Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Washington Post thinks Americans don’t take Climate Change seriously enough. Opinion columnist Catherine Rampell thinks we should look to the example of how German teachers educate children about Climate Change.
Take Emmy-Noether-Schule, an 800-student secondary school in east Berlin I visited recently. Educators there consider climate change so pressing that they integrate it into just about every class you can think of (including, when the instructor is so inclined, Latin). About a quarter of the content in the 10th-grade English textbook, for example, is about threats to planet Earth. That means when kids learn to use the conditional mood in English, their grammar exercises rely on sentences like this: “If we don’t do something about global warming, more polar ice will start to melt.”
Likewise, in an 11th-grade geography class dedicated entirely to sustainability, students write poetry about klimawandel (climate change). My favorite couplet, from an ode by student Hannah Carsted: “The water level rises/ The fish are in a crisis.”
I guess we can all learn something from the German example.
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In EAST Berlin, you say?? Interesting…
and yet Germany has the biggest machine in the world for extracting coal in its own country.
Hold on one moment. How German teachers educate children about Climate Change? Really? Educate?
The teachers are not educating children. The correct word is “indoctrinating” the children.
“….A story of children being schooled,
Not being educated,
Caught when they’re young,
Their minds impregnated;….
From: http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/a-story-of-apathy-a-story-of-today/
It’s amazing what supposedly thinking, beings will swallow. Over and over again.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
——————————————————————————–
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
I love that poem. The road to hell and all that.
Just watched Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. What a wonderful film about the nature of power and its corrupting influence.
I would give this student an A for rhyming, and F for making sense. Fish would certainly enjoy the additional water to populate into.
But that is Ok, nothing about global warming, green ideology, or the like has to make sense it only has to make you feel good about saving the planet, since the planet would be completely helpless without narcissistic self-serving self-righteousness.
They would eliminate mankind (with he exception of themselves and loved ones) if offered the choice. What a paradise to be living as folks did before the industrial age spoiled the planet!
In Europe, today, it is percieved as stupid/petty and even racist to automatically associate anything German with Naziism. Just saying.
Imagine associating anything that happens today in the Southern states with the fact that many people there have ancestors who used to own slaves (or used to be slaves!). It’s very similar.
In fact, Germany isn’t any worse than any other country in the industrialized West. They all compete in self-hatred, giving up their traditions and culture and replacing them with an inferior and explosive blend of exotic backwardness, and dismantling anything their forefathers have ever built up and fought for…. Nothing “German” about that.
“In Europe, today, it is percieved as stupid/petty and even racist to automatically associate anything German with Naziism. Just saying.”
No, it’s all the rage. Our government and its followers try to be as ungerman/interchangeably internationalistic/pro EU/Open Borders as possible. Wave a German Flag at a PEGIDA rally and ALL the MSM will call you a Nazi.
We have a new old word for opposition, it is Nazi.
The MSM is dying of course as a consequence. The state broadcasters are kept in a vertical position by forcefully extracting 8 bn EUR a year from the population.
Plus ça change – two generations ago it was “Heil Hitler”, now it’s “Heil Klima”. (With a stop for “Heil Mao und Fidel” in between.)
It’s no wonder that the level of indoctrination is constantly turned up: like all doctrinaire educational regimes, they note that pupils just shut their minds off as soon as the subject turns up in nauseating frequency to get it over with, and mouthe the required slogans to get passable grades. Unfortunately, that Kind of attitude tends to corrupt all other subject taught in these schools as well, from mathematics and physics to the most wishy-washy “humanistic” ones like religion, philosophy or German (known to German pupils as “laberfaecher”, blathering subjects, because they allow you to bluff your way into a good grade without the slightest effort and zero knowledge) .
KLIMAWANDEL is the perfect word or expression for what occurs naturally that affects climate, and that climate effects. I do not speak German, but a derivative called Afrikaans, in which KLIMAAT and WANDEL are instantly recognizable and translatable.
English has ‘wandered” too far from it’s Saxon roots (howls of outrage from the latin-celtic-norman-danish-angle brigades) to capture the meaning as elegantly and economically.
KLIMA – “climate” is descriptive, allowing that there is not any single climate, nor any global climate, but multiple climates of which KLIMA refers to a particular, or climate in abstract.
WANDEL – is normative, and a delightful word, which conveys the idea of the deviation from mean, and regression to mean, which is central to climate data observations.
In English, “wander” might seem to directly translate, but there is a subtlety lacking, which
“ramble” conveys then loses the basic meaning of ” wander” (in modern usage, ramble is
more descriptive of incoherence or aimlessness)
The words express “journey”, a travel, implying moving location, A to B, which implies a route
or direction, via apparently aimless deviations, “off the beaten path”
But it may equally hold true, for “wandering”, “rambling” “peregrination” and particularly for
the WANDEL, that the route is a return to origin, or nearby. The Fox leaves the hole and hunts,
wandering and rambling and returns to the same hole.
What may appear to us in observing, a clear and linear trend, may in truth just be a long and
interesting WANDEL back to our starting point.
KILMAWANDEL does not contain any of the conviction of “climate CHANGE” or of the hideous
“climate FORCING”, nor does it suggest anything global, or particular, “cooling” or “warming”
The children will mostly forget what was required of them to answer in order to pass this particular school rite of passage, but WANDEL will remain with them.
I like it, and will prefer to use KILMAWANDEL in future to discuss so called ‘climate change”
just as I dislike the terms “hiatus” or “pause” in discussing the inflection points observed in
long time series data.
Oscar,
In English, we also have “wend”, which could now be considered archaic or at least arch. It’s the source of “went” as the irregular simple pass tense of “go”. Due to that linguistic robbery, the past tense of “wend” is now the regular “wended”.
It’s fitting IMO that the Germanic root of “Wandel” may also be the source for the name of the people called Vandals, “barbarians” who sacked Rome in AD 455, thereby spawning the term “vandalism”.
Last week I heard a Deutsche Welle report on a youth conference on climate. In Europe, maybe Germany. My thoughts jumped to the Children’s Crusade. The posting by Janice Moore provided another quote on the same subject: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” Adolf H1tler
IanM
This will serve them well in the machine shops of Germany.
Those are 600 km from Berlin.
Yeah, yeah, now get to work to pay for the Greek socialist benefits package.
If you live in the USA or the UK and you don’t want your children indoctrinated by the state ‘education’ system you have the option of homeschooling. An increasing number of parents in both countries are taking advantage of that option. However, in Germany, homeschooling is illegal. Recently, a German family, deprived of the homeschooling option in their own country sought, and received, asylum in the USA. However, that was after the Obama administration objected.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2573533/German-family-fled-U-S-facing-fines-homeschooling-children-stay-U-S-Obama-administration-challenged-decision-granting-asylum.html
http://www.christian.org.uk/news/german-home-schoolers-granted-asylum-in-usa/
Note that the laws against homeschooling were introduced by the Nazis.
Ahem. Berlin has been the home of the crazies for centuries.
It’s a lot like NYC or SF in that regard, only without the stock exchanges, the trade, or Silicon Valley.
And much much more like Istanbul.
There is a certain irony in teaching the AGW doctrine at schools to students. Anyone born this century ( and slightly earlier) has never experienced global warming. The properganda education on AGW would already be lost if the internet did not exist. I point my nephew who has been indoctrinated through our universities to this web site and I say read it for two weeks and see what you think. I’ve had no response in part because many who have been indoctrinated are afraid to see the truth. I’m sure it was very similar in Germany during the reign of the Nazis.
I’m sure it was very different, as information was only accessible through state controlled broadcasters (they still exist but they have competition now). And what little counterinformation existed came from the BBC, carefully, ahem, crafted.
Is this really about Germans? It seems to me that enviro-fascists come in all nationalities, ethnicities and races.
Well about half of the people in Berlin *are* Germans, anyway.
Ethnic Berliners, BTW, are totally obedient rule obsessed people. So you tell them jump and they say how high. Comes through centuries of Prussian discipline/indoctrination/Kant/Hegel. It doesn’t help that they’re also pretty collectivist.
Agree. Even those of us living at the southern tip of Africa are endlessly exposed to climate indocrination and eco-talibanism. Because of endemic corruption, however, the “thousands” of houses that can supposedly be served by every new wind or solar project attracts less attention than how much money some politician is making from the deal. As a result I like to believe that South Africans tend to be more sceptical about the warmist doctrine than people elsewhere. A cold southern hemisphere winter and numerous power outages in spite of all the “sustainable” energy projects doesn’t help the warmist cause much either.
I was taught about the environmental crisis and resource shortages back in high school. Acid rain would destroy the remaining forests of Europe and all known oil reserves would be exhausted by the year 2000, causing a global catastrophe. All these valuable lessons helped teach me to be a skeptic, although admittedly I thought it was all nonsense back then too. But the teachers believed it all, or those who didn’t, didn’t, said nothing.
of course those Germans are so stoopid. They even give all who want college and university free tuition.
even non citizens.
But I do like their cars
Ah, a Libtard. Well, actually our universities have two classes of courses: What you would call Liberal Arts, where everyone gets a degree – which entitles you to become a waiter – and hard sciences – where the university ruthlessly sieves out 90% of applicants with ridiculously hard maths and EE theory; to not drown under the costs. I am one of the survivors; I got my degree.
“Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
Which is exactly why worrying about anything Germany is doing is pointless. How many children does Angela Merkel have? German demographics are in the toilet. And the chain was pulled a while back.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11644660/Germany-dominance-over-as-demographic-crunch-worsens.html
And that is why you see this kind of thing. “Oh, we’re not dying! It’s the earth that’s dying! And we have to save it!”
Puh, save yourselves first.
Demographics .. let’s worry about Mexico and Egypt. Mexico is reported to have perfected teacher’s unions.
Is this what you mean?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/economist-explains-why-mexico-teachers-revolting-axes
I’m just wondering what you’re referring to…
I don’t recall the exact source, but apparently a teaching job can become hereditary there.
Let’s get rid of hereditary political positions first.
Jeez, Pamela, that throws a wrench in the machine for the elite…
The Germans have a history of group-think failures. It hasn’t served them well, bless their hearts. Heed the words of Forrest Gump when he said “Stupid is as stupid does”.
We allow mythologists (Jews, Christians, Islamists etc) to indoctrinate children with unsupportable nonsense. What’s the difference?
Alan McLeod says “We allow mythologists…”
There is no “we” and nobody asked you whether I can or cannot indoctrinate my children.
“What’s the difference?”
Liberty, that’s what. USA has it, Germany does not; relatively speaking. The USA has a “First Amendment”. It makes a huge difference.
What you consider myth I consider truth; and what I consider myth you might consider truth. I won’t teach your children and you won’t teach mine. Liberty is great.
“I guess we can all learn something from the German example.”
Yes: Not to be Germans. I knew there was some reason one of my ancestors left it.
to Hannah Carsted: “The water level rises/ The fish are in a crisis.”
____
when water levels fall / the fish will strand at all.
___
new business field: strand fish sun cream. Renewable olive oils.
Renamed the Joseph-Goebles-Schule.