Get the children, get the future

Gangrene is a dangerous and potentially fatal condition that happens when the blood flow to a large area of tissue is cut off. This causes the tissue to break down and die. Gangrene often turns the affected skin a greenish-black color.

Gangrene comes in 2 forms, dry and wet:

• Dry gangrene occurs when the blood supply to tissue is cut off. The area becomes dry, shrinks, and turns black. 

• Wet gangrene occurs if bacteria invade this tissue. This makes the area swell, drain fluid, and smell bad.

From Johns Hopkins Medicine

Education — the acquisition and internalisation of knowledge and skills — is the lifeblood of any civilisation. It is the lifeblood of progress and any form of advancement, including evolution. There is a direct causal link between educational attainment and living standard and, for the most part, it has nothing to do with any sort of privilege.

Education is a complex system in any country but the most successful countries have become successful in large part because they have recognised the importance of getting as many people as possible as educated as possible.

Indeed, one of the things that the Soviet bloc got right was mandatory free education, even if you had to drag some to school. Yes, I know the free world had free education, too. Bear with me.

One of the things that the Soviet bloc got wrong was adding propaganda to the curriculum, which I have mentioned before. Now, propaganda is making a return to the curriculum and one might argue — I certainly would — that it is a more dangerous sort of propaganda than “Bulgarians are more Slavic than Bulgaric”, “The Soviet Union is our big brother” and “Socialism will prevail” or whatever previous generations were fed during their formative years.

The reason it is more dangerous is that the above sort of propaganda sought to create some sort of united international community based on, among other things, ideology and presumed ethnic similarities — things that pretty much nobody cared about and that did not affect people’s everyday lives and habits.

The goal of this particular propaganda push is to turn education into yet another weapon for enforcing a transition that pretty much nobody wants and that will very definitely affect people’s everyday lives and habits.

The above propaganda did not seek to spur us into action. If anything, it sought to brainwash us into acquiring some sort of pan-European identity — a laughable objective given where it was tried, bound to fail. The new propaganda, on the other hand, openly focuses on spurring future generations into brainwashed action. And it plays on our caring soul string.

“Education is crucial to promote climate action,” says UNESCO of all entities, and continues, per Euractiv, that ““understanding” and being able to “address” climate change empowers individuals to become “agents of change”.”

Indeed, education is crucial in raising new generations that believe our species is ruining the planet with emissions and that takes action to stop the destruction and bring about a new and better reality.

Here’s an example from the UK, that frontrunner in the transition race. I give you the Ministry of Eco Education — an entity set up by climate activist Dale Vince who also happens to be a very rich man who gives money to Just Stop Oil.

Judging by the behaviours exhibited by Just Stop Oil activists on streets and in art galleries, education seems to have largely passed them by but this does not appear to be a problem because who said education can only mean one thing?

In fact, the concept of education is actively being subverted like the concept of climate to serve the purpose of, if you’ll excuse the simplification, stopping climate change/climate breakdown/climate carnage. Along with a few more minor purposes such as having more docile populations using less resources.

The subversion in the above example has taken the form of a new curriculum for partner schools in the UK that teaches sustainability, environmental responsibility and “why we should only use renewable energy.”

It also “explores questions like: What’s really renewable? Is nature the answer? How much stuff is enough? Does anything ever go away? Is the climate breaking down?”

In the order they were asked: 1. That deepwater jellyfish. 2. The answer to what? 3. However much each of us feels is enough. 4. Yes, common sense. 5. Only if you take “climate” to mean “ your mental health” or “a badly maintained machine”.

I find the third question posed in this list especially intriguing. The topic of consumption and overconsumption is a vast one and I’ve repeatedly argued here that overconsumption is the scourge of modern life. I’ve also repeatedly admitted to being unwilling to impose my personal view of what is “enough” and what is “over” on everyone else.

Yet there have been a growing number of indications that the climate crusade army is not aiming at overconsumption or, gods forbid, the use of private jets by climate warriors.

The target of that army is the ordinary resource consumer also known as a human being. Because we could all consume less. Unless we can’t because we’re too poor or old and set in our ways, and if someone tells us we must start consuming less we might riot. Children, on the other hand, don’t know much. Children have not yet developed the ways to become set in. Children are the perfect target.

“I think sustainability should start from a very early age, with schools having sliding doors, so children can go outside, they can play, and they can explore and learn in nature,” a project and pedagogical coordinator for the EU’s Schoolnet, Miriam Ascanio told Euractiv for the report linked above.

She then said that this approach to education would influence future generations because “if from a very, very young age, you start learning about something, you start caring about it.”

You can’t argue with that, really, although I’d speculate that you can learn about things and start to care about them at any age. Unless life has turned you into a hardened cynic, of course. But children are particularly open to new information, indeed eager to absorb new information. And, for the most part, children are born caring. Making them care even harder would be a breeze.

It’s in this “Care harder” part that I suspect problems will sprout and thrive. Because while there is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching children to care about nature, to not litter and destroy, it is not these things that the new curriculum architects aim for.

They seem to be aiming to teach kids to use less of everything, that is, to put the environment ahead of themselves. And this, I’m afraid, is as unnatural as it may be hypothetically noble.

We are already seeing the early fruit of that push, which has so far been unconcerted and more of a side effect than the outcome of deliberate action. Climate anxiety and depression, even suicides are the side effect of people — adults and children — being told they are bad for nature, bad for the planet, bad for the climate.

When faced with this sort of accusation, because that’s exactly what it is, we react in one of two ways. We either say, Oh, muck it, I’m not making sacrifices, the planet will just have to take it, or we start sacrificing as instructed even if it makes us unhappy and unsatisfied with life. Now, which reaction do you think children exposed to the new green curricula are more likely to have?

An argument could be made that there is nothing wrong with living with less. It will be a perfectly valid argument until we wade into the minor little topic of degrees. The richest can certainly do with less. Middle-income people in wealthy countries could also do with a little less. The poorest among us, though, can hardly do with any less than they already do with.

The question, then, is “How much less exactly?” The answer suspiciously looks like “A lot less, including replacing basic comfort with discomfort”. The answer targets the foundational level of Maslow’s pyramid. And because it targets the foundational level, it would inevitably affect all higher levels, too.

If “sustainability” and “climate action” become the lens through which everything is taught, as the Ministry of Eco Education proposes, then everything else would necessarily take a back seat, including our most basic needs.

You’re cold? That’s too bad but if you have electricity and heating 24/7 that would generate a lot of emissions and wreck the climate. You want a child? You can’t, because there are already too many people on this planet and they are wrecking it.

There is already a movement of women called BirthStrikers who, and I quote so you don’t have to click on a link to The Guardian, “have decided not to procreate in response to the coming ‘climate breakdown and civilisation collapse’.”

Physical discomfort and frustration at feeling the need to override your biological imperatives are a heavy burden on the mind. With such a burden there’s less time to think about other things, from the higher levels of the pyramid.

Do it long enough and you get people who are incapable of reaching those higher levels, stuck at the base. After the millions of years of evolution it took us to reach a stage where we were capable of developing a concept of these higher levels.

As always, I’m exaggerating. I’m sure nobody among the new education architects wants today’s children to grow up in the misery of having to entirely rely on the weather for their physical comfort and for meeting their basic needs, and being too preoccupied with saving nature from emissions to think about things like aesthetic pleasure and knowledge acquisition. Or having children in their turn.

What they do seem to want is to raise a generation — and further generations — that consumes less and is happy with less, of everything. A generation educated in a “climate-friendly” way, according to the activists pushing for the overhaul.

How would that climate-friendly way look? Well, like a Disney movie from back when Disney was about birds, trees, and baby deer. Kinda.

“As soon as they feel this power inside them, this empowering, they will continue after school, they will continue outside the school’s borders,” says Ascanio, the 22-year-old activist and Schoolnet coordinator.

I have no idea where the young lady grew up but here in the sticks children don’t switch off after school. Sure, there are some who do, as they switch on their devices but there will always be those. Until you turn the power off, that is.

My fifth-grade daughter has expropriated most of our houseplants for her room and spends hours studying bird wing structure. Her third-grade friend has a praying mantis for a pet and dispenses truly expert advice to school friends who happen upon the insects. They actually call him for advice.

Another friend helps his parents in the garden and doesn’t grumble about it. He boasts about the size of their onions. These children care as do millions others like them. And nobody told them they should. They learned it on their own because children are born caring.

Caring, however, is not enough for the activist army. No, they believe that “We need to give the freedom and the trust to teachers and students to feel really empowered and together to co-construct solutions.”

The nature of these solutions or their purpose is not mentioned in the Euractiv article but my guess would be that the purpose is emission reduction because there is no other purpose to human existence right now.

What’s more worrying is that too busy to “co-construct” solutions, children will probably be relieved of some of the old-fashioned school burden in such minor subjects such as, perhaps, maths, biology, physics, and chemistry, because there will be AI to do that work for their “solutions”.

They will probably also be discouraged from reading any fiction that was written before the cli-fi genre was born. Yes, there is such a thing. Reading anything that does not have sustainability at its heart risks giving them ideas and brewing questions. As we all know well, climate change must not be questioned and neither must the solution to it.

Gangrene works its way through the body slowly but surely and it leaves dead tissue in its wake. Climate indoctrination is a gangrene of the mind. It works slowly but surely and leaves dead ideas, questions, and self-actualisation in its wake. It’s time for some antibiotics before the necrosis advances beyond treatment.