Big oil companies have been preventing schools from teaching our children about how to take care of creation. They’re doing this because they make more money from people polluting the Earth than from being good stewards of it.
The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) released a report on February 18 called “Polluting Education: The Influence of Fossil Fuels on Children’s Education in Canada”. It shows just how much big oil companies are deciding what Canadian kids are learning about the earth.
Around 40 oil companies have been caught meddling in everything from worksheets that kids fill out to field trips to Alberta’s K-12 curriculum.
Through these avenues, they tell stories of the earth that encourage kids to support these big companies’ actions.
These companies are blowing their own pro-environmental actions out of proportion in the textbooks. They’re teaching kids that they, the kids, are individually responsible to take care of the earth. They’re making sure kids don’t learn about how much the oil industry contributes to pollution.
Raffi, Canada’s beloved children’s singer who is famous for his song Baby Beluga, said of the paper’s findings, “We must call this out for what it is: shameful.”
Canada, and Alberta, need to teach children how to care for the land. But across the country, oil and gas companies are making sure that they learn the opposite.
The Albertan Context
In 2014, the Alberta government brought in Suncor Energy and Syncrude to help write the Kindergarten to Grade 3 curriculum. They wrote the Grade 4 to Grade 12 curriculum with input from Cenovus.
Education resources in Alberta, too, haven’t tried all that hard to hide how much oil and gas companies are influencing them.
The Alberta Council for Environmental Education lists Suncor as one of its major funders. This group offers programs that teach our children how to be environmental leaders in the community and that help schools become more environmentally friendly.
Inside Education, one of Alberta’s most well-loved education resources, lists multiple oil and gas companies as funders. Suncor, Enbridge, Pembina, and Strathcona Resources Ltd all make the list. The website even thanks these groups for their “core leadership support.”
Suncor CEO Richard Kruger makes about $37 million a year, on average. He makes more per day than you or I make in three years of work. He makes almost as much per hour as Education Assistants make in a year.
People like him don’t see the world the way we do. They see the world in terms of what they can get out of it, not what they can put into it.
If people like that are deciding what our children learn, they’re going to make sure kids learn to think like him. Or they’re going to make sure that kids at least support his way of thinking.
Teachers Can’t Do It All
TheRockies.Life spoke with a teacher who taught grade 7 science at a Christian school for a year and a half.
The school where she worked didn’t help students learn how to be stewards. There weren’t posters in the hallways teaching kids how to recycle. They didn’t have special assemblies about pollution. Even things as simple and obvious as drink bottle recycling were left to teachers.
“In our school teachers could request a special bin for drink containers. And then we were responsible to deal with that ourselves,” she says.
She recalls how at the end of the day, she would bring “this disgusting bag of half full drink containers into my car.” At school, she was solely responsible for educating kids about taking care of the earth in her science class. But she was also solely responsible to actually do the work of caring for the earth.
Good Science Education
Andrew Kirk is a researcher in K-12 science education and an assistant professor at The King’s University in Edmonton. In his paper, “Embodying Climate Change Education: Stories in the Secondary Science Classroom,” he talks about the importance of teaching students about how earth’s ecosystems work, and about what they need to thrive.
A Christian, his belief in God is fundamental to his belief that it’s important to teach kids good science.
“Creation care flows from our role on earth as God’s steward,” he says in the paper. “Tending to creation is part of the mandate for reflecting God’s loving care in our world.”
A survey the paper highlights shows that the experience of the teacher we spoke to is happening on a large scale. Teachers don’t feel like they have the resources to teach well. They don’t have the knowledge. They don’t have the skills. They need more time to teach well.
What they need is good resources to teach with.
And all too often, the resources that teachers have at their disposal come from oil-rich companies who want nothing more than to continue to pillage the earth.
Super-rich oil companies shouldn’t have any place in our education or in our schools. Our schools should be safe havens for children to learn how beautiful creation is, and how to make sure we keep it as beautiful as it can be.
What Can We Do?
The CAPE report gives us some answers about how we can move forward to make sure our kids get a good education.
It recommends that provincial governments put policies in place that limit the role that oil companies can play in participating in kids’ education.
It recommends that oil companies not be allowed to advertise to kids.
It recommends that ministries of education create new resources that teach kids what it actually means to care for the earth.
A world in which this happens is a world where our kids learn to see the world for what it really is and what it really needs, rather than through the gluttonous lens that oil companies want us to see it.
