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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (31933)	5/8/2000 11:07:00 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 63513

OT Educational Fact or Environmental Activism? By Justin Torres CNS Senior Staff Writer 08 May, 2000 (CNSNews.com) - 30 years after the debut of Earth Day, American students are learning more every day about the environment - but are they learning the right things? Government agencies, activist groups, and science foundations have created hundreds of programs and courses designed to teach students about the environment. Some of those programs merely present quick facts to help everyone save energy or help the environment. They include turning off lights or participating in recycling programs. Critics, however, charge that some of those programs stake out ideological opinions on subjects under scientific or political debate, such as global warming. Scott Blandish, an environmental science teacher in suburban Spokane, WA, who has written extensively on the politicization of environmental curricula, said many environmental science courses are biased toward what he called "radical interpretations of environmental data." "Kids are being terrorized in school every day with environmental nightmare stories about global warming, rising seas, desertification, killer smog," Blandish told CNSNews.com. "They're not being given facts, they're being indoctrinated." Blandish pointed to the recent ABC News report Planet Earth 2000 - which Earth Day organizers told CNSNews.com may be distributed to schools nationwide - as an example of the tilted environmental lessons children are being taught in school. The ABC program included such assertions as, "The last decade was the hottest 10-year span since we began keeping records in the late 19th century." Clearly, the producers, reporter Elizabeth Vargas, and narrator Leonardo DiCaprio accepted global warming as fact, said Blandish. There is a significant body of evidence to dispute global warming claims. Last year, for example, a report in the journal Science found that while the ice shelves of Antarctica are receding at the rate of 400 feet per year, the shrinking has gone on for 7,000 to 8,000 years - far too long to have been caused by factors such as industrial emissions. "Collapse appears to be part of an ongoing natural cycle, probably caused by a rising sea level initiated by the melting of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets at the end of the last ice age," said Dr. Howard Conway, head of the team of geophysicists from the University of Washington and the University of Maine that conducted the study. Kathleen deBettencourt, executive director of the Environmental Literacy Councilsays that politicization isn't the worst problem of environmental education in the U.S. Instead, she says, it's the way environmental science has replaced the teaching of basic scientific principles. "A lot of the material that's out there emphasizes environmental problems rather than basic science. For example, on the topic of acid rain, students aren't learning about the H20 cycle or the pH scale," deBettencourt told CNSNews.com. "Environmental science should be integrated with the core science curriculum." The ELC was formed to address precisely those concerns, and its website directs teachers and students to position papers and scientific resources on both sides of the environmental debate. There's some evidence to back up deBettencourt's claims. A recent Harvard University study found that more American high school students take environmental science classes that stress potential environmental calamities, than take basic courses such as chemistry or biology. The most important thing teachers can do in approaching politically-sensitive topics, says deBettencourt, is "know the sources. . . There's a range of opinions about environmental topics, and teachers and students need to evaluate those opinions for what they're worth." cnsnews.com\Enviro\archive\ENV20000508a.html