Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Poster Fun

At work yesterday, I was looking through a Teaching Resources catalog from a well-known Canadian company that we use a lot, when I noticed a new addition - the Global Warming poster pack. It's for decorating your classroom walls, or bulletin board. This was in the Pre-K and up section and I was a bit dismayed at some of the titles. Indoctrination time again? Here are the titles from the package, which runs at $14.99:

The Temperature's Rising: the Greenhouse Effect & Global Warming (title poster)

What's The Problem With A Warmer Earth? (full of facts and figures)

Who Turned Up The Heat? (list of blame and fault)

Kids Can Help The Earth In A Big Way (list too small for me to read in the catalog)

Falling Trees And Burping Sheep: Unexpected Sources Of Greenhouse Gases

Even Kids Add To Greenhouse Gas (I guess this is in case they just blame their parents, so they can share equal guilt instead)
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I'm used to seeing packs about recycling, conserving water and electricity, not littering, etc and those are all good - but now I see the GW/CC stuff creeping in and I can't let go of my dislike for teaching theory as fact. If this is in the Pre-K category, talk about starting them young!

6 comments:

  1. I did a little search on their website to try to find the photo, and found some other links about GW books, etc that the company sells to teachers, parents, and students:

    http://www.scholastic.ca/titles/thedowntoearthguidetoglobalwarming/

    (and a 2007 article from Webwire citing at least one person's issue with Scholastic peddling this very book to children http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=44565 )

    and this is the poster pack page, third one down on the left

    http://www.scholastic.ca/clubs/cec/images/CEC_09-10_14.pdf

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  2. Whats wrong with a warmer Earth?

    Who are these guys kidding; population and trade rose during the Medieval Warm Period (and crashed during the Little Ice Age), and the biological diversity on Earth was far higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum.

    Oh wait, I'm using mere facts, not "settled science (tm)".

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  3. Old mother earth has a new meaning in the 21st century liberal humanist globalist classroom. (real conservative)

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  4. Yes technically Scholastic is american but it has a huge distribution center here and some of the books are different, released in the US first, then here, etc. My friend in Brampton's husband works for Scholastic there. Point being, it's scholastic.ca we order from, the catalogs are printed in Canadian $$, the company we pay is in Ontario, where the books are also shipped from. Not a Canadian company by birth, and actually a lot of books Scholastic US/CA sells are by a British company called Usborne Books (reprinted for Scholastic).

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