CLIMATE CHANGE ON THE CURRICULUM: TEACHING OR PREACHING?

[Music] thank you welcome to this lunchtime session entitled climate change on the curriculum teaching or preaching my name is Harley Richardson I'll be your chair for this discussion I write about the history of education and I'm a member of the Academy of ideas education Forum which is supporting today's strand of Education debates in this room now this discussion was prompted by the dfe's announcement back in April of a new Natural History GCSE as part of abrasive initiatives relating to sustainability and climate change now the new subject which will be taught from 2025 will enable young people too I quote explore the World by learning about organisms and environments environmental and sustainability issues and gain a deeper knowledge of the natural world around them some have done this the climate change GCSE and as the dfe's policy paper explains the GCSE unrelated initiatives will support the delivery of the government's 25-year environment plan and Net Zero strategy so today's topic is not the details of the GCSE which are yet to be published we're here to consider a question raised by this new subject what is the proper place of an issue like climate change in the curriculum particular is it the role of schools to support government policies such as sustainability and Net Zero as the dfe's policy paper acknowledges there are different views and opinions and different solutions about how climate change can be addressed so where does that leave teachers parents or students who don't think say that Net Zero is the way forward if you're at the climate change discussion this morning downstairs you may have heard some other ideas about what the way forward might be always the new GCSE actually a long overdue addition to the curriculum which some have argued is has been too matter of fact in its handling of climate change the debate is over there's an urgent client a global crisis the normal rules don't apply and education is a vital element in the fight to save the planet it is said some have claimed that new GSS GCSE doesn't go far enough and climate change should be Central to all teaching so is this teaching or preaching and if it's preaching is that just what the situation demands so you know the format I think our panel today have five minutes each to give their perspectives on these questions get the discussion started I will introduce them in the order they will speak can't begin to cover everything on their CVS so please do look up their biographies on the festival website firstly on my far left is uh Dr Alex Standish an associate professor of geography education at University College London and co-editor of the book what should schools teach disciplines subjects and the pursuit of Truth next to my direct left is Barry Darcy a parent and environmental environmental entrepreneur who recently chose not to pursue a career as a teacher because she didn't feel she could teach a curriculum with all the important bits taken out and last but not least on my right is Claire page a designer by trade who is speaking here as a parent pursuing three formal complaints about indoctrination at her Children's School so I'm looking forward to hearing what they all have to say and then what you have to say in response it's just it's a short session so let's crack on over to you Alex thank you Holly um so I mean my first point um so picking up on what Nadeem zahawi said that education is an important weapon in the fight against climate change uh you know from a Secretary of State for education I mean that's appalling okay you know education shouldn't be a weapon in anything um and uh because education has its own purpose um so but I think I think that that attitude uh expresses not just uh you know his view but I think a lot of people when they say there should be more climate change on the curriculum um take that view that that that's what education should be for it should be instrumentalized in the in the purpose of a bigger political issue so it's not just um Secretary of State for education but teachers and Industrial teacher education where I work non-governmental organizations many people think that that policy that that um issue should drive of the curriculum which which I think is a mistake because it it instrumentalizes children for a political purpose it treats them more as objects for someone else's political project you know which is not which is not an educational aim okay when we if we want to educate children we need to start with educational questions which are you know how do we how do we prepare um children to become autonomous individuals who can think for themselves and can engage with any political issue rather than be just sort of driven uh you know the curriculum be driven by um by this particular political issue issues will come and go but we need our young people who are educated in the world um so that they can engage with any issues the next issue that comes along um and be prepared and think about how to address that um so my second point I think is that the I don't know I'd call it sort of um I mean maybe there is some preaching but I think a lot of a lot of schools uh you know do take a critical view but while I so well I think I think the science of climate change is maybe taught um I'll stick my neck out and say maybe maybe talk fairly well uh taught geography sources in science um but I think the response to it the interpretation of the science and the response to it is fairly one-dimensional so I don't think it's necessarily that um teachers are deliberately preaching although um some some of them maybe are some of the more activist ones but I think um you know the response is largely one-dimensional and it and it probably does reinforce an environmentalist agenda so just State last week in my my daughter's school they they announced a new Initiative for Eco uniforms okay Eco uniforms which obviously are more environment environmentally friendly you know and so it's like on face value of your children you see that that sounds like a positive thing why would you be against Eco uniforms but I think that that's the problem is it's just as it's taught right very unquistically and you just get this environmental perspective instead of saying um well you know how could we um you know what what are the different responses how could we address this how can we address climate change differently rather than just changing our environmental behaviors and all um you know following uh you know environmentalist logic so instead you know could we have a more human-centered response which says that you know what we've we've encountered many environmental problems in the past um such as soil fertility uh air and water pollution hole in the ozone layer historically we've had lots of environmental problems but we've you know we've we've uh We've overcome or we've improved um in response to this so a human-centered approach is one where we where we look at humans not as part of the problem that is us that needs to change but that we're part of the solution okay and we can what what is it we can do and to uh to address climate change and and live with it so what I'd advocate for is uh you know having a grown-up discussion with children where um we um we have a grown-up discussion with them about how we're going to live with climates uh with climate change and global warming and what are the long-term changes we need to make to energy production and economy and our economies to address a greenhouse gas emissions so I think we need to we need to broaden this discussion and give give exposed children to different different ideas different points of view um as we're I guess we're trying to do here today thanks so much Alex uh over to you Barry um can I start with a question teachers should always understand prior knowledge In Their audience so can I say I'm the bleeding heart liberal candidate on the panel um any other bleeding heart liberals in here yay yay three of you brilliant great good good to see you my friends right so my perspective is that this question is about the curriculum but really you can't talk about curriculum without also talking about pedagogy so how you teach any subject and in this case we're talking about climate change we can broadly equate that to geography so um Alex and I have a very different opinion on this and essentially that was why I couldn't go on to be a geography teacher after doing my pgce and getting a distinction so presumably I should have been good at that um because what I found on my degree was that of my PGC I should say um was that we tried to teach topics like climate change from the bottom up so we assumed that if you teach everything there is to know in geography from rivers to weather to um deforestation Etc that at some level you put all those building blocks in place and kids will get that bigger picture now for me I think it's actually are quite a lot simpler than that I think we just need to talk to kids because obviously I think climate change is important and I think it's going to have significant effects on all of us in lots of unpredictable ways so I think we can keep it fairly simple I can think we can talk about the causes and I think we can talk about the effects now that might be teaching a range so from sort of high-tech emergent Solutions like carbon capture and nuclear as a proven technology I might not like it but I think we should teach it right the way through to intermediate Technologies like Paris is a 15-minute City or low-tech Solutions like individual action and also Community Action so how individuals organize together at different levels different scales so I think this debate is really asking us to talk about the question of responses so I think causes and effects fairly straightforward I think responses is where it gets tricky and particularly when you're talking about the degree to which you can engage kids in discussions about individual action now I think we must talk about individual action for four reasons first of all individual action if you don't talk about it you're negligent educationally because it is one of the levers that we've got to deal with climate change secondly if you don't talk about individual action you're not talking about the root causes of climate change because we know that it is a cumulative effect of all of our individual footprints I think if you consider school to be about preparedness for life and Alex and I may differ on that um then I think you have to make sure that in that time at school kids have the equipment that they need to become consumers and voters but I would definitely put that under the umbrella of having the knowledge they need to make their own choices I do not want to make those choices for them but I think they need to have that broad range of opinions and my fourth reason why you must teach individual action is because if you don't you're fueling Eco anxiety Eco anxiety is a completely rational response to um the threat that we currently face and that we don't currently have a path to get to 1.5 so that's a rational response leaving kids with just the cause and effect without giving them the agency that comes with um talking about um the ways that they can make a difference I think is is quite difficult psychologically for those kids so do I think that talking about individual action is susceptible to teachers manipulating children for sure of course it is do I think that we can solve that yes absolutely we can if we think about um different ways that we can instruct teachers through teacher training and training to make sure that they can make those informed decisions and make sure that a wide range of perspectives are put forward but that means perspectives that are not palatable to you and not palatable to me too because it's really about putting tolerance and free free speech at the top of the agenda lots more I could say but I'll leave it there thank you very much everyone's coming in under the times the yellow card is doing its business um over to you Claire okay yes I'm yes thank you um I um I know nothing about climate change um but I'm I'm going to try and claim that that that still qualifies me to talk on this panel because I'd like to represent in a way the kids and parents who are coming to this naive and I think that's a really important place to think about uh thing to think about when you're considering School subjects which is that we begin from first principles and we have an understanding that we are training the innocent mind and that's a really great responsibility and a privilege and I think a teacher's job in that case is to leave a mind enriched with facts and ideas and hopefully help kids know the difference between the two but to also leave a mind absolutely as open as they found it and open to New Perspectives and new facts that will come along so that's my premise um I hope I've got some expertise that are useful to the discussion because I've also um I've spent time thinking about education law because I've made a couple of school complaints about politicized teaching in my at school it was a different subject but the same principles apply and I just want to mention what I learned about that so the Education Act has two really valuable Clauses in it they're called section 406 and 407 and the first prohibits the promotion of partisan political views to children by teachers you can still uh you can still talk about politics um but you can't give your own View and promote it to the children and the second Clause says that if you do discuss politics then you must be prepared to give the alternative opinions um and that with with balance these are just such important Clauses and they're designed specifically to protect children from adult political beliefs being forced upon them and we know that unscrewed police governments or governments just looking just looking for popularity have always targeted children as a way to shape the future political ground and actually to reach their parents through them um and you know in the worst case we think of of sort of Nazi use or Mouse Red Guard so the avoidance of political indoctrination of children is it's not only to protect them it's to protect a society from a future in which a whole generation think the same thing uh that's the moment when we make big societal mistakes I think um so we also know that children when uh convinced of something tend to hold their opinions very vehemently and can be excessively passionate about them and that's another reason that we protect children from indoctrination um I think that one thing I noted is that when looking at this law there's a crucial piece of case law that describes this and work through these these issues it was in 2007 and very interestingly it was on climate change so we've already found uh the point at which the public and the status are having a disagreement about what is or isn't political here um in this case the government then it was Alan Johnson was the education secretary issued um the American Democratic politician Al Gore's climate change video to all schools it's An Inconvenient Truth um and a member of the public took the government to court about that feeling that his children were being indoctrinated the judge made a very sort of messy ruling on that he said well it was a bit indoctrinating because it wasn't properly introduced as coming from a politician but as long as you give a bit of critique that's okay you can show it whereas the QC for the the member of the public said we don't need just criticism we need the alternative view with equal air time somebody who has a completely opposite view being presented well the government um well sorry what what they understood at that point was that a left-wing politician was advancing his status and interests behind what was now thought of as a consensus opinion so the government's now gone further and suggested um that climate change science is and facts are now no longer subject to Education Act and section 407 you don't need to balance the view on the anthropogenic uh climate change um you don't need to give denial or skepticism in fact you shouldn't do that would be misinformation so in a way we can't quite act from first principles anymore we can't we ask the question and the academy must always re-ask the first question do we still have climate change what does that mean um so that leaves a huge gray area where which which parts of the science are thought to be a fact which form part of the political contentious Solutions um and which are just being forwarded by a government that wants popularity um yes so just to wrap up then that the this sort of the result of that I think is the political opinion is likely to advance itself behind this sacred uh subject and we've seen a growing trend for contestable politics to borrow the certainty of Science and Advance its its program that way thinking of covered for example thank you if you have hands up please for questions and comments um so we've heard from the panel that education should not be a weapon in the in anything let alone the fight against climate change but also that it would be negligent not written not to engage um individual action maybe when you come back Barry you could be interested to hear a bit more about what you mean by engage individual action also Claire here um raising some concerns that um well I should say I think there's a surprising amount of agreement on the panel it seems that we should be having a sort of open knowledge base discussion about this in schools but um Claire has suggested that this might raise concerns that that might not be happening in practice uh so let's see we've got quite a few hands um let's go to this chap in the front row and then we'll work our way backwards so I just mentioned uh the income being intrigued by Al Gore and if that was actually found to contain at least nine serious factual Errors By the judge I think um it's interesting that we care so much we talk so much about children's well-being and especially at school they're told you know they're constantly told about how it's important to protect their mental health and then scare them to death about the climate um I mean my youngest is this being um within year 10 now but I mean every year since it's 300 secondary school he's had to do some sort of projects on climate change which fortunately because it's got me as a dad has he's been able to um put an alternative point of view um I think when he did his project last year on uh you know how the work the world is going to um is burning up and so we're all going to have to move to Mars uh where it's obviously far too cold for anybody to live and and where CO2 levels are at 98 strangely um you know I helped him to write his his projects on that and when he handed it in his teacher gave it back to him someone with an opinion um they I mean if we look at the you know the climate change gold standard of the ipcc um which you know when politicians use that report reports kind of summary and say oh look we're one minute to midnight we're on the verge of burning to death Etc um if you if you actually Wade through the report um you know you get a lot of talking in the actual you know 3 000 page report that nobody reads but they've got low confidence that floods are increasing low confidence that this there's a lot of speculation about how much uh CO2 you know even if you read the ipcc they are not certain about what except what effect climate change is telling and you know the accuracy itself itself has been found to a percent amount of corruption involved with a lot of nepotism um a lot of scientists have been hand-picked um and from the most various principles around the world to give a diverse City I would say rather than the actual defense rather than finding the top scientists they you know they have an agenda yeah yeah and um you know I just think you know to present the children that were facing a clear and present danger instead of looking at what as Alex said about humans possibility of Human Solutions you know it's a very negative um way of treating children I I just wanted to say that I think you'd probably find lots of friends in the school system there are plenty of teachers who are teaching in exactly that way and I know Claire and um we've had similar experiences in that um that ilk of teaching you know does make zelets of the kids they really do trust the teachers and they do really do believe in them and it creates a war zone because you know the few kids that maybe you know have conversations at home or or want to think differently are interested in exploring storing ideas in a broader sense just simply can't and are shut down and it's it it's just toxic and it's toxic what's happening so you would probably be very happy in a lot of schools because you could happily I mean I've seen lessons you know you don't need to have that GCSE it's already happening you know we had to they had to design apps for climate change they have clubs they have inset days where they're told to go and protest it's not a problem you know that's happening it's just it I find it really deeply silent sorry it's not a question really ever that it that teachers don't understand what what education is or should be just on instrumentalization I think that's really important because I do think that the ideology behind this is seeing children as instruments for political action um there's a campaign group called Teach the future which is run by young people and it's trying to pass a bill to implement climate education at every level of the curriculum as like the foundation of the curriculum I don't think it will be passed but it's got quite a lot of support from my own MP Nadia term and Jeremy corbyn Etc um and if you read this every element of it is about political action and they explicitly say you know in order to kind of galvanize students to put pressure on the government and I think that's an incredibly Insidious way to approach education and what's really sad is it's young people themselves who want this and they're asking for this um and you know I'm fairly young but I've also worked in teaching quite a lot and I don't trust that children know what's best for them and I don't trust that they know they should be educated in and I think that it's very concerning that we're allowing students to um have control of what they're being taught um and I also don't think that Eco anxiety is a rational response I think that children are told that it's a rational response and they should feel that way but as a lady said it's very upsetting um and I don't think it's very productive either because I don't think that this education is particularly useful for a lot of students I'll probably learn it feel quite rubbish and then go and do whatever they want to do anyway which isn't probably going to be in climate change or sustainability or anything I think what's best is a teacher I'm a very robust Rich curriculum that will make them interested in the world and maybe some of them might go and work education climate change but if not I don't think that's a problem either whether climate change should be on the curriculum well it shouldn't be if we can't as a society have a two-sided debate properly at the highest levels of media and government if we if adults can't even discuss it in a reasonable way and hear the other Viewpoint like you know criticisms of alcohol's predictions that in 2008 he said in five years there'll be no ice left well there's just as much ice down pretty much it may be decreased a little bit but there's we don't understand the climate as a you know the scientists that we we claim are all in agreement actually um you know there's a lot of open questions as as the guy over there was pointing out so yeah that I'm rambling now but yeah if we can't talk about it then how can we teach there needs to be a sort of two-pronged approach whereby you focus both on individual action that young people can take as well as voting and this kind of thing the first I want to focus on that issue of the the second issue of sort of voting and sort of political action the first thing you need to do is give people give children a basic political knowledge because even adults in this country don't know who their representatives are they don't know what constituency they're in they don't know when the elections are when the elections are about to take place they don't know who any of the candidates are or where to find them so I do think that you just this goes for all issues not just climate change any political issue that you want to teach children indoctrinate children with whatever you first need to tell them the basics that they live in a ward they live in a council Ward they have a representative and there's a there's an election every four years and you need to tell them when the elections are and how they can find out who the candidates are I've built some technology that is going to help this yes we're going to come back uh to the panel for a couple of minutes each um to pick up on whatever they want to pick up from the order from the audience comments starting with you Alex okay um it's not just sort of Eco anxiety that I think you know young people are experiencing them so if you've seen on the news in the last few days um you know children young people not children sorry um young people throwing tomato soup at you know Vincent van Gogh um painting and um and then the incident waitrose the young people pouring milk out on the floor because you know they want plant-based products so you know that that's that's the extreme end but what we're seeing is that young people are you know a very anti-human okay or a very negative view of humanity and human creations and um you know and that you know we should we should be able to uh produce meat for ourselves so they're they're learning that uh you know they that's I guess the planet first the environment first because they I I think what they're not getting on the school curriculum is is enough um you know positive positive teaching about Human Experience about human society and and a sense of progress um so you know so it so that's what I mean by being one-dimensional so and that's not to say that it's just um you know the the teachers are deliberately and indoctrinating but I think that's you know that's reflecting what's going on in society that's the discussion in society that um Society in the media every time there's a storm every time there's an event it's like climate change is to blame humans are to blame um for for the you know for the weather um so weather and climate have become conflated now it's very hard to to separate the two but if they're constantly and bombarded with a narrative that humans are to blame um for the state of the world they're not surprisingly they take a very negative view um of humanity so um you want to stop me now all right okay okay thank you um I'm very pleased um where to start um the lady that mentioned about using the term individual action to kids I absolutely wouldn't um my son and I are um we've got a refill station in our garage we don't talk about that as being individual action we just talk about that as being a sensible thing to do to help use um plastic more than once so that so no I wouldn't use those terms two kids you know we're all grown-ups here um in terms of our Gore and the errors in that that's not great um but do we need to throw the baby out with the bath water do we have to be purist at this do we have to pick holes at things or can we try to see each other's different opinions or should we just like kick the the legs out from each on each other you know is that helpful um in terms of um political Awards completely agree I think it's important that kids understand those structures and that that is an option open to them when they are 18. um they can't use that mechanism now so it's just a kind of an understanding and I think absolutely whichever their opinion they should know that the political system is their voice that's their way of getting their point across um in terms of Vincent Van Gogh from the tomato soup um of course that is awful that's despoiling a common good for for all of us I would never encourage that um I think that to me that speaks to Children's lack of agency they don't know how to influence this they're anxious about it that's how I interpret Greta timberg um you know she's she striked because she knew that was shocking and it was the only area that she had any control over um so I think we need to listen and respond to that and help give those kids agency um so and definitely draw a line on tomato soup and milk in any in any um context um to the lady that thinks that climate change is a um is a narrow um area of the curriculum and not everybody's going to go on to be involved in climate science I'd obviously beg to differ because it doesn't matter whether you're in a in engineering home economics um you name it climate will affect us in so many different ways which is you know the whole concept of a climate so you can't really duck that one I ironically I think the um the challenge is not to preach about climate change in schools because I think that's counterproductive and I think there is a real danger that you'll end up having sort of climate change and home economics climate change and poetry climate change and music and I think that would be really counterproductive so I definitely don't think that's a good idea um um just on that by one of the associated um recommendations from the government or plans is to make sure that every teacher at further education level has to embed sustainability into their teaching so that is kind of an example of what you were talking about there at further education yeah so I'll just respond to that one which I I'm glad to hear Barry say that it shouldn't be treated as a tag on with every other subject and spread across if you're going to take something like that seriously it should be in science and it should be in geography which are the subjects that would know how to analyze it properly and so I I would agree with that but that isn't what the government's doing and that's the perhaps the biggest worry that what's being asked of it is is about a kind of cultural smothering of the entire curriculum with this subject so that and in and when you do that we've actually seen that happen already we've seen it with race politics gender politics we've seen it where um and what's actually going on is a kind of socialistic approach is being spread across other subjects which allows people to exert their political will in a way that actually doesn't care about the subject it probably perhaps doesn't even care about the environment when it's it's operating in that way so that's one thing and the other is just I'd like to pick up on the use of children bringing them into adult argument which I think you mentioned I just wanted to quote what was said at the time of of this court case so Alan Johnson said children are the key to changing society's long-term attitude to the environment not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their own families Lifestyles and behaviors now I'd just say that's wrong you'd never ever use children as a method to politically change their parents Minds when you do that you are doing politics wrong I don't care if it's about the environment or anything else and this is the part that's really problematic and I think should be addressed and treated with great skepticism science talk about it that's important this method is wrong thank you okay so last chance to ask uh answer or ask questions and make your comments got quite a few hands yeah I just want to quickly mention that uh I think talking about how climate reports are unclear is kind of counterproductive or kind of backwards because I thought everybody would agree that an unclear but definite danger is worse than a clear but definite danger so you know if you don't even know in what ways it's going to affect you it's even harder to kind of tackle the issue um but I do disagree with Barry on on individual action because I I grew up kind of being told that I need to recycle I need to do the things that you know big oil or companies couldn't do and it's kind of I think that fuels anxiety as well and it kind of pushes blame onto the individual instead of kind of where I agree with the blue man in the blue shirt um instead of kind of showing how in a democracy you know you are kind of gathering knowledge and learning how to think critically and then becoming a good voter or knowing about how to kind of make your voice heard in society about these issues thank you come forward so I was taught GCSE geography I think in the I can't remember if it was the late 80s or early 90s anyway in GCSE geography we were taught about malthusianism and the population time bomb and that it was an emergency and the main person on the other side of the argument was you you may remember some of you was Julian Simon and Julian Simon had this wager with the malthusian guy who inherited the the malthusian way of thinking about there's too many of us the population Time Bomb means we're we're we're we're heading towards disaster it's an emergency and Julian Simon won that wager and he won that debate but the important educational point is that both those arguments had equal time and they had equal time actually because it was very clear that one side had won and it was the non-alarmist side and the point is is that as the gentleman said we're not having this debate in the public so it's Upstream from the schools what's happening now in the schools is is something that started in the 1970s so in the 70s on this not population on climate emergency they were predicting uh cataclysmic irreversible climate damage they were predicting in the 70s they were predicting it in the 90s they're predicting it now the question is how many more times do they have to predict it those predictions not come true and then you look at the detailed science and the scientist does not confirm the emergency climate change is real global warming is real but the science does not confirm okay okay thanks hi um I want to um talk about this idea of science having a kind of cold light following in the Modern Age it's true that science has a um a different kind of viewpoint on issues in the sense that it looks at them objectively and it uses the scientific method to come to conclusions rather than starting from the basis of any opinion opinions in science begin at a kind of hypothesis level and then from that hypothesis you can draw um draw conclusions later on what um all the while trying to avoid making any subjective viewpoints on the matter um the problem is we're in a um we're in a time now where just as in the past for example with cigarettes where people were mentioning how cigarettes had um Direct effects on your body and increasing your chances of getting various types of cancer the cigarette companies who were making money from this didn't want to lose out so they basically funded projects which would um which was um show evidence of the country to say basically cigarettes are not bad here so in the same way is there uh are we only looking this idea that maybe nefarious characters will want to um achieve um achieve goals for personal aims are able to fund science projects which are actually not science but they're just um projects which um which back up their own opinions but they look like science because they're run by scientists thank you okay at the end of the sessions yesterday people outside having cigarettes and saying goodbye uh talking to this young woman who looked about 20 and so what sessions did you do I did a few climate ones and I'm going to paraphrase what she said she's like oh my god there were some like climate change Denial in in some of the sessions and it in her mind or Chatsworth there's like well we've won the argument about racism that's bad the argument women's rights that they're the same that's good and we've run the argument about climate change we're all going to kill the planet and there was like a sort of certainty in her Outlook that that argument's been won right but there were people there today that were saying hold in a minute let's have a talk about this you know I was watching football Focus the other day can you get to your question thanks and like a football program and they've given out an awards for some German footballer because he's done lots of things to save trees it's so invaded in what we do that here comes the question it to me like doesn't really matter whether there's going to be a GCSE about it because it it's filtering there from every other part of society that the kids are going to get from somewhere anyway and they would have made their mind up where the school tells them or not thank you thank you and this this lady here and then we're back to the panel for the final minute each with their final killer point so I you agree that there's a lot of nuance being lost I mean there's a great quote that you know um if um if if one person is saying it's raining outside another person saying it's not you know the media's job isn't to report on both it's to look out the window and you know ascertain so I think um the problem with you know people saying oh alternative views always need to be said is that gives ideas like flat flat Earth or um you know something ridiculous the same sort of legitimacy as actual you know you know at points that need to be made about actually you know know if it's not going to be just sort of oh everybody needs to recycle or whatever you know there's not a lot of points being made about actually um if there's not a change made at the industrial stage then we can recycle all we want it doesn't make a difference um so basically what I'm trying to say is um like okay um what I'm trying to say is we should always be kind of encouraging children to do critical thinking but that but that a lot of questions unfortunately don't understand nuance and sometimes you don't want to create everything being a fight okay thank you thank you very much okay so thanks to all of you for your comments and questions the the panel have an impossible task of responding in a minute each to what you just said but this conversation will carry on at the festival and Beyond no doubt so Alex over to you um I think it was consensus that we need to broaden the discussion out and I think that starts here what is the responsibility of the teacher the teacher should be giving um children something that they don't get in the media they should they should be offering them uh getting them to explore Alternatives and we should be we should be talking to young people about how we're going to get there how we're going to get you know we're going to use nuclear fission you know what other Alternatives will enable us to live with climate change and have a better future and stop scaring children and stop telling them they're responsible um by going around then then ordinary lives and for me it's about the science I mean obviously I'm a Believer a True Believer um so but I came to that view just because of Pascal's wager you can't know none of us know the answer to that and I think it's um worse to not act than it is to act and I don't think the downside is is um anything to be frightened of so I'm cool with that um for me it's about a model of looking at climate change much more like we look at something like obesity it should be taught across the different subjects and nobody has any problem with that being taught um and nobody has any problem with mandatory PE lessons and nobody has any problem with the fact that school clubs will then be provided and kids may or may not choose to use those School clubs it's exactly the same idea for climate change for me thank you okay um yes I I think I uh sort of picking up hear the feeling that maybe there are geopolitical interests in energy or Commerce that are beyond our Democratic reach I think that's how I would sum up what the nervousness is about this um why would the ipcc always be right and just and fair if we don't get a vote in it um and that to me makes this subject too complex for schools as opposed to universities where you can study the real data with the real studies in in schools it's a hugely emotive subject and I I think that makes it prey to all sorts of forces that would like to harness the emotional response of children I think that's quite a dangerous thing so for me this is an issue of method um it's not a matter of of how urgent a crisis is it's a math the method of how you use politics to fix it and you just don't indoctrinate as the as the answer to that you always work from first principles and uh yeah so I I think what I'm saying is is that I think there's something more important than the environment and that is uh children having open minds I think they'll fix the environment best if they have those open minds and the full ability to question um and I believe there is perhaps a downside to taking those actions I think it will cost us and I think we are vulnerable to making mistakes okay let's thank our students thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: worldwrite

Views: 593

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Id: aEkcUIcbdtA

Length: 44min 25sec (2665 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023