Give Me the Child at Seven and I will Give You a Coal Industry Supporter: CEDAR in the Schools of Appalachia

The headline of the Logan Banner, the paper of record for Logan West Virginia, reads Logan Middle School first at CEDAR of Southern West Virginia. Beneath the proud headline the news story goes on to explain that a group of eight graders won a first place award at a “coal fair” for producing this rather clever video found here.
              CEDAR stands for Coal Education Development and Resource, a program developed by the coal industry 20 years ago and whose somewhat wordy goal is “to facilitate the increase of knowledge and understanding of the many benefits the Coal Industry provides in our daily lives by providing financial resources and coal education materials to implement its study in the school curriculum.” CEDAR started in Kentucky, but has since spread to other coal producing states.

The targeted curricula are K through 12. The financial resources are grants given to teachers. It’s basically dollars for school supplies, a seductive offer for many teachers in cash-strapped schools. The “coal education materials” are booklets, pamphlets, and DVDs with titles like “What Everyone Should Know About Coal” and “America’s Fuel.”

As you can see in this video, these fairs are not small. They may be some of the biggest things going on for weeks in some of the smaller communities of Appalachia.

Though some of their materials encourage teachers to “form an informed and unbiased opinion of the coal industry,” the goal of the coal industry’s pamphlets, posters, and DVDs is to instill in young minds a positive outlook of the coal industry, even using junk science to do so. One of the DVDs offered by the organization is called “The Greening of Planet Earth” that makes the assertion that “our world is deficient in carbon dioxide, and a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is very beneficial.” CEDAR reviews the teachers’ lesson plans of their curricula, particularly if the organization feels that lesson plans have unsupported bias against the coal industry. Could it be considered an unsupported bias against the coal industry to point out that CEDAR is completely wrong about the world having a deficit of CO2?

Bad science, aside, is CEDAR something that we want allowed in our schools? Or is the captive audience of a school classroom a place where any industry or business is allowed to hand out pamphlets and posters to schoolchildren? Even if you think that is perfectly fine for an industry to gain a large presence in schools, shouldn’t there be some sort of academic fairness doctrine that says that if you’re going to have a coal fair one week, you have to have an alternative energy fair the next week, or a fair that concentrates on environmental consequences of coal mining?
                Or maybe they could have a fair that encourages critical thinking, coal or no coal.