Plenty of depressing news today.
Of more than 900 teachers who responded to a poll conducted by Penn State University political scientist Michael Berkman and colleagues, 32% agreed that creationism and intelligent design should be taught as scientifically unsound. Forty percent said that such explanations are religiously valid but inappropriate for science class.
However, 25% said they devoted classroom time to creationism or intelligent design. Of these, about one-half — 12% of all teachers — called creationism a “valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species,” and the same number said that “many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian theory.”
- Wired Science: One in Eight High School Teachers Still Teach Creationism
Apparently the rulings of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, don’t mean anything anymore.
Of the 939 who responded, 2% said they did not cover evolution at all, with the majority spending between 3 and 10 classroom hours on the subject.
- New Scientist: 16% of US Science Teachers are Creationists
Three and ten hours?! Evolution is the basic fundamental platform that all of modern biology and medical science rests upon and they only cover it for three to ten hours? No wonder why our kids are blithering idiots! Our teachers are blithering idiots!
When Berkman’s team asked about the teachers’ personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.
Teachers who subscribed to these young-Earth creationist views, perhaps not surprisingly, spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers, the survey revealed.
The survey also showed that teachers who had taken more science courses themselves – and especially those who had taken a course in evolutionary biology – devoted more class time to evolution than teachers with weaker science backgrounds.
- New Scientist
ATTENTION PARENTS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS:
Many public schools have “open house” days toward the beginning of the year. Many parents don’t go to these events. If you have a child in school and you care about their education, GO! If you missed the event or you don’t know when it is, call your child’s school and make an appointment to meet with your child’s science teacher. Go to the school and ask your child’s biology or geology teachers how many science courses they have taken. Ask them how much time they are going to devote to the teaching of evolution. Ask them how old the Earth is. Ask them if they will be studying the principles of natural selection. Ask them if they will accept incorrect answers on tests and quizzes if they are religiously sensitive. Ask them if evolution will even be on any tests and quizzes.
The problem is bigger than most like to think. I had a great biology teacher in high school, but she never touched the subject of evolution. She accepted and understood evolution, but she was scared of her religious students. I did not get any sort of decent education on evolution until I started reading Dawkins and Gould for myself. Don’t let your kids go through the same shit.
The study’s authors note that courtroom victories — classroom creationism has consistently been struck down in U.S. courts – [are] apparently insufficient to guarantee an accurate depiction of evolution. Neither will rigorous state science standards, like those recently passed in Florida, do the trick. Instead they recommend teacher certification requiring the completion of an evolutionary biology course.
- Wired Science
Wait a second… what? Biology teachers aren’t already required to take courses on evolutionary biology? Seriously? Jesus Fucking Christ! Would you go to a doctor who was not required to take at least a few courses on pharmaceuticals? Would you hop into a cab with a cab driver who didn’t take at least a few hours of drivers’ education courses? Why the hell would you send your child to learn biology from someone who hasn’t taken a course on evolution?
If you’re not outraged yet, read on.
In what could be a major change in public school policy in Tennessee, the “Bible in Schools Act,” sponsored by Sen. Roy Herron, D-Dresden, has passed the State Senate by a unanimous vote.
The bill authorizes the State Board of Education to create a non-sectarian high school course about the Bible and its impact on the world.
“Our government school teachers cannot constitutionally preach the Bible, but they can teach the Bible,” Herron said.
“I want students to study the greatest and most popular book in history. I want young people to understand how the Bible has enormously impacted literature, art, music, culture, history and politics. A Bible course will help students understand our culture and our highest and best values.”
Currently, 78 of Tennessee’s 95 counties do not have a single high school offering Bible courses. “There are school systems all over the state that are afraid to offer a course about the Bible because they’re afraid of being sued,” Herron said. “But the First Amendment does not require students to leave their Bibles at home, and the First Amendment does not require hostility to the Bible or faith.”
Prior to passage of the “Bible in Schools Act,” Herron and House sponsor Rep. Mark Maddox, D-Dresden, obtained an opinion from the state’s attorney general that the proposed legislation is constitutional. The attorney general commended the bill for going to “considerable lengths in order to comply with Supreme Court opinions on religious materials in public schools.’”
The bill is not exclusive, and it will not interfere with the few existing courses.
It will, however, make the Bible course a state-approved elective and no longer will school boards have to apply for a special course through the state Department of Education.
The “Bible in Schools Act” is scheduled to be heard by the full House today (Tuesday).
Check out the language here: “a non-sectarian high school course about the Bible.” Notice it is not a secular course on the Bible. Non-sectarian does not mean secular. Non-sectarian is still religious. All it means is that Protestants and Catholics can both go to class without getting upset at each other. This is a non-sectarian Christian class that will teach the Bible as truth. Don’t believe me? Move to Tennessee for a few months and get back to me then.
Let’s look at this quote.
“Our government school teachers cannot constitutionally preach the Bible, but they can teach the Bible.” WRONG. You cannot “teach the Bible.” You may teach about the Bible. You may teach about how it was written, by men, or you may teach about its cultural impacts. You may not “teach the Bible,” in any Christian understanding of the term. Growing up in church, I was often told to “teach the Bible”–exact same phrase–to my friends at school to get them to come to church and accept Jesus.
“I want students to study the greatest and most popular book in history.” WRONG. Why is the Bible, a self-contradicting, committee-authored, historically inaccurate book, the “greatest book in history?” Are you considering that the book was used to justify the Crusades, the witch trials, the Holocaust, the KKK, the murder of countless doctors and scientists over the years and thousands of wars? Wow! What a great book! Let’s teach the kids that it’s true and maybe they’ll grow up to do great things too! Like kill the Jews and blacks!
“I want young people to understand how the Bible has enormously impacted literature, art, music, culture, history and politics.” Okay… no problem here. However, this would best be done as a chapter in a history or literature class. A comparative religion class might even be good.
“A Bible course will help students understand our culture and our highest and best values.” WRONG WRONG WRONG! The Bible does not contain our highest values. We contain our highest values. We can cherry pick the Bible to find things that make it seem to mirror the values we have already chosen for ourselves through out natural ethical sense and the cultural moral zeitgeist. We can’t, however, take our morals from the Bible. Slavery, misogyny, racism, homophobia, murder, rape, genocide, theft, torture, genital mutilation… unless if these are your highest values, the Bible is not where you get your values from.
“the First Amendment does not require hostility to the Bible or faith.”
Actually, the First Amendment, as interpreted repeatedly by the Supreme Court, requires that schools not teach the Bible or any faith as holding any priority over any other religious text or faith. Unless you are holding a Qur’an class and a Bhagavad Gita class, no Bible class.
You’re not going to do it correctly or legally, so don’t do it at all. Keep the Bible out of our schools.
If you’re still not outraged, you hate children.
Where did you get those definitions? Here is my take on the two. Creationism is a religious belief rooted and tied to a sacred text. While there is difference in how the creation happened, the root belief is that a supernatural being created life. Intelligent design, though some creationist have flocked to it, is a scientific movement that says that life as it exists on earth today could not have arisen simply through chance and natural selection (i.e. evolution). ID proponents say that the evidence points to an intelligent agency, which could just as much be an alien as God. Like evolution, ID doesn’t really help with first causes, because all it is looking at is life on earth. Life on other planets or of our alien creators could be very different.
My apologies if I took your statement to mean that Bush is primarily to blame for leaving our children behind. I do think we place blame a little differently. You point to Bush, video games, television, lack of reading, etc. as the cause, and I think those are just symptoms. As one commentator put it, Americans are “amusing themselves to death.” The interesting thing is that we have the problem of working ourselves to death as well. Competitiveness for colleges, jobs, advancement has made people so cutthroat that they willingly overwork themselves, load themselves down with excessive extra-curriculars, and worship at the altar of productivity and efficiency. Not on point, but just a thought I had.
I said “strictly biological.” Perhaps not the best word choice, but what I meant was they are more pragmatic in their use of biology as opposed to the more theoretical branches. In neither case is it imperative that the practitioner believe that all living things evolved from a common ancestor over billions of years. Stretching a understanding of the adaptation of viruses necessitate they be hardcore evolutionary biologists.
Welcome to party of people I know that find it humorous what my father does.
I was getting the “teach kids more than just what the want to learn” from the growing preoccupation with vocational/pragmatic studies. I’m sure you’ve heard of struggles Arts departments have had with funding or seen the masses flocking to a university’s business/law/medical college, while the liberal arts continue to shrink. Success is very narrowly defined these days, and it shows in our schools.
Comment by Trey — 22 May 2008 @ 11:00 am
You are right about evolution being different abiogenesis. I knew that, and think that one of evolution’s flaws is its explanation of first life, but I still shouldn’t make the two synonymous. Sorry about that. However, I will continue to disagree that adaptation is the same as large-scale evolution. Ignoring the distinction has been and is the chief reason for poor discussion between the two opposing views.
Comment by Trey — 22 May 2008 @ 11:11 am
ID is not scientific. ID starts with a rigid conclusion and looks for evidence to support it, ignoring all other evidence. Science starts with a flexible, falsifiable hypothesis and takes all evidence into consideration.
Here’s the definitions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqNxAzaWBo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People
Re: children working themselves to death, I agree. I’ve made that same point many times before. Most of my friends are in IB and AP classes, have multiple extra-curricular activities and study for hours daily. I see the effect it has on them. But these are not generally the stupid ones. The stupid kids are the ones who take the light course load and “amuse themselves to death.” And there are more of them than the A+ students.
I’m not sure what a “hardcore” evolutionary biologist is. Are there “hardcore” gravitational physicists or “hardcore” theoretical cosmologists? May I assume that you mean “hardcore” as in someone who is very publicly vocal about their science? All scientists are “hardcore,” then, when their own field is in jeopardy by people who don’t understand it.
But, still, you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to be a doctor, and I never claimed that, but you must understand the basics of evolution to be a good doctor. A doctor must understand vestigial organs, common human problems as a result of imperfect “design,” the ability of bacteria and viruses to adapt to resist drugs and many other lessons that we learn from evolutionary biology. And saying that an adapting organism is an example of evolution is not stretching any definition of evolution or adaptation that I know of.
Comment by Rev. Reed Braden — 22 May 2008 @ 1:26 pm
This video focusses on the book more. It also features “cdesign proponentsists.”
Comment by Rev. Reed Braden — 22 May 2008 @ 2:00 pm
You’re a theologian, not a scientist. You have also shown that you don’t even know enough about evolution to call yourself a layperson. Whether you agree or disagree with any premise of evolutionary theory holds no sway on the theory whatsoever. Essentially, anything you have say about evolution is entirely inconsequential.
[karate chop]
Comment by Rev. Reed Braden — 22 May 2008 @ 2:14 pm
So, you pull your definitions from wikipedia and NCSE propaganda videos, huh? That is a complete misrepresentation of ID, as far as I know. The theory is based on the belief that there is a discernable difference between things that are designed and those that were not. I think the evidence points to a large amount of designed attributes, while you choose to believe chance and natural selection explain everything. If anything, evolution is the inflexible, rigid conclusion that forces evidence to conform to its outcome.
Simply disagreeing with you doesn’t mean that I know nothing about evolution. If those rules apply, then your opinion on philosophy/theology is now entirely inconsequential. I understand the premise to some extent, but I do disagree with the conclusions. You’re bald, 19-year old student, not a scientist.
[karate chop] deflected
[judo kick]
Comment by Trey — 22 May 2008 @ 2:58 pm
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