OPEN LETTER: Contest promoting nuclear energy in schools harms critical thinking

For educators, teaching students how to deconstruct bias and how to enhance critical thinking skills is an overarching curriculum mandate. Information literacy is tied to critical thinking skills and teachers have an obligation to challenge students particularly to consider a wide variety of resources in their research projects.

The promotional contest supported by the New Brunswick government on the topic of small modular nuclear reactors, also known as SMRs, breaks every rule in the book.

The contest asks students to persuasively consider a technology that doesn’t even exist. Furthermore, the importance of exploring the environmental and health risks of SMRs is not included in the suggested topics.

What kind of critical thinking is promoted in the sample title, “My favourite SMR and why”? None whatsoever.

It is a travesty to offer cash prizes on behalf of an extremely questionable industry veiled in the form of a contest, particularly when there is no intention  whatsoever of providing unbiased information.

We are adding injury to insult by encouraging youth to argue for an industry whose profits are linked to the potential sacrifice of the air and waters those same students will rely upon in their own futures.

Members of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War Canada published a letter on February 8 in New Brunswick newspapers, including the Telegraph-Journal, calling on the New Brunswick government to cancel the contest and consider promotion of this dangerous technology in schools unacceptable.

Let’s allow our leaders of tomorrow to exercise the skills they will need in classrooms that provide clarity — classrooms that can resist the fog of political propaganda.

After all, teachers hold both parental and public trust to provide all children with the best tools they will need in order to thrive within an increasingly complex world.

Kathrin Winkler, retired teacher, Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace; Sandy Greenberg, Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace; Sarah Morgan; Linda Scherzinger; Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, PhD and professor emerita; Brenda Holoboff; Ann Verrall, documentary filmmaker; Connie Dushene, registered nurse; Helen Lofgren, retired teacher, Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace; the Reverend Margaret Sagar, ret’d UCC Minister, former teacher, member of VOW; Clare Christie, retired high school teacher and lawyer; Laura Myers, NB Retired Teachers Association member; Jim Gurnett; Elinor Reynolds, VOW member; Wendy Watson Smith; Susan Adams; Deborah Luscomb, Touching the Earth Collective; Paul Schwartzentruber; and Margaret Shane, Secretary, Mahatma Gandhi Canadian Foundation for World Peace.