ARTICLE & RESOURCES: Coal, The Poison We Never Talk About in School

[Ryan Goble]

"The Poison We Never Talk About in School" is part of the Zinn Education Project "If We Knew Our History" series. Here are lessons and resources for teaching outside the textbook about coal.

 

Here is a screen shot from the artice. 

 

Of special interest was this paragraph...

Given coal’s enormous role in the most significant challenge facing humanity—the climate crisis—you’d imagine that coal would occupy a similarly central place in our textbooks. You’d be wrong.

No, what textbooks do instead is to leave students with the impression that coal is something we should regard as a 19th-century phenomenon. Take the widely used Modern World History, published by McDougal Littell, owned by giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The text devotes three sentences to coal mining in the 1840s, telling students: “The most dangerous conditions of all were to be found in coal mines.” And: “Many women and children were employed in the mining industry because they were the cheapest source of labor.” Three hundred pages later, a single brief mention of coal in one sentence on nonrenewable sources of energy underscores the book’s subtext: Coal was a problem in the 19th century, but today it’s no big deal.

 

 

 

You can read thefull article HERE.

[Antonio Lopez]

Thanks for sharing this. How disturbing!

[Ryan Goble]

One could even do a SECOND dissertation on textbooks coverage of enviornmental issues, right? Get on that :)