An Inconvenient Truth Propaganda in the Classroom?

The problem with education today is not what is being taught, it is how it is being taught.

If you are molding the minds of young students and are an honest person, you need to take the information, make sure that you are not only instilling your own beliefs, and do your best to provide accurate and unbiased information. If you think this is going on in schools today, you have another thing coming.

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gores film on environmental cataclysm, is being shown to students across the country as the definitive work on Global Warming and climate change. I do not care where you fall on the Global Warming debate, the film was created as a propaganda tool and even the most pro global warming scientists are uncomfortable with the presentation by Gore, a politician not a scientist.

But students across the world will take the film and believe it as fact. No explanation that this is theory, no explanation that the movie was made by politicians trying to paint the broadest and most dangerous picture they can, just the film and an explanation that it is the best source on global warming. If you are not going to provide balance to propaganda as a teacher you are even more guilty than the propagandists themselves.

And that is just wrong.

“I really don’t understand why they keep showing it,” says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). “I’ve spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to present it as a debate. But every time we’ve seen it, well, one teacher said this is basically a two-sided debate, but this movie really gives you the best idea of what’s going on.”
McKenzie says he has educated himself enough about both sides of the climate- change controversy to know that the Al Gore movie is too one-sided to be taught as fact. Even scientists who back Mr. Gore’s message admit they’re uncomfortable with liberties the politician takes with “science” in the film. But, McKenzie says most of his classmates are credulous. His teachers are not much more discerning. “They don’t know there’s another side to the argument,” he says. McKenzie’s mother was outraged to find out that Mr. Gore’s film was being presented as fact in her son’s classroom. “This is just being poured into kids’ brains instead of letting them know there’s a debate going on,” she says. “An educational system falls down when they start taking one side.” via the National Post