Germany celebrates its export successes while indoctrinating children in poor countries against "cars, buses and factories"

Promoting Germany's industrial exports is one of the most important activities of Angela Merkel's government: 

In Germany, industrial exports are seen not merely as the consequence of the competitiveness of the economy, but as a goal in themselves. A brand is an object of pride, for the left and the trade union movement as well. It’s also insurance against demographic decline, as investing the trade surpluses will help in part to cover Germany’s social expenditures in the future.

And Angela Merkel is making that outbound voyage. Since 2007 the Chancellor has made no less than 274 trips abroad: 168 within Europe, 59 to Asia, 29 to North America, 11 to Africa and seven to Latin America. Even little Moldova was entitled to a visit. In this crammed itinerary, China occupies a special place. In the last six years, the Chancellor has made no fewer than six lengthy official visits there, including two in 2012, spending time both in Beijing and in the provinces. Clearly this isn’t happening by accident. In the past 10 years trade between the two countries has shot up from €36bn to €144bn, with China becoming Germany's third-largest trading partner

However, the same German government is also promoting and financing a campaign to indoctrinate children in the Pacific region against "cars, buses and factories"  in the name of fighting (non-existent) human caused "climate change"  :

 6,000 copies of the children’s story book “The Children Take Action – a Climate Change Story” were today handed over to the Permanent Secretary for Education for delivery to all primary schools in Kiribati. The Curriculum Development and Resource Centre (CDRC) will use the book to improve literacy skills in te-Kiribati and English. In addition, the story book will help children learn, in a very simplified way, the basics of climate change and its impacts on our environment. For example: 
 
"Jone didn’t know what climate change was and asked his grandfather to explain. Grandpa told Jone that the Earth’s temperature is becoming hotter. “My temperature gets hot when I am unwell,” said Jone. “Yes!” said Grandpa. “The Earth is becoming unwell too. There is less food for the birds and the fish. That is why they are leaving our island.” “What is making the Earth sick?” Jone asked. “We are,” said Grandpa. “Gases from our cars, buses and factories are making the Earth too hot.” “People are driving more cars and building more factories. So the Earth is getting hotter and hotter.” “Just like putting too many blankets on me!” said Jone."

The story was developed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and 1500 copies were printed with funding from the Australian International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative. The book has since been translated into te-Kiribati and 6360 copies printed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)/Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Coping with Climate Change in the Pacific Island Region Programme (SPC/GIZ CCCPIR on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, BMZ).

The German government rightly takes pride in the country's global export success, which "will help in part to cover Germany’s social expenditures in the future". But one can only wonder why the same government wants to deny poor people in developing countries the same access to industrial and economic development.  

There is a fine word that explains what this is all about: Hypocrisy

Professor Frank Furedi: history "has suffered most from the impact of the anti-intellectual ethos of contemporary pedagogy"

King George V and Queen Mary at the Imperial Durbar in New Delhi in 1911.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
George Santayana

University of Kent sociology professor Frank Furedi joins the UK debate on how history should be taught: 

Unfortunately, the current debate surrounding the new history curriculum is not so much about its intellectual content as how it should be taught. So when Richard Evans, the Regius professor of history at Cambridge, denounced the curriculum because it allegedly sought to restore the ‘rote learning of the patriotic stocking-fillers so beloved of traditionalists’, his main target was a pedagogic approach which he caricatured as traditionalist. His ire towards a pedagogy that assumes children should possess a sense of chronology and periodisation, and ought to be familiar with basic historical facts, is widely shared by the educational establishment.

Of all the subjects taught in the school curriculum, history is the one that has suffered most from the impact of the anti-intellectual ethos of contemporary pedagogy. In line with the vulgar tendency to promote key skills and downgrade the intellectual content of the subject, history today is taught as a series of discrete and unconnected episodes that are used as resources for developing children’s critical learning skills. The presentation of this modularised and fragmented past is justified on the grounds that facts, such as dates and names, are relatively unimportant. Instead, chronology and knowledge of the past are far less significant than the skills required to use them. According to this simplistic paradigm, skills trump knowledge.

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Whatever the weaknesses of Gove’s proposed curriculum, at the very least it assumes that students studying history need to have a knowledge of the past. That represents great progress over the current academic-lite history curriculum.

Advocates of skills-dominated education regard the understanding of the past as having little relevance today. What they focus on instead is a complex, ever-changing and technologically sophisticated world. From this perspective, real history has no intrinsic virtue other than as a vehicle to teach ‘key skills’.
It is important to recall that there has been a long legacy of denouncing ‘traditional’ history on the basis that it is not relevant. Sneering remarks about ‘rote learning’, about the irrelevant lives of ancient monarchs, communicate the idea that history is an outdated relic of the nineteenth-century educational establishment.
But why should the subject of history be seen as a hangover from a nineteenth-century curriculum? Why should a study of people’s historical legacy be represented as irrelevant? Of course, from an instrumental perspective, the study of this subject is entirely unnatural and unrelated to the experience of children. How can the study of sixteenth-century English history be of relevance to twenty-first-century children confronted with the challenges of a hi-tech, globalised world? Yet, properly understood, history is probably the subject that contributes most to the broadening out of the imagination. One of its purposes is to help children transcend their own immediate experience and gain an understanding of how a community has evolved and developed an understanding of itself. It is ironic that policymakers, who are obsessed with training children to adapt to change, actively devalue the academic study of change.

Read the entire article here

(bolded text by NNoN)

How right Furedi is. This is of course not a problem that affects teaching only in the UK. Unfortunately the views of the leftist "progressive" education establishment are still dominant  in most other western nations, too.