Bill Scott's blog
Thoughts on learning, sustainability and the link between them
-
Two hours max for wellbeing
Research by the universities of Exeter and Uppsala, published in Scientific Reports, found that people who spend at least 2 hours a week in natural settings such as town parks, woodlands, country parks and beaches are more likely to report good health...
-
An Urgent Plea from the Future
Last week, I read a message from the Global Center for Human Change – a not-for-profit organisation in New York – about a new resource: An Urgent Plea from the Future: A Guidebook for Conscious World Citizens. The message began:...
-
What teachers think about climate and curriculum
Last Friday, the Guardian published part of the results of a YouGov survey of teachers commissioned by Oxfam on behalf of the UKSCN. Here are the full results: Thinking generally about the UK's education system... To what extent,...
Latest posts
-
Five go down a funk hole at the BBC
For me, the worst part of the BBC's lamentable 'debate' on Tuesday night was not the format (clearly designed for 4 candidates), the moderator's failure to be moderate, impartial or in control, or the poorly-constructed questions. Rather it was the...
-
Powerful geographical knowledge
I've been reading John Huckle's recent paper – that is, his latest re-write of his perennial plea for more critical realism in geography teaching and life more generally. The latest iteration of the paper will be familiar to those of...
-
Reading the climate change small print
I said yesterday that there had been wide-ranging approval for the decision to go for net-zero carbon [N-ZC] in the UK by 2050. This is not universally the case, however, and a number of points have emerged. The first is...
-
Should there be zero poverty before net-zero carbon?
The reactions to the UK government's commitment to N-ZC (net-zero carbon) by 2050 have been pretty positive both here and elsewhere, although it failed to get a mention at last week's parish council (PC) meeting where discussion was (literally and...
-
University carbon cuts
I came across this summary of how one UK university has been responding to the need to use less carbon (and other stuff) in its operations. I was quite impressed seeing how student numbers have grown: – Electricity use down...
-
Sex and gender are all the same to Edexcel
More from the GCSE barricades. In this year's exams, Edexcel asked students to identify the gender shown by a diagram of a set of chromosomes, and then explain how gender is inherited from parents. Except, of course, it isn't. It's...
-
Intellectuals as natural luddites
This is an extract from CP Snow's 1959 Rede lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. It was pertinent 60 years ago and remains so today. I read the lecture whilst drafting a chapter on ecological imagination for the...