This past week, downtown St. Louis overflowed with science teachers from across the country attending the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) annual conference. The NSTA has a membership of over 50,000 and over 10,000 attend the national conference. This was my first visit to the conference, and I was inspired by the energy of so many dedicated educators, yet disturbed at the amount of influence energy companies, timber industries and other corporations had on our children’s education materials.

Recently, controversy surrounded the NSTA when it turned down an offer of 50,000 free copies of the film An Inconvenient Truth to distribute to its members. These claims have been disputed. What is not disputed is that distributing this film would have been in direct conflict with the goals of the oil, timber, and coal companies to spread their agendas in our classrooms. The NSTA is not willing to lose backing from the likes of ExxonMobil, Weyerhaeuser, or Peabody Coal by distributing a film that highlights logging, oil, and coal as significant factors in global warming. This is a much larger problem then An Inconvenient Truth not being distributed by the NSTA.

Weyerhaeuser sat in a corner booth reeling in educators with timber propaganda promoting clear cutting as a stabilizing force to earth and its communities. I stopped by the booth for Project Learning Tree (PLT), which develops the most widely distributed environmental education materials in the US. Unfortunately, all of PLT’s materials are funded by the likes of Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek.

I attended a “teaching climate change in middle schools” workshop presented by the Keystone Center, and expected a workshop on how to engage middle school students in global warming issues. I was confused when all that was discussed was CO2 sequestration, a technology that does not even exist. Not once during the curriculum were the words sustainable, solar, wind, or conservation mentioned. Why? Maybe because the Keystone Center has ties to oil, timber, and other energy companies and their curriculum is distributed in collaboration with Natural Energy Technology Laboratory, which promotes coal as the solution our energy problems. Are these the influences we want educating our children?

Educators come to the NSTA conference seeking the tools to inform and engage the next generation. They’re not blind to the propaganda they’re being given in the guise of educational materials. During an off-the-program discussion regarding corporate influence at the NSTA conference, over 30 educators stopped by to voice their concerns and discuss how to kick corporate agendas out of curricula.

Rainforest Action Network and the Native Forest Council spent the week passing out over 800 copies of An Inconvenient Truth, distributing forest and energy conservation information and lesson plans, while calling for responsible science education. These organizations’ booths were jammed with educators hungry for the materials to teach the next generation what’s at stake, and empower them to take their own actions, which only illustrates the growing call to kick the corporate agenda out of children’s curricula.

Posted on behalf of Nick Magel. Contact Education@RAN.org for more info