Duncan O'Leary
Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.
Iain Dale writes an interesting post on his blog to today, criticising Alan Johnson and David Miliband’s decision to send a DVD of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to every secondary school in the country. He argues:
‘They say the debate over climate change is "over". Whatever Gore's movie's merits, it is not the job of government to indoctrinate children. I'm sure they also think the debate on many issues is "over". This is a very dangerous precedent to set.’
For me this is important territory for debate: where do we draw the line between ‘citizenship’ and ‘indoctrination’? Increasingly, politicians from across the political spectrum are keen that education serves to instill ‘British values’ (taught through conveying facts and analysis about British and world history), but yet there is nervousness about ‘indoctrination’ in other areas. Arguably this is what Gore’s film does: convey a fact (climate change) with analysis about it’s impact.
The film is emotive, but so is much history – including any disccussion of what British values and history really are. Perhaps the answer is that what really matters is the way such material is introduced: “here is an emotive film about climate change. The science is clear, but what we do about it isn’t” strikes me as a pretty good way of encouraging critcial engagement with the issue, whilst “Here’s Al Gore explaining how we’re all going to die unless we walk to work” looks a little more like brainwashing.
All of which feeds into a bigger set of questions: do we want to take the politics out of education? And is it even possible?
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- i sort of agree, but surely there's no point in showing his film if it's just about critical engagement - isn't the point of putting it in citizenship period that climate change needs a collective response - like fighting in a total war. by making it about critical engagement you just stick it next to source B in a gcse history text book. how about:
here is an emotive film about climate change. The science is clear (it will affect us all), but what we do about it isn’t.
Encouraging a critical approach isn't about giving different views the same weight, it's about giving people the tools to understand and interpret the world around them and decide for themselves what they think that means. All of which (in my view) would lead to people taking Gore's film - and its implications - more, not less, seriously.
how Britain is likely to shape up in 'an age of globalisation' the subject of an article in this week's Economist, and a response on openDemocracy.
It's a bit like the Jade Goody stuff a couple of weeks back. One of the key things was the lack of cultural literacy in that house - the capacity to read and take on board other cultures. This, and the ability to respond in the ways that Duncan suggests, seem absolutely vital to the future.
Al Gore’s film is not simply an objective account of the climate change that is sweeping across our ecosystem. It is laden with assumptions, implications, values, distortion and power. There is a real danger that this ‘sustainability discourse’ will hegemonise the intellectual frameworks of environmental movements and education. The fact that we are disastrously warming our planet is not really an issue of serious contestation anymore (even the white house’s scientific crackpots have yielded), the crux of the argument now lies in how we are doing this and what we need to do to stop it. Gore’s lecture is, in this regard, limp and unhelpful; he ignores the fact that the systemic dynamics of accumulation (the driving characteristic principle of our social system), acting as positive feedback loops, are fuelling social and physical degradation. This central contradiction was clearly articulated in a seminal report (The Limits of Growth) by a conservative industrial thin-tank called the Club of Rome over 30 years ago. Today it has been obscured and ignored in favour of the warmth and fuzziness of the win-win and endless growth scenarios peddled by Gore and his contemporaries in the ‘sustainability’ and CSR movements. To this end it is clear that Gore, still a mover in the corporate dominated political circles of Capitol Hill, represents a narrow and historically shallow interpretation and analysis of the nature of environmental change. If we are serious about giving young people the tools and information they need to interpret and reach objective accounts of the world then his film should only be included as part of a wider package that also offers alternative prescriptive and analytical perspectives. Personally I had trouble sitting through the film as an adult and was lulled into an uncomfortable sleep by the monotony of the narration, as a child I may have very well thrown a tantrum…
It is indeed bizarre to suggest that ‘the climate debate is over,’ when we still hear remarks such as this one from Chrysler’s chief economist: he called on Europeans to deal with climate change "in a step-by-step, rational way, and not play much Chicken Little". I wonder what his type of ‘rationality’ consists of, and who it would involve in the process of formulating these ‘steps’. Presumably he would be very win-win about it all, most of all advocating a series of technological fixes – the car industry’s own equivalents of the expert-driven solutions that often rule the environmental discourse, in fields from public transport (Maglev!) to energy – indeed, nuclear technology.
I am reading a book called “Nature and The City - Making environmental policy inToronto and Los Angeles