A post by Maynard
Wow. Here’s a macabre bit of trivia that caught my eye. This is anecdotal but sadly representative of a bigger disaster.
Twenty-six fourth-grade students at a Rhode Island elementary school (one kid for each letter of the alphabet) were honored by this page on the official state website for their artistic renditions of frightened, whining children. Twenty-six little drawings of sick and dying children; the victims of common everyday man-made eco-catastrophes such as factories and power plants.
Seems to me this exercise is really a form of child abuse. The teachers who perpetrated this travesty should be fired instead of paraded. They’re telling kids to be afraid and to cry. It’s apt that one of the selected examples above portrays a “Limp Lucas”. That’s what we’re becoming.
We all understand the need to be good stewards of the planet. But this fear-mongering indoctrination is an insane assault upon gullible young minds. We live longer than we ever did, and most of our health issues are self-inflicted wounds. In this great and free land, we are masters of our own destiny, and not a sorry collection of petulant victims. Tell the kids to go easy on the garbage food and jog around the block every now and then, and shut up with this egregious nonsense.
Could someone tell me how this sort of brainwashing is any different than what we see in the Iranian death cult videos out on the web?
Asinine Assignment
Effete Education
Treacherous Teacher
They spent my entire childhood trying to frighten me into thinking that I was about to be nuked at any moment. I remember how they ramped it up when Reagan got elected. Every other TV movie was about a nuclear holocaust and every Sci-Fi show took place post nuclear holocaust.
My fifth grade son was assigned to write a poem on global warming. It was a pretty good poem, from a poetry standpoint, but the subject matter was flawed. That had to be the most interesting discussion we have ever had. I had to compliment his poetic style, while explaining to him the inaccuacies of the ides.
It seems he understands now, but it drives me nuts that I must constantly refute what is taught in school. I don’t mind helping with the math and the spelling, that is my job as a parent, but when I have to teach simple scientific method so that my sons understand that human causation is over hyped, well, I find that to be a failure on the part of the education system.
No, I am not just whining about it either, I get out there and let others know, I get myself published in the local papers, and I am vocal at the school board, involvement is the only way to effect change.
Yes, and I think this has been going on for some time.
I remember in Junior High School videos about how the world population was out of control and billions were going to die unless the WE have less children.
There was another one about the growing wealth disparity and it showed cartoon characters that used machine guns to defend their property-like in Omega Man.
Much as I would like to be outraged, this is nothing new.
When I was in the 5th or 6th grade (and I’m 45 now) we had an assignment in my government school to create a poster about pollution.
I drew a neat one about the “Smog Monster” from Godzilla.
That year there was an entire science fair project category about pollution and other made up scare stuff.
I forgot about that nonsense just as quickly.
Even at that age, I thought that if everyone would just switch to nuclear power the smoggy stuff would go away.
Then Jimmy Carter came along and decided to junk nuclear energy and make trillionaires out of terrorists. But I digress.
In all, this was a stupid exercise by a bunch of whiny idealistic government teachers and will by and large be forgotten by the brighter students while the duller ones will continue on in their indoctrination.
By the way, when my 12 year old asks about this sort of thing, I make it a point to talk to him about it. Without prompting from me, he thinks it’s bunk too.
Remember when appealing to the child’s sense of responsibility was enough. What ever happened to the simple “Give a Hoot, Don’t pollute.”
Opps forgot…does that mean its bad to teach my kids that if they fail to wash behind their ears their heads will fall off?
As a high school teacher of mathematics and science I want all of your readers to understand that this Rhode Island elementary school “teacher” is not representative of all of us. Most of my colleagues do not condone politicizing students (although, I am sad to say, some do). We are supposed to teach children how to think, not how to recite propaganda.
My 10 year old was sullen and jumpy on the ride home from school…turns out, a classmate had gotten so upset during the ‘global warming’ discussion (hearing that water would rise and cover the earth!!!!) that he had an asthma attack. This sort of teaching is child abuse. Kid and I had a talk about scientific evidence and stupid adults. She will be fine and listens to Howie Carr with me too – but why did we have to endure this?
Mwalimu Daudi,
we need allot more teachers like you.
Some of these pictures are really funny like “Zonal Zack”. He looks like he was at a weekend rave and had too much ectasy.
I would have had my kid do a realistic whiny kid – “Fatty Phil”, who sits on a couch with a PlayStation controller in his hand, or “Spoiled Sara”, who forces her parents to spend thousands of dollars for a birthday party on MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16”.
I mean, let’s be real, peeps.
Unfortunately this has been going on for decades. I can remember when I was in 5th grade (I am now 37) we were shown a film in class about how our pollution was destroying the Earth, laying waste to the land, etc., and it made horrific predictions about the future if we didn’t reduce the bad things we were doing. When I was about 7 years old (in the 1970s) I remember seeing a movie in the theater that also claimed we were destroying the Earth, and that someday the whole Earth might catch on fire. No joke. That was the previous generation’s “An Inconvenient Truth”.
When I was in my 20s I reflected on the fact that our environment was getting better, not worse, and that the world’s environment had not gone to hell in a handbasket within the timeframe that was predicted years ago. I realized what I had been told was a lie.
What bugs me is anytime I or someone else comes out saying that things are not as bad as some believe on this front, people like me get accused of endorsing further pollution and increasing our waste. Quite the opposite. I love efficiency, especially when it’s affordable. To me, waste is a measure of efficiency. If you’re producing a lot of it, you’re doing something that’s inefficient, and you’re losing out on value. I recycle, and take walks when I can instead of using the car. Some waste is unavoidable. Look at our own bodies. We produce waste in a few ways that I won’t go into. 🙂 When it comes to our machinery and processes it can be a positive exercise to try and figure out how to reduce the wastefulness of it. You can learn a lot.
There are times when our society as a whole gets worried and depressed. It’s during these times when we have a tendency to believe all sorts of scary stories. The 1970s was such a time, and it appears to me we’ve been going through a time like that again during this decade.
Michael Crichton said on Charlie Rose about a month ago that people these days are given to catastrophism. He said he’s tried an experiment at cocktail parties. He’s tried making small talk by saying things like, “Things are really bad.” He noticed that others in the room gravitated towards him, agreeing passionately with this sentiment. At a different party he tried saying, “Things are actually pretty good.” He noticed quite a different response. He said people would turn away, and even get angry at him. His conclusion was people don’t want to hear that things are going well, even if it’s the truth. Hence, the catastrophic predictions of global warming theory fit right into this mentality.