The holiday weekend, a busy schedule, and some massive battles in the Ettenmoors kept last week’s This Week from being more than abstractly thought about, so of course there’s a lot of catching up to do. It turns out that a good number of recent news items have dealt with the push to force mythology into our public school science curriculum, so I’ve decided to split what would be a huge This Week column into this post on education and another, later entry that covers some of the other recent nonsense.
There seem to be few limits to the dishonesty to which people will sink in order to have a better chance of cramming God’s Word into America’s should-be-secular public education system. Witness, for instance, the metamorphosis of creationism into intelligent design – same shit, different legal paradigm, or at least that’s what they were hoping. Still, though, Reason has won some high-profile victories such as the Dover, PA legal battle against surrogates of the Discovery Institute and its allies, who failed in yet another attempt to inject magic into the science lesson plan.
We won, right? Aren’t our schools safe now?
Hardly. Apparently delusion and persistence go hand in hand.
One “solution” to combating the evils of Evolution is to simply ignore the courts and go ahead and teach some form of Intelligent Design anyway. Turns out, as one survey suggests, that about one in eight high school biology teachers presents intelligent design as a viable alternative to the scientific theory of evolution. Now I understand that good teachers are hard to find and good science teachers even harder, but belief in holy sorcery over scientific evidence should automatically disqualify you from the job, because obviously you weren’t paying much attention in science class as a student.
Sneaking the bible into schools isn’t enough, though; many fundamentalist sorts won’t be happy until it comes barreling through the front door. Don McLeroy, creationist head of the Texas Board of Education – an organization that through its sheer size has tremendous influence on the nature of textbooks made available to schools all over the country – has used the English curriculum as a warmup before tackling state science standards.
teachers and experts had worked for two and a half to three years on new standards for English. So what did McLeroy do? He ignored all that work entirely, and let “social conservatives” on the board draft a new set overnight.
… and then the conservatives who dominate the school board voted their standards in before anyone outside their little clique even had time to review them. What do you want to bet that their upcoming science curriculum has “King James Edition” stamped on the cover?
Texas, of course, is not alone in experiencing legislative myth creep in its schools. In Tennessee, a “Bible in Schools” bill has passed; while the bill’s claimed intent is to “create a non-sectarian high school course about the Bible and its impact on the world”, what are the odds this will be presented in any sort of objective way? And why single out one particular mythology as deserving of its own, separate treatment, when there are so many others whose influence can be felt worldwide? Where is the “Eddas in School” bill, or the “Works of Homer in School” bill? Why single out the Christian Bible unless the intention is to present it from a biased point of view?
Louisiana is also gearing up to teach Magic Sky Faerie theory at taxpayers’ expense. A bill ironically titled the “Louisiana Science Education Act” has reached the House floor there. If passed, it would introduce Untelligent Design to that state’s classrooms. How far the bill will go remains to be seen, but at least one newspaper has come out against it:
That prospect worries the Baton Rouge Advocate’s editorial board, which wrote (May 21, 2008) that the bill will “provide a full-time living for dozens of lawyers in the American Civil Liberties Union. They will have a field day suing taxpayer-funded schools as groups use Nevers’ language to push Bible-based texts in the schools. That’s unconstitutional, and we can see the taxpayer paying — and paying, and paying — for this policy in the future.”