Teachers have a captive audience. It's bad enough, but somewhat forgivable, that through our shortcomings or oversimplifications, we occasionally create misconceptions regarding electronic energy levels or evolution's mechanisms. But the inoculation of curriculum with political agendas should be unacceptable in the classroom, even if the ideology seems to be on the side of the angels.
At a well-organized STEM symposium I attended a few days ago, a young teacher blemished his quality-presentation by recommending radicalmath.org, a "resource for educators interested in integrating issues of social and economic justice into their curriculum." They propose that rather than merely computing the population density of dandelions or the probability of encountering a red light at an intersection, we should be presenting our kids with problems like:
1) Calculate the liquor store and fast food restaurant density. Look at how many liquor stores/fast food stores are in your neighborhood and compare them to the number of schools in the area.
2) Explore the probability that a trafficstop should be (and is) of a person of color.
3) If Walmart factory children workers make 30 dollars per week, what is their average wage per hour?
(I should point out that the third problem is not necessarily from their web site, but from one workshop at the symposium.) In 2007, four hundred teachers attended a radical math conference in New York City. Another one took place this year(2012) in San Francisco and there's one coming up in January 2013. These educators seem to believe that teaching in a conventional way is too dull and that they have an antidote for what our children otherwise learn in an unfair society.
In a similar vein, a great deal of environmental issues have found their way into all subjects. In these realms, it's difficult to dissociate the science from subjective policies, and at times the environmental science presented in high schools is riddled with factual errors. In recent years I've seen students being fed a minestrone of nonsense including:
In a similar vein, a great deal of environmental issues have found their way into all subjects. In these realms, it's difficult to dissociate the science from subjective policies, and at times the environmental science presented in high schools is riddled with factual errors. In recent years I've seen students being fed a minestrone of nonsense including:
(1) a French-as-a-second language article that confused the ozone hole with climate change.
(2) a made-for-teachers booklet from the right-wing Fraser Institute, which argued that CO2 cannot possibly present a problem to humanity because its concentration in the atmosphere is below 1%.
An environmental club has its place in a school. So does teaching the greenhouse effect at the appropriate level. But to force-feed uncritical minds a mixture of science and politics at the expense of the basics is not pedagogically sound. 
What is fashionable in schools is to get students to fast- forward through the science, read a couple of superficial newspaper articles and have them write an essay about an environmental topic.
Students and people in general don't suddenly and magically have worthwhile discussions about complex issues. To expect students to take a stand on topics whose surface they've barely scratched is to encourage intellectual dishonesty.
Even when we stick to the science, students have a hard time grasping ecology without a good grounding in biology and chemistry. Pedagogues argue that exposing students to relevant, environmental issues makes it more likely for them to get turned on to science. What could happen instead is that young people might get overwhelmed and eventually desensitized to important environmental problems.
What is fashionable in schools is to get students to fast- forward through the science, read a couple of superficial newspaper articles and have them write an essay about an environmental topic.Students and people in general don't suddenly and magically have worthwhile discussions about complex issues. To expect students to take a stand on topics whose surface they've barely scratched is to encourage intellectual dishonesty.
Even when we stick to the science, students have a hard time grasping ecology without a good grounding in biology and chemistry. Pedagogues argue that exposing students to relevant, environmental issues makes it more likely for them to get turned on to science. What could happen instead is that young people might get overwhelmed and eventually desensitized to important environmental problems.
