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Today's Top News
09.08.10 - 12:47 PM
Teach Your Children Well
The eminently wise officials of California recruited BP, which boasted an iffy safety record even before they trashed the Gulf of Mexico, to help craft a new environmental education curriculum for grades K through 12 in over 1,000 school districts statewide. Revisionist history, anyone? Next up: Goldman Sachs will teach "Morality in Business."
"I'd hate to see how a section in future textbooks mentioning the BP oil spill will look," said Lisa Graves of the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy, a critic of so-called "greenwashing" techniques by corporations to make their products appear eco-friendly.
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7 Comments so far
Show AllOh jeez.
Joe
Next up: some nifty standardized tests on the BP curriculum, courtesy of Neil 'No Child Left a Dime' Bush.
While they are at it, BP, Halliburton, and Transocean can teach us about taking responsibility too.
I honestly think they do these things as an attempt to drive us insane.....
The only thing mentioned in the article from the Sacramento Bee about curriculum is how BP is mentioned in the curriculum as giving grants to teachers, UC Berkeley and other attempts at greenwashing their image. Without being able to see the curriculum we won't know much more. Sure BP could lend a hand in the basics of environmental education. What remains to be seen is what there input will be about how the business they are in is leading directly to global warming and what does this new curriculum say about global warming? Or how they would explain the damage done to the Earth by the oil business whether it is harm to the environment from the spills and the pollution it causes or the indirect problem of mass consumption of petroleum based products that end up in the landfill.
Of course it is worth looking at the curriculum, and there are lots of things one might refrain from criticising until doing so.
However, there is plenty we might reasonably conclude already, and no reason to pretend naivete. British Petroleum is an organization designed to gather money and wealth to the owners of British Petroleum. They have a gigantic financial interest in convincing the US public that British Petroleum and petrol companies in general are basically good guys, passingly well run, necessary for the well being of all concerned.
They have decided that spending some money in California public schools is worth having an inside track with people who will eventually vote for or against propositions to drill in the waters off the state of California.
Please note that so far I have made no claim about the curriculum itself, and no claim that an accurate and representative, unstacked curriculum would refute. This already indicates that California should not allow British Petroleum to teach its children. It also indicates that no state should allow British Petroleum, Exxon, Halliburton, Bechtel, GE, Monsanto, Xe, the Navy Seals, the US Marines, the World Bank, or the IMF to teach its children - or its adults.
I should think that the truth of the prior statements should not depend on what we might surmise about the curriculum itself. But even here, why should we ignore the obvious?
British Petroleum intends to present and promote the most favorable possible consideration of oil exploration, drilling, mining, transport and use in general, and British Petroleum's involvement in these in particular. We do know, then, that the materials presented to California's children will be misleading, and as misleading as British Petroleum considers to be practically possible under the circumstances.
Does this mean that British Petroleum presents a grotesquely stacked appraisal of the current energy picture, concluding that Drill, Baby Drill is the royal road for the present? Does it mean that British Petroleum does a job passable to the bland, post-Disney standards of the California educational system, then slaps a friendly cartoon BP logo with birds and plants, claiming to have kiddie interest well at heart?
It only matters slightly, and should not matter in California's decision: both are severe and damaging disinformation -- and, frankly, given California's standards in such things otherwise, probably not overwhelmingly different.
I am fascinated again to see the double standards between people and corporations. Californian schools would not and do not invite known human felons to teach. Here British Petroleum is allowed to prepare materials in the specific areas of its multiple felonies.
Californians,
while we watch the sack of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan over oil and gas concerns - while we watch the menacing of Venezuela and Iran over oil concerns - we might do well to remember that the waters off of California harbor a considerable oil reserve.
British Petroleum has boarded California's K-12 schools as an exploratory measure prior to drilling.
This is serial crime, now in the classrooms in California.