I came across a pretty disturbing piece of news this morning…apparently the producers of An Inconvenient Truth recently offered the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) 50,000 free DVDs so that teachers could show the film in classrooms to educate kids about global warming. The NSTA declined the offer. According to an article in Sunday’s Washington Post, this was one of the NSTA’s reasons for rejecting the free DVD offer:
Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.” One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.
Interesting, no? You can also read another take on this topic written by John F. Borowski, who has been an environmental science teacher for the last 26 years. Borowski wrote an open letter to Gerald Wheeler, the Executive Director of the NSTA, in 2005, urging the NSTA to break ties with Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute.
You can do the same. Contact the NSTA, or better yet, email Gerald Wheeler directly at gwheeler@nsta.org. Let him know what you think of special interests in the class room. Remind him that the primary concern of the National Science Teachers Association should be children and education, and NOT the interests of oil companies.
Sad, but not surprising. Thanks for bringing this our attention- you can bet I’ll be contacting them!
Left by Georgia Hadley on November 30th, 2006