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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I’m a bit confused here as I am an historian. Mind you I suspect I have been force fed too, being British. I didn’t know the KGB existed during the Zsar’s reign that ended in 1917.
Some German’s including Hitler thought Germany never surrendered in 1918 and were so heavily penalized that they went broke very quickly (and didn’t end paying off the debt until 2010 I think). Rothchild’s Jewish owned bank bankrolled the allies in WW1 and bought the American’s intervention. In WW1 Rothchilds had an understanding from Baldwin, that as Britain had the Palestine mandate that they would allow the formation of Israel. Baldwin did not honor that agreement. The problem with Hitler is he did not understand WWI started as a war of attrition. But towards the end, the British Navy blockaded German supply lines, and although it was true no foreign enemy entered German territory, they were on the edge of starving their population and running short of supplies. Armistice was in their favor, unfortunately they ended up on the loosing side. However, in my view Germans can be very naive when it suits them. And let’s face it, they are continually being reminded in movies etc., of the Holocaust.
bushbunny
Stalin’s KGB (expanded from Lenin’s NKVD, and before that the revolution’s guards) was a direct follow to the czars’ hundreds of years of slavery (serfdom) and enforced civil terror internal to the Russian/Ukrainian/Georgian/etc/etc/etc state dictatorship. St Petersburg was built with slave labor in the marshes of the Baltic. Roads, canals, dams, and cities were made by slave-labor since the Dark Ages out there.
The KGB/NKVD/tsar state police used the same buildings, the same prisons, the same rifles and the same Siberian gold and steel mines to kill the decendents of the same people driven there hundreds of years before. It is no wonder that the Russian people (as a general mass) are more docile, accept dictatorial rule more readily than even the socialist Europeans: They have been bred that way for 1200 years. Any who complained were taken, robbed, enslaved, sent to Siberia, then killed. At least in Europe, those who wanted to fight dictators (church or state or kings or Mongols or Huns or Vandals or Franks or Vikings) could leave, could go to other lands (conquering those people) or could leave to America, South Africa, Australia, Canada, South America …
If you believe in evolution, Europe represents those who refused to evolve: They accepted their state control.
Russia and China (coldly and brutally summarized) represents that population group who remained alive by submitting to authority (or by becoming that authority – such as the Chinese bureaucrats who deliberately changed nothing for thousands of years of stagnant civilization), and thus who are bred for slavery and domination by others.
America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Brasil and the like represent that population group who left oppression, left authority, rejected state control (at least initially) and faced extreme hardship to fight for the right to resist state authority. They chose difficulties but freedom, and those descendents (initially) continued those general genetic traits.
Until recently at least – when the docile easy life of city-supported state-mandated controls and programs allowed those who choose to stay in cities under government control to again dominate the rest.