A resolution passed by the Portland Public Schools Board last week will prohibit teachers from using any classroom materials that treat climate change as anything other than a proven scientific fact, and will require them to list human activity as one of its causes.
The move first drew national interest when it was reported Friday by conservative news website The Blaze, but has also been covered by The Oregonian and the Portland Tribune. The move aims to eliminate dispute over global warming and its potential impact.
The resolution was introduced by school board member Mike Rosen, who also leads the NW Ecoliteracy Collaborative, a project that focuses on environmental curriculum standards. He told the Tribune that his work with that initiative is currently on hold, however, and the schoolboard unanimously passed the proposed changes to the district’s curriculum.
Books that cast doubt on global warming ‘unacceptable,’ student says
Testifying before the school board, Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux said that it was “unacceptable” that she and her fellow pupils were learning from “textbooks… that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis.” She added that “climate education” was “the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”
Likewise, former Portland teacher Bill Bigelow told district officials, “A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise.” Bigelow noted that the books being used by schools frequently used words such as might and could when discussing climate change, and that students should not be learning using materials which he said look as if they were provided “courtesy of the fossil fuel industry.”
“What we’re asking for is not: Buy new stuff,” said Bigelow, who according to the Tribune is a co-author of a textbook on environmental education called A People’s Curriculum for the Earth. “What we’re looking for is a whole different model of curriculum development and distribution,” he added, noting that some schools in the district already has climate-change literacy classes.
Such a move is unlikely to be universally supported in the Portland area, however, as according to Fox News, a petition circulated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) that calls upon the US to reject the international global warming agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan in 1997 has to date been signed by nearly 32,000 people, including 9,000 people with post-secondary degrees.
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