Fifteen years ago, on this day, April 9, 2008, a US student saw that his text books were full of crap about climate change….
Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and experts say the teen’s criticism is well-founded….
LaClair said he was particularly upset about the book’s treatment of global warming. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently heard about LaClair’s concerns and has lent him some support.
Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book’s discussion on global warming contained “a large number of clearly erroneous statements” that give students “the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain.”
The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that “science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all.”
Student sees political bias in high school text https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24018762
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 387.3ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
The US has seen a particularly strong and virulent business obsession with schools for decades, not just back to the Powell memorandum, but back to the early days of the twentieth century (and earlier!). One good book on this was Alex Carey “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
What I think we can learn from this
Hegemony is a thing. Capture young minds, miseducate them, undereducate them and the battle is largely won… (Clears throat because about to shout) – THEY WANT US TO BE STUPID BECAUSE STUPID PEOPLE ARE EASIER TO CONTROL AND MISLEAD.
What happened next
The war on the public mind continues. It has to.
See also this from 22nd December 2022- College Biology Textbooks Make Little Mention of Climate Change, Study Shows https://e360.yale.edu/digest/climate-change-college-textbooks
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.