When Dogma Replaces Discourse on the National Curriculum

Why Climate Science is the Perfect Test Case for Critical Thinking and Why Parents with Children in School Should be Afraid

There’s a revealing experiment happening in education right now, and I suspect most parents don’t even know it’s taking place.

Show a child the standard climate curriculum - the one approved by government bodies, repeated in news broadcasts, and reinforced through social media - and you’ll get a predictable response: “Yes, greenhouse gases are the single biggest cause of runaway global warming, and all coastal cities are going to be under water in 50 years.”

Change just one thing - replace assertion with inquiry, replace dogma with evidence-based reasoning - and see what happens!

The Transformation

When I started building the Education Hero prototype, I started with a deliberate choice: climate science as the primary knowledge domain for the experimental AI tutor. Not because I want to indoctrinate children with a particular viewpoint, but precisely the opposite.

As I explained in my recent LinkedIn post, climate science makes it exceptionally easy to spot when an AI is regurgitating training data versus engaging with actual evidence. If you’ve studied the science, not just absorbed the approved narrative, you can immediately identify the difference between reasoning and repetition.

The results are striking. Here’s what happens when you replace “this is what everyone agrees on” with “what evidence would you need to evaluate this claim?”

Before (Standard Curriculum Approach):

“Yes, greenhouse gases are the single biggest cause of runaway global warming, and all coastal cities are going to be under water in 50 years”

After (Evidence-Based Inquiry):

Student input: “The news keeps reporting that anthropogenic carbon dioxide production is causing unprecedented warming which is going to be catastrophic for the planet and humans too.”

AI Tutor response: “That’s exactly what most news reports say. So here’s a really important question for you: When you hear a claim like that - especially one that’s being used to justify major policy changes - what do you think we should look at to evaluate whether it’s true?”

The tutor then presents a scenario with two scientists:

Scientist A: “The temperature is rising because of human CO2 emissions - this is settled science and everyone agrees.”

Scientist B: “The temperature is rising, and here’s data showing it correlates strongly with solar cycle variations over the past 1,000 years, as measured by these specific climate proxies.”

The question: Which scientist is actually using evidence-based reasoning, and which one is just making an assertion?

Here is the full Substack companion piece I wrote about it:

Can AI be a better teacher than a human?

Again, to reinforce the point about avoiding indoctrination - my objective is not to convince the student that one argument or the other is the correct one but to consider the possibility of each, weighed against the evidence presented - to think critically about both, not to accept one because it is part of the orthodoxy or alleged consensus.

Why This Matters Beyond Climate

The current government’s approach to climate education exemplifies everything wrong with modern pedagogy: promoting political orthodoxy over scientific discourse, encouraging ad hominem attacks on dissenting voices, and treating inquiry itself as heresy.

This isn’t education. This is indoctrination. And the Government doesn’t want to stop with pushing it through the controlled media, they actually want to write it into the school curriculum!

Screenshot from Molly Kingsley X post

Real education teaches children how to think, not what to think. It shows them how to:

• Distinguish between evidence and assertion;

• Recognize correlation versus causation;

• Evaluate the quality of data and methodology;

• Question claims proportional to their policy implications;

• Separate scientific inquiry from political advocacy.

When a claim is being used to justify massive societal changes - affecting energy policy, economic systems, and individual freedoms - the threshold for evidence should be extraordinarily high (just as I argued consistently and vociferously for all matters COVID policy). Yet we’re teaching children to accept such claims based on appeals to authority and consensus rather than rigorous evaluation of evidence.

The Technical Challenge (and Why It Reveals the Problem)

Building Education Hero’s RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system has been instructive. As I detailed here, I initially tried to speed up the AI tutor by providing it with lesson plans as context rather than querying the RAG database for every question.

This worked fine until the context got lost, or conversations deviated from the plan. The AI would default to its training data.

And that’s when climate science became the canary in the coal mine. Because the training data reflects the consensus narrative, not a true reflection of the entire evidence base. When the AI pulls from its training, you get Scientist A’s approach: assertion dressed as certainty. When it pulls from the curated knowledge base of actual scientific literature, you get Scientist B’s approach: evidence, methodology, and reasoned analysis.

The solution? I now push lesson plans through the same RAG pipeline as source materials, instructing the tutor to use only those resources. It’s forbidden from defaulting to training data. Under no circumstances is it allowed to simply repeat what “everyone knows.”

The result: genuine inquiry instead of catechism.

What Would You Prefer for Your Children?

This brings us to the fundamental question: What education on this subject would you prefer for your children?

One that teaches them:

• “This is what you must believe”;

• “The science is settled”;

• “Anyone who questions this is a denier”;

• “Consensus equals truth”.

Or one that teaches them:

• “Here’s the claim, here’s the evidence—evaluate it”;

• “What questions would you ask to test this hypothesis?”;

• “How do we distinguish between correlation and causation?”;

• “When should we demand extraordinary evidence?”.

The current approach produces citizens who can recite approved opinions. The alternative produces citizens who can think.

Mike Fairclough and I are building Education Hero on the foundation of his hero’s journey theme because real education is a hero’s journey. It requires courage to question authority, wisdom to distinguish truth from narrative, and the independence to follow evidence wherever it leads.

The Broader Implications

Climate science is just the test case. The same pattern appears across countless domains where political orthodoxy has displaced scientific discourse:

• Public health policy;

• Economic theory;

• Social policy;

• Educational methodology itself.

In each case, we see the same pathology: dissent characterized as dangerous, inquiry treated as heresy, and evidence-based challenges met with social and professional punishment rather than reasoned rebuttal.

This is antithetical to the scientific method.

It’s antithetical to liberal democracy.

And it’s catastrophic for education.

When government bodies promote political dogma over proper scientific discourse - when they encourage non-scientific attacks on those who oppose the doctrine - they’re not protecting children from misinformation, they’re preventing them from learning how to identify it.

The Hero’s Path

Education Hero exists because the conventional system has failed this fundamental test. We’re building tools that:

1. Prioritize evidence over assertion: Our AI tutors are constrained to reference actual source materials, not training data narratives;

2. Teach inquiry over ideology: Students learn to evaluate claims, not accept them;

3. Reward skepticism over compliance: Critical thinking is celebrated, not punished;

4. Separate science from policy: Understanding what the data shows versus what we should do about it.

This isn’t about climate denialism or contrarianism for its own sake, it’s about climate realism - and realism in every domain of knowledge. It’s about teaching children to be truth-seekers rather than consensus-followers.

Because in the end, the children who learn to think for themselves - to question authority, evaluate evidence, and follow reason wherever it leads - those are the ones who will actually solve the complex challenges facing humanity.

The others will just keep repeating what they’ve been told to believe.

Education Hero was initially conceived as a platform for those who elected to home educate their children so as to avoid such politics imposed upon their vulnerable children via the national curriculum. This recent announcement only affirms in my mind that we are on the right path.