Breaking today in the science, economic and international press comes news that leaked documents of the Heartland Institute, (a libertarian oriented think-tank) show startling evidence of an intentional campaign to keep climate science out of our children’s schools.
The documents first unveiled by Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog, offer glimpses into not only who the funders are of these efforts, (such as the Koch Foundation and other mysterious anonymous donors) but also offers this troubling revelation about strategy in keeping this topical issue out of our science classes altogether.
“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.” [Emphasis added]
Source: The Economist
Given Texas history as being the national epicenter for education content debates when it comes time to select school textbooks, no doubt we should expect some of this here. Assuming we have not already.
In 2009 a late decision from the Texas State School Board on textbook standards regarding environmental systems (biology and related subjects) already began introducing this skepticism. As the Washington Monthly reported the incident:
Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.
Source: Washington Monthly