[rhaway84773]

> These specific topics are also clearly selected for left wing environmental radicalism e.g. "earth science" means climate change, "infectious diseases" means teaching kids how important and brilliant lockdowns and masks are, "biodiversity" means the importance of not building anything and so on.

Sounds like the only ideologically bent character in this entire saga is you.

[revelio]

Given the past few years, what exactly do you think terms like earth science or infectious diseases will mean in practice? Not some hypothetical curriculum that might exist in a theoretical universe, but in this one.

[hot_gril]

My elementary school science class in the early 2000s was mostly earth and plant science, with a unit on viruses too. This seems pretty normal. And in my case, the teacher said that climate change isn't caused by humans.

I have no idea what this little draft means in New Zealand. There's not much to extrapolate from.

[revelio]

Ah right I see.

That sort of thing sounds OK for primary/elementary school. You'd expect science at that level to be focused on soft stuff. Expecting kids of that age to do real experiments or care about the philosophy of science is too much, if you can get them out into the garden and looking at insects and flowers then that's a good start.

I think there's a subtle difference between viruses/bacteria and what government officials mean when they talk about infectious diseases. Obviously any good biology curriculum will cover viruses and bacteria at the microscopic level. But when governments talk about "infectious diseases" what they really mean is the macro scale of epidemiology and other social sciences, because they're constantly being told by rich NGOs that we now live in an age of pandemics, and they think about disease purely through the lens of social policy and enforcement. The response to COVID was widely condemned as un-scientific because link between what academics/civil servants recommended to governments and what was actually scientifically known about viruses was nearly non-existent.

[aakresearch]

Exactly! Prior to 2020 "infectious diseases" wouldn't even have make it to the list as explicit inclusion. Everyone would have thought it is silly to single the mundane topic out like this. It is as ridiculous now as it was back then, but serves as a perfect giveaway of their agenda. See, they bolted it on as a "fifth" to their "list of four", but couldn't be bothered to fix the numerical :)