Bill Scott's blog
Thoughts on learning, sustainability and the link between them
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Ten years on
I began to blog on this site 10 years ago today on June 10th 2009 and now, some 1900 posts later, I am still at it. The first post was about the south-west learning for sustainability coalition, which collapsed under...
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Plymouth: a very modern major university
I read that the University of Plymouth is being unfairly criticised for spending a mere £375,000 on the much needed refurbishment of the vice-chancellor’s office while prudently saving £zillions cutting 150 jobs that are now surplus to requirements. Fools! Who...
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Let's be done with GCSE
When communism fell apart in the USSR there was panic in an unusual sector of the economy: the school examinations industry. What was to become of all those questions about Marxist-Leninist theory and the history of the communist party —...
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The price of steel
As I write this, no coal is being used in a UK power station to generate electricity, and it has been this way for a while now. Indeed, zero-coal records have been set, and if plans come to fruition, the...
