Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen — 23 January 2024 — 500 words/4 minutes
What not to teach in primary school: Climate change propaganda. But, in the State of New York:
“Ms. Neumeister was one of 39 elementary school teachers from across the city who participated in a four-day training session in the summer called “Integrating Climate Education in N.Y.C. Public Schools.” Its goal was to make the teachers familiar with the topic, so they can work climate change into their lesson plans.” [ source ]
And who trained Ms. Neumeister to teach climate change?
The Teachers College at Columbia University, in New York. Columbia is the same university that houses and supports Columbia School of Journalism’s climate propaganda cabal: Covering Climate Now.
Here’s their intro to the course:
“From the devastating fire on Maui, to a rare California hurricane and Canadian wildfires causing dangerous air quality across the United States, the climate crisis is seemingly impacting North Americans more than ever in 2023. And while climate change policy currently rests with older generations, educating the youngest about climate change and paths to sustainability can pave the road to improvements in decades to come.“ [ source ]
Readers here see the problem already, none of the “crisis” items were caused by Climate Change – not the fire in Maui (see the Congressional Research Service report), no hurricane hit California (Hurricane Hilary crossed into Southern California as a weakening tropical storm) and while a hot dry summer contributed to Canada’s wildfire season, the fires were not a result of climate change. (mostly lightning strikes and arson).
But apparently the program is getting great results:
“Third graders at Public School 103 in the north Bronx sat on a rug last month while their teacher, Kristy Neumeister, led a book discussion.
The book, “Rain School,” is about children who live in a rural region of Chad, a country in central Africa. Every year, their school must be rebuilt because storms wash it away.
“And what’s causing all these rains and storms and floods?” asked Ms. Neumeister.
“Carbon,” said Aiden, a serious-looking 8-year-old.”
That’s what they call education?
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Author’s Comment:
Honestly, the little picture book mentioned in the quip, “Rain School” written and illustrated by James Rumford, is very good. I liked it. The featured image is from Mr. Rumford’s book. You can download a .pdf here. You can buy a copy from any good online bookstore. It tells the story of a small village school in Chad, which consists of a single teacher – but no building. Every year, at the beginning of each school year, the children come and build a mud-brick-and-sapling shelter with a reed roof. They learn to read. Then the school-year ends, the monsoon comes and washes away the school. It is a life-affirming story.
The propaganda comes when Chad’s normal weather pattern of monsoon rains is blamed, apparently by the teacher, as CO2 driven “climate change”. And poor little innocent Aiden has her mind filled with nonsense and is taught that “carbon” — the basic element of all life on Earth — is an evil threat and is “causing all these rains and storms and floods”.
Apparently, Ms. Neumeister’s education at Columbia failed her as well.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
Rain is Caused by Carbon
Must be the new chemistry: C -> H2O
Regards,
Bob
Bob ==> Thanks for stopping by. The beautiful innocence of that little girl in the Bronx being muddied with Climate Crisis nonsense. How will she be able to learn chemistry, human physiology, and other advanced topics with that falsehood pre-biasing her mind?
She won’t be able to count beyond ten without taking her socks off, and that will be applauded by people who will tell her that in order to become a scientist, all she has to do is identify as one.
The Climate Jugend and Green Shirts just have to follow their climate preachers and stay inside the 15min cities. No need for thinking. And those who do think will be reeducated in special facilities.
I don’t recall what I learned in 1st grade (there was no pre-school or kindergarten) but I suppose we learned about colors, shapes, and letters. Maybe the words to “Row, row, row your boat.”
I doubt my teacher ( a young nun ) knew much about atoms and molecules. I’m not sure my high school teachers knew about electrons and spectral lines.
I wonder if Ms. Neumeister and the others know Carbon dioxide is more Oxygen than Carbon and that O2 can be very dangerous. Carbon not so much.
Reading, writing, comprehension and the building blocks of arithmetic.
Get the fundamentals right first.
The exact opposite to what is being brain-washed into students now-a-days.
bnice2000 said, “Reading, writing, comprehension and the building blocks of arithmetic.”
That bought back memories of the late 1950s. There were the notebooks (hard bound Composition Books?) with three lines per row (middle one was dashed), large letters and numbers on sheets pinned to the thin cork boards above the black boards, and, of course, the Dick and Jane readers. Oy vey!
Regards,
Bob
Bob ==> Ah…but once you could read! One could “go” anywhere, “see” anything, “experience” anything through books. I read volume after volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica — ruined my spelling.
I believe that oxygen is a poison that gradually kills life that depends on it. It think CO2 breathers don’t have the same problems. That’s why trees can reach 1000+ years old and oxygen breathers do well to make 100+.
Something to do with how oxygen and cells react but I’m relying on a not very good memory so could be way off the mark
Every single human being born before 1900 that was foolish enough to take deadly oxygen into their body has died.
A 100% fatality rate.
Think I could manipulate “serious looking” Aiden into stating that oxygen kills human beings?
(Granted, I am NOT a member of the teachers union, so that probably costs me at least 40 IQ points.)
And all along I thought it was the ingestion of carrots that killed all those people. Thanks for the update.
That’s what I call indoctrination…
sstrat ==> Quite right, Slim.
The road to hell paved with good intentions.
100% Inordinate amount of damage is caused by ignorant people who think they have to, just HAVE TO!, do something. They really don’t know what, but they have to something.
Rarer than hen’s teeth: a public school curriculum that presents a balanced view of the climate change controversy. Equally rare are teachers themselves who haven’t been brainwashed by climate alarmists. Rarest of all: teachers who have had extensive training and education about the entire climate issue.
Edward ==> Apparently, this young teacher (see photos at the NY Times) is herself desperately ignorant about the world around her. It frightens me to think that she is in charge of teaching eight year olds. Looking back,even as an 8-year old,I would have known that the “carbon causes rains” lesson was idiotic.
I’m a fan of various quiz shows in the UK. Whatever level they are set at , whenever a teacher is a contestant I always lose hope for the children they are teaching
How long do you think a well educated critical thinking teacher will last in that community? I doubt if he will even be able to finish the teachers course.
As I have said before… support for the AGW memes is not about education, understanding and knowledge…
… it is about ignorance and gullibility to propaganda.
bnice2000 ==>I would like to be able to go and visit that little girl’s class and explain to them what really causes rain, weather, clouds, etc. In Chad, where the Rain School story takes place, monsoon rains come every year. If they don’t come, famine results from drought.
The purpose of the propaganda is not to change peoples minds. Instead, it is designed to force people to hear, and more importantly repeat things which they know to be untrue. To be forced to utter lies is one of the most effective methods of demoralization. The lies may not necessarily be directed at the children specifically, more so at the teachers, demoralizing them so that they will be morally unable to resist indoctrinating their students.
“They learn to read. Then the school-year ends, the monsoon comes and washes away the school”
This rain is caused by carbon dioxide. Ten years ago, they didn’t have to rebuild the school because Chad was in a permanent drought. This drought was caused by …ahh … carbon dioxide.
Gary ==> Chad is in the part of Africa that sees drought and floods alternating. That is their normal climate situation. That’s why our little book, Rain School, didn’t even bother to mention it. It is normal for them. Their little mud-brick and thatched roof shelter is their school,and it is “renewable” — easily erected every year and not expected to last.
G’Day Kip,
“..easily erected every year and not expected to last.”
And that in itself is part of ‘education’ in many parts of the world.
In the mid 1960s, I worked for the Geological Survey of Nigeria in the Sahel and geologically mapped a large area to the south of Maiduguri which is seasonally on the ‘black cotton’ swamp on the western side of Lake Chad basin.
.
Gary ==> so you know well the drought/monsoon cycle.
The dissolving schoolhouse is a great (if unfortunate) metaphor for the entire climate education edifice. Big city kids with solid brick and mortar, steel and glass buildings shouldn’t have to sit through these faddish units, but there are people earning their living churning out the curriculum, lesson plans and whole books on the subject of climate alarm.
Flashy lessons peppered with references to natural disasters, full of sound and fury, cemented together by lies and dung. By the time reality washes away one facade, they’re ready with plans for a new one. Every year. Renewable! Recyclable! Sustainable!
Yes, especially since that solid, comfy school, and indeed the rest of our civilization was built on the affordable and actually really clean energy from fossil fuels.
Compare fossil fuels, especially natural gas to the soot and fire hazard from burning wood – don’t need a chimney sweep for a gas furnace. And let’s not talk about burning dung…. 😫
Because it only needs to provide shelter from the sun. So why build a more durable building that will be destroyed by termites anyway and is more expensive and needs longer to build ? Better to have a fresh start every school year.
To the engineer in me, it seems like wasted effort – unless part of the deal is teaching a new cohort of students practical building skills, which is definitely a good thing.
But eventually, even around Lake Chad, the students will need access to the internet and computers, and you wouldn’t want them to wash away.
It seems to my uninformed mind that it shouldn’t be that much extra labour to make the building waterproof/resistant – though I never experienced a monsoon.
PCMan ==> I have done a decade’s worth humanitarian work in the northern Caribbean. The problem is devastating poverty — among the people and the government at all levels.
We did a lot of work with health clinics in the countryside. The government could supply nurses and doctors (on rotation) but couldn’t find the money to build and maintain clinic buildings. Doctors Without Borders built a fine clinic building, which stood empty for 3 years as government funding to outfit it was “stolen” by the outgoing minister of health. Our group, LDS Humanitarian Services, took over the project, bought equipment and supplies, and had the clinic open and fully operating (in cooperation of the new regional Health Minister) inside of three months.
The kids in Chad build a sunshade shed — that’s all they need to learn to read and count and add and subtract. If you want to help, donating to NGOs that build schools in Africa would help. Better yet, retire and volunteer, there are NGOs that will build schools with your labor.
RE: LDS
Yesterday NPR’s “On Point” aired an interview with Terry Tempest Williams and a professor of ecology at BYU, Ben Abbott about the plight of Great Salt Lake. The interview mentioned an article Williams did for New York Times recently.
The drying up of this saline lake is an issue about which I’ve been aware but not at first hand. So I listened, and on my computer looked for the linked article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/opinion/great-salt-lake-drought-utah-climate-change.html
Williams writes informatively and, I would say, eloquently, about the lake where she grew up. Her nature writing is heavily influenced by her LDS upbringing but even more by Native American themes. She advocates for “personhood” status for the lake so authorities can be sued for mistreating her. And of course global warming is one of the lenses through which she sees all other reality. (She teaches at the Harvard Divinity School). Her article, “I am haunted by what I have seen at Great Salt Lake”, is worth reading for the drone photos alone, which feature the brilliant colors of the mineral rich waters intensifying as they concentrate in the basin.
At one point in her article she writes:
I’d like to hear your take on efforts to re-fill the GSL whose shrinkage is spawning EPA “superfund sites”, impacting bird populations, supplying half the world’s supplies of brine shrimp, and whose eponymous city is still the destination of tens of thousands of people in the next year.
Sounds like child abuse. Time to round up the people pushing this nonsense. Maybe a little jail time would make them think twice.
Richard M ==> While teaching propaganda in place of real science is bad, the teacher in this case is herself a victim of several cascading problems….when the teacher was young, her education seemingly failed to give her any sense of how weather happens — geology, earth sciences, chemistry, physiology. She graduated Teachers College but is barely educated.
The Climate Crisis crowd realizes this, she can’t teach Climate Crisis as she doesn’t really know anything about weather or climate. so they come along and fill her head with Climate crisis nonsense and leave her MORE ignorant and left to teach her students the nonsense they taught her. Meanwhile, she is bombarded by the NY Times, day after day, with false stories that make her think the propaganda must be true.
Primary school was never intended to teach this kind of stuff. You go there to learn to read, write, and calculate. The rest is higher education where the teacher knows what he is talking about (in the old days).
Being the majority women in primary teaching doesn’t help either. They are just wired different than men.
That’s quire a non sequitur.
Even if we accept that women and men do think differently, to suggest that that makes women less suited to childcare seems unsupported by the organisation of most societies throughout world history.
I don’t think he meant that – obviously. I think women might accept the party line more readily than a similarly uninformed man – you know the guy is going to be more lazy about jumping to something new that requires more work and the female is going to fight hell itself to protect the children.
But notice I said “similarly uninformed” – there’s plenty of educated women scientists, some featured here on WUWT, that have fought the green propaganda – and added to my IQ every time I read one of their articles – thank you Drs. Susan Crockford, Jennifer Marohasy, and so on!
PCman ==> Add Jo Nova, Susan Crockford, and others.
No rain. No food.
Let’s all “decarbonize”!
Gunga ==> And in Chad, this is particularly true — it tends to be droughty and then floods with the monsoons.
One can see the monsoons here:
African Monsoon | http://www.clivar.org
Unfortunately, country outlines are not shown. If you need, find another source to see where Chad is.
Chad is the RED country, right in the middle:
Some folks say that is the plan.
That’s what they’re planning. YOU are the carbon they want to reduce.
Alarmist twisted jargon is amazing. We should not let them get away with it.
Rud ==> That’s what we are fighting against — in many many fields and across many scientific topics. You have been a great contributor to the effort to set somethings straight.
Kip, many thanks. I have lost some ‘altitude’ in recent years because of personal situations, but will continue to comment and maybe even occaisionally post. You are terrific.
It is past time to get the government out of the education business, they have fouled it up enough already.
Bob ==> The activists have now gotten into the act — trying to make education into indoctrination — making sure kids think like “we” do.
You are right.
Hopefully if am still around still around l intend to donate my first snow data to the local infant school when it reaches 50 years of data (2027).
As one of the things they learn about is the changing of the seasons and climate. So will be trying to do my bit to make shore they get as least some real data rather then just climate propaganda.
taxed ==> Real data — scientifically carefully measured and recorded — if even it is is from one spot in the whole world — is and can be extremely valuable.
I can devise a demonstration of rain that doesn’t involve Carbon.
Today, in central Washington State, fog is so thick schools have been cancelled. See the region east of the blue (Longitude) line:
202401232331.jpg (1324×716) (uw.edu)
John ==> Returning fishing boats will be glad to have their radars in that fog. There was a time when you’d just have to stay well off-shore until the fog lifted.
I think Chad is on to something here – “They learn to read. Then the school-year ends, the monsoon comes and washes away the school”
Mujik ==> I’m with Paul Simon: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s wonder I can think all.”
“And what’s causing all these rains and storms and floods?” asked Ms. Neumeister.
“Carbon,” said Aiden, a serious-looking 8-year-old.”
Very good, now take your graphite pencil and write that down, young carbon-based lifeform!
johnesm ==> You’d think that having been through college and gotten a teaching degree, that the teacher would know that….
The truth is water in the atmosphere is “controlling” atmospheric concentrations of CO2. When water evaporates from the oceans, the CO2 it contained is released into the atmosphere. The more water that is evaporated, the more CO2 is released. On the other hand; when that evaporated water condenses into cold rain in clouds, it returns most of that CO2 back to the surface.
FH, please learn more about the ‘carbon cycle’.What you posit simply is not true. On several levels. Please do not pollute WUWT with your easily discredited stuff.
As a possible discrediting ‘climate science’ troll, you fail. Miserably.
Fred ==> I have to say that I do not think there is any evidence that supports such a theory. If you have any, you can post links.
Story tip – A New Business Plan to Save Electric Vehicles! – American Thinker
story tip
https://watcher.guru/news/apple-delays-release-of-electric-car-to-2028
English and math are very hierarchical subjects. To teach them properly demands recognition of such. Modern education smears that hierarchy to oblivion.
Children are taught geometry terms while they are still reciting “Dick sees Jane”. It is ludicrous, and teachibg anything at all about climate to a third grader is malpractice. These kids aren’t equipped with the vocabulary or logic skills to grasp any of it.
It can only be indoctrination, not education.
Paul ==> I didn’t mean to stir up the world’s unease about how to educate out children. It’s a topic that can cause rifts in marriages, school boards etc all the way up to the federal Dept of Education.
My luck was that I did learn to read at an early age (before kindergarten) and never stopped. I learned math by absorption and learned to do back of an envelope calculations in my head. I was chastised for these things, of course, but had the sense not to stop.
I spent all my life in professions for which I was not formally trained — instead I learned by reading books then on the job from doing doing doing.
So, my major focus, with my kids, was to see that they learned to read at a young age, and fed them all the books they could handle — bedtimes were strict, but suspended if a kid stayed up reading — they could read as late as they wanted.
I used to lay in bed late at night and read books using a flashlight.
My folks would have frowned on that, I’m sure, but they were asleep. 🙂
Global warmening of 1.5C is a hoax as it’s all UHI-
Why hot Australian cities keep laying dark heat-absorbing asphalt, and not pale ‘cool roads’ (msn.com)
White rooves and roads matter!
PS: Michael Jackson knew-
Michael Jackson Skin: Why Did Michael Jackson Turn White? | WHO Magazine
again a GREAT discussion in the comments…this is the education for us non-scientist…after being there for the Desert Storm Kuwait oil fires, flying thru the smoke and oil clouds for a few months…there is no way any person will convince me that burning fossil fuels will alter the climate…if those 8+ months of massive carbon and all the other chemicals from the raw oil burning did not significantly alter the climate…All the ICE cars in the USA are totally meaningless.
Kip, Jud, and all you others I fail to name…please keep up the dialog and in a manner us “uneducated in the climate science lingo” can follow and learn from.
Deacon ==> Thank you for the compliment. Climate Science is a huge controversy — read widely, think critically, look deep into evidence and claims.
There are a lot of good climate realist primers out there — you can read my two part series here and here.
Chad is a place of extreme climate contrast, it might have been nice for the little book mention that,
>>The kids in the story (or reading the book) ain’t told that their chopping down of saplings & trees and gathering up tall grass (burning it and overgrazing with goats) by their forefathers is what made the desert climate that they are in.
i.e. = the mud, the baking sun, the freezing cold thro January/February, the baking heat thro Jun/Jul/Aug, the sudden wind-storms & torrential cloudburst thunderstorms that destroy their school
iow: Their very first lesson, in Rumford’s book, is How To Make and Perpetuate A Desert
They are taught ‘selfishness, expectation & destruction’ from the very word ‘go’
Oddly in his book, it is still very windy and rainy when they’re building their school in September. How Western values (school starts in Sept everywhere) are imposed upon them
Not very warm in September either (Average temp at Arkenoki was 9°C) considering the clothes they’re wearing in the book. Stereotyping at its very best.
On Sept 29, 2022, at Arkenoki Chad was a thunderstorm delivering 90mm per hour.
Are kids gonna be outside building a school in that?
As attached, my little montage of one of Wunderground’s few visible/reliable stations in Chad at Arkenoki
The station is at about 1,600feet AMSL and 20⁰ North
That puts it well into The Desert.
Southern Chad is much greener – presumably that is where these kids are operating, chopping down trees so as to extend the desert. And release CO₂ from that destruction when their school crumbles.
nice
They’re not told that the harvesting of trees and grass by their ancestors prior to 6,000 years ago is what turned a rainforest into the desert they live in now.
And abruptly/permanently ended the Holocene Climate Optimum
even nicer
Much further south in Chad and in the forest (N’Djamena at 1000ft and 12° north) is another station.
January average temp there is 25°C with a monthly high of 36°C and a low of 14°C
Up in the desert at Arkenoki, January avg= 3°C with high of 15°C and a low of -7°C
Yet primary school teachers tell that “deserts are hot places”
And how many people, even big grown-up climate skeptics still believe that?
(and Illiterates that create story books for kids)
Peta ==> Chad is a large diverse and very poor country. The purpose of the book is to tell a story of kids willing to work hard and get the opportunity to learn under adverse conditions. They do the best they can and profit from it, and don’t complain that no one has built a school for them.
The book and story were subverted by the indoctrinated teacher to tell a false story to the children. Somehow, the teacher and the NY Times reporter in the classroom were pleased that the child totally misunderstood about what causes Africa’s monsoons (the rains and wind).
dya see how why The Optimum ended?
>>If Arkenoki was still rainforest, it would have similar temperatures to N’Djamena, not really all that far south
So if the entire Sahara (3 million square miles) took on that temperature profile (an increase in the average from 3°C to 25°C in January (winter) – how might that affect ‘Global Average Temps‘?
I visualise all of climate science going into meltdown, just from planting a few trees.
I saw some lovely big Beech trees recently, and they were truly lovely. Easily 12 feet diameter trunks.
They filled their space nicely, at less than 50 trees per acre
So we’d need 94,800,000,000 trees – about 10 billion
Is that really to much to ask?
** 100 billion too
phat phingers and a glacial (overhelpful) editor
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
That is exactly what is going on in our societies right now.
We are being inundated with propaganda about climate change and about everything else in life.
Be careful what you believe. It may be a lie. In fact, when it comes to climate change and politics, it probably is a lie.
It’s rainin’ diamonds?…..not on earth….but on a planet far far away?
I’ve seen claims to that effect.
It’s tantamount to child abuse.
Lying to children about climate change and scaring them half to death and making them fear for their future, is child abuse.
Teachers who tell them these lies are doing harm to these children.
A few percent extra carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere might have led to 7% more rain (extremely dubious for many reasons) which would result in about 2% higher river levels, and the kid gets taught that the disaster happened because of carbon.
I’m not looking forward to one of these kids treating me for an enlarged prostate.
Widespread alarmism like this will lead to a loss of trust in the institutions of education just as it has for science. When these 8 year olds hit 12 some will realize they have been lied to. Bring it on.
But see https://joannenova.com.au/2024/01/new-deniers-eh-one-third-of-uk-teenagers-think-climate-change-is-deliberately-exaggerated/
Soon coming to a school near you.
David ==> Thanks for the link to JoNova — I had this up yesterday.
Add up all these little wastages of education and soon you no longer have a workforce that’s capable of maintaining a first world society.
Thank goodness the military is getting fully automated.
The key lesson here is not that children are learning wrong things, its that we are all learning the wrong thing, if what we are learning is not Mandarin.
soon you no longer have a workforce that’s capable of maintaining a first world society.
I think we’re already starting to see the impacts of that.
Toyota’s chairman and former CEO, Akio Toyoda, made the point: How can EVs be the future when a billion people on Earth have no electricity?
Neo ==> And the WEF/Davos crowd thinks they should only have it when the wind blows and the sun shines. Of course, they won’t be able to afford EVs because their standard of living won’t rise until they have 24/7 electricity….
Children have limitless potential that can be washed away in seconds when you fit them with brown shirts and teach them to goose step.
There is a good report regarding Chad, here:
Saudi Aramco World : Last Lakes of the Green Sahara