Stuff you learn from 8 year olds...

Yesterday I had an assembly and a class visit at the local Primary School. The assembly was very well presented by the P7 class and the the dual themes of the day were our role in protecting the environment and encouraging biodiversity.

The children were very much left to their own devices to come up with some presentations and I was surprised and discomfited by a frighteningly direct link between the ability of these primary school students present in the room to recycling their plastics and the earth not turning into a lifeless ball of dust. Planting bee-friendly plants and not swatting the little creatures will stave off the certainty of all life dying on the planet within weeks.

The message has gotten across.

I'm not sure that scaring the shit out of little children is ever noble. I'll leave it to pedagogues and future generations to determine whether it's even effective.

There must be some better way to encourage responsibile behaviour towards Creation.

One thing that came up during the discussion of 'invasive species' such as the Grey Squirrel was the fact that Hippos are an invasive species in South America. I sat there with my head cocked to one side like the RCA Victor dog. Hippos? South America?

Later in the day I googled 'hippos' and 'south america' and it appears that the kids were right - sort of.