Michael Gove’s appointment to the Defra brief has all of the usual suspects up in arms, and as usual, the truth is a lot less exciting than the social media ranting. Take, for example, this tweet from Paul Johnson, the deputy editor of the Guardian, no less:
Gove back in: Environment Secretary.
The minister who tried to remove climate change from curriculum https://t.co/U1VA3oGOun— Paul Johnson (@paul__johnson) June 11, 2017
Or this one, from Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation:
In 2013 it took Ed Davey to block Michael Gove dropping climate change from the school curriculum, now Gove is handed the environment brief
— Andrew Simms (@AndrewSimms_uk) June 11, 2017
Gove made his original suggestion about changes to the curriculum back in 2013, but unfortunately for the perennially outraged members of the green blob, even a cursory look at articles from the time reveals that he was suggesting only that covering climate change in both geography and science was probably overkill. He thought it should be restricted to science. This is not unreasonable, in my opinion. Certainly it’s a great deal more reasonable than what is happening now. As I noted in my report on climate change education in schools:
A search of the AQA past paper repository returned 526 documents containing the expression ‘global warming’ and 391 containing the expression ‘climate change’, spanning a wide range of subjects. For example, the expression ‘global warming’ could be found in papers on economics, chemistry, geography, religious studies, physics, French, humanities, biology, citizenship, English and science.
This situation is, frankly, pretty disgusting. It’s not education, it’s indoctrination. But, let’s face it, indoctrination is precisely what the green blob wants. Mr Gove can expect the same ‘special’ attention that Owen Paterson received in his time in the same role in government.