Recently, after a National Science Teacher Association conference attended by over 10,000 educators from across the nation, twenty six states, the National Research Council, and the National Academy of Sciences worked together to develop a framework for teaching science to public school grades K-12.
After navigating that highly-linked paragraph above, you're probably saying to yourself, "Big deal. How else would we draft national science education standards besides involving teachers from around the country and the academies?"
While I agree completely with the common sense and logic of that sarcastically-rhetorical question, it appears the legislatures of several states do not.
The main objection to these Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) expressed by dissenting politicians in these states is that man-made climate change will be taught as established scientific fact, rather than an ongoing debate among climate experts.
The standards “handle global warming as settled science,” State Representative Matt Teeters, a Republican from Lingle, told The Casper Star-Tribune. “There’s all kind of social implications involved in that, that I don’t think would be good for Wyoming.”
Of course the distracting lie of preserving "parental choice" is also given as an excuse.
“We question this whole idea of standards reform and the whole idea of nationalized standards,” said Amy Edmonds, policy analyst at the Wyoming Liberty Group. “We believe at the heart that it continues to take away parental choice.”
Parents have the right to raise stupid kids, didn't ya know?
But the obvious truth is that passages like the following have these fossil fuel industry-supported and supporting politicians shaking in their well-heeled boots:
...it is clear not only that human activities play a major role in climate change but also that impacts of climate change—for example, increased frequency of severe storms due to ocean warming—have begun to influence human activities. The prospect of future impacts of climate change due to further increases in atmospheric carbon is prompting consideration of how to avoid or restrict such increases.
Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming).
Global climate models are often used to understand the process of climate change because these changes are complex and can occur slowly over Earth’s history. Though the magnitudes of humans’ impacts are greater than they have ever been, so too are humans’ abilities to model, predict, and manage current and future impacts.
In other words, we're warming the planet and our climate models not only work but represent the best hope for predicting the future and informing how we should act.
BAM! Teachers deliver the climate change denier's most feared smackdown. Gotta love it.
Of course the elected shills for energy companies are going to recoil from lessons like that reaching the ears, eyes, and thoughts of future generations. You know, kinda like how they try to prevent one other scientific fact from being taught to kids, so that they can short-circuit their critical thinking skills, and brainwash them with woo in order to maintain tyrannical mind control over them. This similarity between creationist and climate change denier tactics is not coincidence. It is a symptom of the one truly debilitating societal mental disorder of which we must cure ourselves. As I've stated before, the pervasive influence of irrational religious belief is softening human brains to the point where this great, advanced society we have built, full of grand medical and technological wonders, is under constant, unnecessary threat, such as not being able to teach kids the truth about the world around us and how we affect it.
Think about how ass-backward and demented one of the first lessons of the Bible is. Knowledge is bad and makes us evil.
Jaezuz.
Fooking.
Wot.
Thah.
FOOK?!
Right off the bat, Western, monotheistic religions declare themselves the enemies of rational thought. Great. Just fucking swell that.
In stark contrast to the "morals" found in Genesis, casting knowledge (science) aside is in fact the real fall from grace.
Unless you want to plunge humans back into the Dark Ages (you know, so priests can take over society again and start animal sacrifices, executing heretics, burning witches, and all that fabulously brutal, Stone/Bronze/Iron Age stuff, like Hitchens mentions in the video of my previous post linked to above), shut up and listen to scientific consensus.
And teach it to your kids, instead of the pathetic fairy tales you're allowing to drastically damage your own failing logical faculties. You wanna continue to believe that brain rot? Fine. But your kids will be taught REALITY in our schools. Don't like it? Simple. Don't have kids, or home-school them if you do.
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