write down answers on tests that the teacher wants to see, such as, climate change is real. The fact that America's public education system has been and continues to be so strongly influenced by conservative politicicians and politics is reflected in local school board elections all over the country. Cimate change is neither liberal nor conservative, is very real, a clear and present danger, and should and must, for the sake of America's children and America's future, be taught honestly in America's public schools. Climate deniers can either lead, follow, or, as we say, get the hell out of the way.