Eco-School: Learning to Freeze in the Dark

It's probably a good idea to teach kids what the logical consequences of forbidding all practical means of producing electrical power or heating buildings with fossil fuel, but I doubt that was the message that they intended to convey:

Children left to freeze in the classrooms after head turns off heating on coldest day of year 'to show how school can be eco-friendly'

Furious parents vented their anger at a headteacher who turned off his school's heating on one of the coldest days of the year. Pupils at Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, were forced to grip their pens through thick gloves and wear their coats and hats in class as temperatures dropped to 1C. The school's headmaster, Rob Benzie, shut down the radiators as an experiment to show students how the school could cut its carbon footprint.

But staff and parents condemned the plan, branding it 'barbaric' and 'beyond stupid'. One teacher said: 'It was absolutely ridiculous I have never experienced working in such cold conditions. I am all for saving the environment but to conduct an "experiment" as the head calls it on such a cold day is beyond stupid. The kids were complaining, no one was working properly some of them could not even write because they could not grip a pen through woolly gloves. We have a number of pupils with mental and physical disabilities here and they really struggled with the cold. It was unnecessary and in my opinion barbaric.'

I cheated a little in the title; I don't see where they turned off the lights too; but they should have.  This is a demonstration they should try at the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University or the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.