The Coal Industry Teaches the Teachers In Texas

In Texas the coal industry has a program to ensure that their agenda makes it to the classrooms of the Lone Star State. The industry sponsors “Coal Camp,” five days of workshops for Texas schoolteachers in which the coal industry schools the schoolteachers on the industry's message.

            What’s in it for the teachers? They can get credit to renew their teaching certificates. And the workshops are paid for—to the tune of about $100,000 a year— by the coal industry. The teachers pay nothing for coal camp.

In Appalachia they are far more direct with their message, going right to the classrooms and schoolchildren. But the effort of this program in Texas is probably the same, getting the next generation to accept the methods of extraction used by the industry to get coal out of the ground and into the power plants.

Any industry has the right to promote its business, but taking business, any business not just coal, into the classroom is wrong. After the three R’s, schools are to teach history, the sciences, and give kids a notion of critical thinking skills. The children will have plenty of time during their lives to absorb the promotion of the coal industry through their normal PR campaigns and their advertising, and all the coal companies are welcome to come into the schools on career day to attract the workers that they might need in the mines and in their offices. But the coal companies should leave the schoolchildren of Texas alone to do their math problems and learn their grammar.