Maybe possibly
Portland schools won’t be teaching “skepticism” about climate change from now on.
In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools.
“It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”
The resolution passed Tuesday evening calls for the school district to get rid of textbooks or other materials that cast doubt on whether climate change is occurring and that the activity of human beings is responsible. The resolution also directs the superintendent and staff to develop an implementation plan for “curriculum and educational opportunities that address climate change and climate justice in all Portland Public Schools.”
Skepticism should be part of science education, but there are plenty of areas where fruitful questions and competing hypotheses can be explored without wasting limited school time on pseudo-controversies. Also, it’s better not to use materials paid for by corporations with an interest in particular conclusions.
Bill Bigelow, a former PPS teacher and current curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, a magazine devoted to education issues, worked with 350PDX and other environmental groups to present the resolution.
“A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” Bigelow says, accusing the publishing industry to bowing to pressure from fossil fuels companies. “We don’t want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry.”
In board testimony, Bigelow said PPS’ science textbooks are littered with words like might, may and could when talking about climate change.
“ ‘Carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, power plants and other sources, may contribute to global warming,’ ” he quotes Physical Science published by Pearson as saying. “This is a section that could be written by the Exxon public relations department and it’s being taught in Portland schools.”
The kids now in school are going to have to deal with climate change, so it’s only fair to give them a decent education in the subject.
Strangely there was zero controversy about this when I was in school… and that was in the South.
Of course, schools are sort of driven to that by the underfunding that goes on in most state legislatures. We could give our students better education if we didn’t rely on corporations for anything.
I still have some of that problem at the college level – not with the textbooks, but with other instructors who are afraid that a textbook that is very mainstream science will be seen as “foaming at the mouth radical” by our red state students. Everyone is running scared that even mentioning these things will get the legislature all hot and bothered and lead to them removing our funding. It’s actually all too real a possibility in a state where the state agencies are forbidden to consider global warming when discussing weather anomalies or making policies.
I do teach all the forbidden things – global warming and evolution. I hope I’ll be able to continue for a long time, because I think it’s good for the students.
It’s nice to see some good news from my home town.
Meanwhile…in Texas….
it’s better not to use materials paid for by corporations with an interest in particular conclusions. Agreed. And it’s better not to use materials paid for by well-funded environmental organisations with an interest in particular conclusions. Better stick to science I think.
What kind of “interest” though? It seems to me they’re not entirely comparable.
Is there some evidence that school text books have been paid for by “corporations with an interest in particular conclusions”? If so I haven’t seen it. OTOH environmental organisations have often voiced their interest in “decarbonization” of industrial economies. The science however, if people would only study it a little, is a lot more equivocal and a lot more complex than the “CO2 is the only cause” meme from environmentalists. The arguments are not whether burning of fossil fuels causes climate change but to what extent and what other factors such as ocean/atmosphere interactions, solar cycles, Milankovitch cycles and natural variability play a part. Also the doomsday scenarios we are all accustomed to these days are the products of computer models which are known to improperly and incompletely simulate Earth’s climate. There is much work to be done yet.