Climate extinction rebellion
Let me admit here and now: I have absolutely no idea how serious the threat of global extinction through man made climate change really is. I do not have any ideas either.
But there are an awful lot of people who do know the answer.
Yup, there it is. Use the kids to spread the vital message. You know it makes sense. They are, after all, the future. Read the whole article here.
Here are some of the ways the Union has decided you can disrupt the school for such an important issue.
- In Doncaster the council have asked schools to set off fire alarms to illustrate the climate emergency.
- Get the whole school to take action for 30 minutes by demonstrating in the playground.
- Drop the curriculum for the day or part of it and teach environmental and ecological issues.
- Take an assembly on the climate emergency.
- Encourage meetings of student eco-committees.
- Organise a live link with protests taking place in city centres.
- Organise your own protest in the playground or at the school gates.
- Send a delegation to the climate change protests.
- Hold inset days with focus on climate and an opportunity for staff to attend protests.
So who are the people making these demands?
The National Education Union is the largest education union in Europe, supporting and representing more than 450,000 members, including the majority of teachers. It is the renamed National Union of Teachers and Association of Teachers and Lecturers – two of the biggest Unions in teaching.
So what it says is important if you are a parent, a teacher or indeed just someone trying to get to work along streets where demos are taking place today.
What would the world be like if children, sometimes as young as eight or nine, were encouraged to show their displeasure on the streets whenever a fashionable cause presented itself?
I can remember, at the age of six, huddling under my Mum's bed as the Second World War ended, listening to, of all things, the Nuremburg Trials of prominent Nazis.
One by one the prisoners were pronounced guilty in a very stern voice.
Me? I was praying, “Oh God please don't let him die! Please don't let him die!”
Touching.
I also remember, when eight, rushing into my Aunt Bet and Uncle Frank shouting: “Good news! Mr Bevin has died!” Ernest Bevin was, of course, a Labour politician and we were all Conservatives! So I knew that I was quite right.
And, of course, we all believed, fervently, in the British Empire. Even after Suez.
I am so pleased that there is no record (apart from this article) of any of this on the web. I am so pleased that I was not outside the house shouting it in the street. What will the shouting, placard waving kids on the street today, encouraged by their own teachers, feel about their demonstrations in a few years' time, I wonder?
Real education is teaching children how to handle difficult topics by seeing both sides. Hitler was a non-smoker as well as a seriously bad politician in every sense. Stalin was a good father to Svetlana his daughter and a very down to earth, jolly Russian as well as the man who ordered the deaths by starvation of tens of millions of Ukranians. There is good and bad in everything.
There are always two sides. Education is seeing the whole picture.
These oh so trendy, oh so clever political teachers are denying their pupils their rights to real education.
The very opposite of their sacred duty of handing on the flame.
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