Knowledge v "Climate Activism": How Dare They!

"What happens in our schools is a very big part of shaping the future of New Zealand," Helen Clark crowed back in her day. This remains true. The state's factory schools have a captive audience. A new generation of impressionable children is served up every day, by law, to be indoctrinated in the state's chosen values. "Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination."

Some argue that the chief problem with the state's school system is that it is "inefficient." Not true. The problem is it is all too efficient: that is, it is ruthlessly efficient at delivering the government’s chosen values. And so it has – we now have several generations who are culturally safe, politically correct and unable to read a newspaper, a bus timetable or operate a simple appliance -- ‘good citizens’ of whom more than half are ‘functionally illiterate.’

Case in point: a series of tools announced by the Ministers of Education and Climate Change for students to "process their feelings of 'eco-anxiety' over climate change and to "plan their own activism." For which they will receive credits. "The new resource – Climate Change: Prepare Today, Live Well Tomorrow – is from the Ministry of Education and is aimed at Level 4 teachers teaching children aged 7-10 about climate." Part of a worldwide "mission to create an army of Greta Thunbergs" angry about "climate change" before they even have the tools firmly in their own minds to understand how climate even changes, or what is at stake for all humans on this planet if their activism were successful.

Materials created for teachers that were provided to the Guardian suggest students keep a “feelings thermometer” to track their emotions, learn how to change defeatist self-talk, and consider how their feelings could generate action and response...
    Another tool in the curriculum helps students create and carry out an action plan on a particular environmental issue – such as creating an edible garden.
    The curriculum included text, video, and advice for teachers, the education minister Chris Hipkins said in a statement.
    “It explains the role science plays in understanding climate change, aids understanding of both the response to it and its impacts – globally, nationally and locally – and explores opportunities to contribute to reducing and adapting to it impact on everyday life,” he added.

The term “climate change” is deliberately vague.

Everyone agrees with the literal meaning of the words climate and change which means some kind of religious belief that humans have a convenient dial to control storms, clouds, rain, heatwaves and the sea, that they know what exact temperature “earth” should be, that we can also measure that accurately, and that all countries agree on that level of storms and heat and sea level.

Teaching this is teaching a delusion. And yet, that's not the worst thing about this climate indoctrination. The very worst thing is that "today's schools teach students to be comfortable bandying about abstractions they don't understand and opinions they can't validate" while denying them the means of thinking through these issues for themselves when they're ready for it. It teaches them to form conclusions without understanding, and take action without real knowledge.

Climate science is complex. Incredibly so: oceanic, atmospheric, biologic, geologic and thermodynamic processes interacting to drive a complex climate system with still unknown feedback systems and tremendous regional differences across the planet. To even begin to understand those interactions takes a firm grounding in not just the basic sciences, but in all the more advanced sciences that grow out of these. And this is not even to mention assessing the likely outcomes of the solutions they are being taught (without thought) to demand.

In other words: all knowledge has a hierarchy. Inversion of this hierarchy turns children who were ready to begin learning "into passive parrots able to recite - and unable to think." Teaching conclusions about complex processes without the platform of knowledge to understand or assess how those conclusions were derived violates that hierarchy, rendering students able to repeat the propaganda those conclusions, but not able to understand how they were arrived at. They become simply Pavlovian puppets.

Educator Lisa van Damme reiterates the point:

“To say that knowledge is hierarchical means that there is a necessary order to its acquisition. Before you can learn calculus, you must learn algebra; before you can learn algebra, you must know arithmetic. This fact, that knowledge—to be real, meaningful knowledge—must be gained in a specific order is generally understood in the subject of math, but is woefully neglected in many other areas. The most abstract principles of science are taught as bolts from the blue to be memorized, with no presentation of the observations and intermediate principles that led to their discovery and that render them meaningful. Controversial political events are discussed and analysed when students do not have the knowledge of history that would make an informed, intelligent judgment possible. These rampant inversions of the hierarchy of knowledge are turning children into passive parrots able to recite abstract formulas—and unable to think. If we want our children to be truly educated, to have a vast store of crucial knowledge that they grasp deeply and independently, then education must be radically reconceived with respect for the hierarchy of knowledge.”

It's not enough in any subject to give students conclusions without the means to validate those for themselves.  But the government will be terrorising schoolchildren about imminent death and destruction from “climate change” while denied them the means to understand why, or how, or to validate those conclusions for themselves.

How dare they.

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