A couple more responses to the Climate Control report have appeared, of decidedly variable quality.
Left Foot Forward's take is, as you might expect the kind of thing you would expect from that less than august organ, mostly written without reference to the report at all and not really addressing anything we said in it. Author James Bloodworth has this to say for example
According to the GWPF, telling kids to “avoid polluting the world”, “recycle” and “reduce their carbon footprint” is “brainwashing” carried out with the express intention of turning children into “foot soldiers of the green movement”.
But hang on a minute. What exactly is objectionable about teaching children to safeguard the environment? If you can avoid doing so, don’t go around polluting the world – it’s hardly revolutionary advice.
One hardly knows where to start with this. For a start, we do not say that the mere saying of these things is "brainwashing". We say that saying it in every subject and repeating it throughout the child's time in school from nursery to sixth form and beyond is "brainwashing". Expecting children to repeat the mantra as revealed truth in examinations is "brainwashing". Punishing those who question it (see comments to my original post on the report) is "brainwashing".
Bloodworth seems strangely unaware that other people might have different priorities or different preferences or different ways at looking at the world. Some, for example, might feel that more carbon dioxide emissions might be a better thing, particularly as we look at the lights going out (or more likely the prices going through the roof) in the next few years. The LFF author and I might, for example, place a different value on lives of old folk threatened with freezing to death in cold winters. In fact clearly we do. Underneath it all he seems to be working on a Stern-like low discount rate, seeing problems far into the future as looming large and scary. I, in common with most of mankind, discount the future to a much greater extent. What right has Mr Bloodworth to force his discount rate on my children or me? Who does he think he is?
Similarly, Mr Bloodworth seems to think that recycling is something that children should be told to do. Why does he think anything so foolish? Even WRAP, the government's official advisory body on recycling, says that we should not always recycle because recycling sometimes uses more resources than disposal. If children were told to recycle when economically sensible I would have no problem with it. Teaching it as though it were a self-explanatory "good thing" is unscientific ignorance of the highest order.
In fact just what you'd expect from Left Foot Forward.
A somewhat better critique comes from Bill Scott, who is, I understand, the president of the National Association for Environmental Education. Prof Scott talks about the existence of tendentious material in all aspects of the curriculum and speaks of teachers' ability to sift through it. This may well be right, but this is not going to help when the tendentiousness appears in exam papers.
It's also worth pointing out that we were quite careful not to overstate what we had said, and were clear that we were presenting evidence of a problem and could not speak to their prevalence. However, Prof Scott takes us to task for implying that climate related activism was "always proselytising", and asks us if pester power is used by many schools to change parents' behaviour, something he agrees is inappropriate. In the face of our clear statement that we hadn't done this - I imagine such a project is far beyond the meagre resources of GWPF - this seems just a little unreasonable.
But at the end of the day, Prof Scott seems to agree with the conclusion of our report; we need to know much more about what schools are teaching about the environment. For that I, and I'm sure John Shade too, are grateful.