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Over the last few years, the Left has become increasingly bold with the type of teaching material it brings into classrooms.  While biased information was once common.  Now, blatantly false information cloaked with good intentions is the norm.

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Last year, I was horrified to learn from The New York Times that Annie Leonard’s video, “The Story of Stuff” was being shown to extremely young students in schools around the country.  In case you are unfamiliar with “The Story of Stuff,” imagine compiling every environmental and Marxian economic fallacy into one video with a smiley face.  Imagine teaching students that military spending is 50% of the budget (it isn’t), that 4% of our original forests are left in America (our forests are increasing) and we are using too much “stuff” (only if you ignore trivial economic concepts like efficiency and prices, and think our prosperity must be curtailed).

Consequently, I spent about a week combing through the video’s footnotes, and subsequently created the 4-part “Story of Stuff” critique debunking the entire video.  Since that time, I have received hundreds of emails telling me that my video critiques were used to get Leonard’s video out of the classroom.  I’ve also been on Glenn Beck’s television show and CNN to discuss some of the many problems with Leonard’s work. (more…)

All over the United States taxpayer funded public schools are teaching this little lesson? It’s from a documentary, The Story of Stuff, and it’s about how the developed world, especially America, destroys everything it touches to make stuff no one needs and then dumps it and kills all the animals. 

We’ll start with extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is a fancy word for trashing the planet. What this looks like is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals. — The Story of Stuff  

This and other ‘teachable moments’ are being brought to a classroom near you by The Story of Stuff. According to the New York Times it has been watched by over 7 million children in the US. Annie Leonard, the filmmaker, says she spent 10 years traveling the globe collecting the information contained in the 20-minute film.  (more…)

“The picture got great reviews but let’s take a chance anyway.” That’s what I usually say to my wife when we’re planning a night out at the movies. Critics and I are not usually on the same page. But the Disney release called “Earth,” a compendium of brilliant nature footage cribbed from a BBC series, seemed irresistible, even though it got raves. True, there’d been quibbling about the corn-ball narration and the selection of stentorian-voiced James Earl Jones to deliver it, but the summation of the reviews was: don’t miss it.

Disney had taken miles of extraordinary footage from the long-running English nature series and condensed and shaped it into a story of sorts: mama polar bear and her cubs emerge out of hibernation in the arctic snow, with the adorable babies blinking at their first sight of the summer sun. She begins the task of teaching them to survive. Papa bear, meanwhile, or “dad” as he’s known in the narration, is off on the ice floe, trying to catch a seal for his dinner. But “global warming” is making this difficult to do as the ice is breaking up earlier than usual. Dad falls into the frigid water and begins swimming for his life. He swims and swims till he gets to Antarctica where there is an abundance of seals. But dad is too weak from all that swimming, can’t nab a seal, and lies down and dies. End of family. (more…)