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Florida kids will now be taught PragerU's climate denialism amid record heat
https://www.reckon.news/news/2023/08/florida-kids-will-now-be-taught-pragerus-climate-denialism-amid-record-heat.html
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Sept 2022, 2.5 million children missed school in Florida. Five schools were damaged, and three were destroyed as the category four hurricane hit the sunshine state from the west side – something that rarely happens. Over 168,000 children were kept out of the classroom for weeks, with some missing as many as 100 school days. The losses for children were huge, while scientists and environmentalists said this was an example of climate change in action. And yet, as the unwelcomed anniversary of Hurricane Ian approaches, many of Florida’s school kids - who have endured one of the hottest summers on record and have been swimming in coastal waters over 100 degrees - will now be taught that climate change is not real.
The baffling juxtaposition, which education and environmental experts claim is the equivalent of teaching children that fire doesn’t exist as it engulfs their classrooms, is being brought to Florida’s K-5 schools by the right-wing non-profit group PragerU with the explicit blessing of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s board of education. The same duo has pushed anti-progressive politics in recent months that targeted the LGBTQ community, abortion rights, gun control, Black history, book bans, and gender identity while also trying to bully Disney away from its support of liberal issues.
PragerU’s sleek and highly produced educational videos, presented in a series of cartoons, delicately infer that climate activists are like Nazis, wind and solar power pollute the earth, and that record global temperatures are merely cyclical and have nothing to do with human actions. While environmental advocates and educators work hard to show the true extent of climate change, hoping it will alter human behavior, PragerU’s arrival in one of the country’s largest public school systems is undoubtedly a major blow to the movement. Raymer Maguire, director of policy and campaigns at the Cleo Institute, a women-led environmental education and advocacy group in Florida, told Reckon that teaching climate denialism could have a detrimental impact on Florida’s students going forward.
“By teaching future generations blatant lies and propaganda and that climate denialism that is in direct contradiction to scientific fact,” he said. “We are setting up our future generations to not have the tools and the education they need to tackle what is arguably the greatest crisis that they’re going to face in their lifetime.” Maguire also noted that offering different points of view to children was perfectly reasonable, provided they were rooted in scientific fact and good faith, which he says PragerU is not doing. “What they’re doing is completely denying the nearly universally accepted scientific fact that humans burning carbon is resulting in us having the climate impact that we feel today,” he added.
A bad time for climate denial education............
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5 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
The Lies My Teacher Told Me available on Amazon.
Seriously, a lot of the problems we humans deal with are highly complex and not well understood. So we make sh-t up to quickly explain what we see (or think we see). When people dare to look at the problem more closely and question our explanation a lot of folks decide it's easier to push back than to reflect on it or accept an alternative explanation.