Creation in Public Schools: Let’s try it one more time
Many people, including New Scientist, are reporting on the passing of a bill in the Louisiana Senate: Senate Bill 733, the “Louisiana Science Education Act.” This is yet another instance of a religious agenda being pushed into the public school under the guise of science. Can we go ahead and agree that this is ridiculous, not scientific in the slightest, and has no place in a public schoolroom? Look, if you want to teach your kids creation, that’s great–but keep it at home or at church. Not in the public school that I am funding. Of course, this doesn’t just deal with evolution, but with “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” Oh, come on!
Before I go on my rant about why this law is absolutely ridiculous, I feel that I should quote the parts of the law here that seem most inflammatory here. Also, please note that a parish is the Louisiana equivalent of a county in the other US States.
Section B1:
The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.
Such assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection. [The previous paragraph]
Section D:
This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.
Okay, so, the groundwork of the law has been laid out. There are a few interesting parts of this law to me. Why did they choose to enumerate the specific topics they did? Why did they choose such vague wording when describing the instruction of students? Why in the hell can no one but scientists figure out what the word ‘theory’ in a scientific context means? They’re so bent on promoting the ’scientific method’ with the damned hypothesis that you think they would use that word instead of theory.
A large problem with this law is that it puts certain ‘controversial’ topics into the law which, to be honest, is not necessary even if they’re trying to push the inclusion of creationism (or ID or whatever). Why specify evolution, global warming, and human cloning? As far as I know there is no ‘theory’ of human cloning. It’s something we may or may not be trying to accomplish, but it’s not a theory. Global Warming, as far as I know, doesn’t really have a theory attached, but I’ll let that one slide. Evolution (and “the origins of life”) is a well established theory that, like any other theory, is subject to any new findings we happen to discover or develop on the subject. Personally, I think that String Theory (once again, not an actual theory) is more controversial than Evolution–We have evidence of one and we have highly idealized, incomplete, mathematical models for the other.
The main problem with this law, however, is that this law puts the critiquing of well-established scientific theories into the hands of someone who may not even have a degree in their field! A science education degree does not give a person the same amount of knowledge and authority on evolution as a degree in, say, Biology would. Why are we allowing teachers to disagree with the scientific community at large? Not only are they most likely wrong, but their own personal viewpoints are being pushed as facts to their students when they are, clearly, not. There is a reason that scientific theories are scientific theories. They have been vetted over a period of many years (usually decades) and have been proven to explain the natural actions of the universe. It is ridiculous to think that a class of high school students could find a huge flaw in well-vetted scientific theories. This point alone makes it very obvious what the legislators were going for.
I wish states would stop passing laws like this. It always ends up the same way. The law gets passed, a parent gets pissed, sues, wins. What follows is a horribly drawn-out series of appeals in which, eventually, the parents wins out because the case finally hits a judge that realizes that ID is just repackaged creationism. Then the school has to pay out a bunch of public tax money to lawyers, the parents, etc. And we wonder why schools don’t have enough funding? Oh well–now we just have to wait for the courts to overturn this and hope this doesn’t sway even more young people into believing religion because of lies marauding as science.
Tags: Cloning, Creation, Education, Evolution, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Louisiana, Public School
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Politics, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 14th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Easy solution: vouchers. Get rid of public provision of education. Evangelical fundamentalists can brainwash their kids all they want, as long as I am able to send my children somewhere else. Granted, this isn’t likely to happen.
July 14th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Vouchers are quite an interesting solution to the problem created by all of this meddling by politicians. The problem, I think, is larger than just the idea of vouchers. Vouchers would help send the overly religious kids to other schools but you have to remember–this is one of the cases where the problem isn’t the schools necessarily, but the government of Louisiana. They are courting a very specific demographic of person when they pass a law like this. That person may very well already have their children out of the public school system. When it comes to the election season, however, the representatives who voted for the bill can issue statements about how they “showed the courage to protect religious freedom in the classroom against the tyranny of the liberal big science” or somesuch. Now they have gotten themselves a lot of votes, even though those children who would be affected could possibly be in private schools.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Yes, I agree. It just seems that the choices made about education should be “bottom-up”, instead of via government mandates. I’d hope that vouchers would largely remove the ability of government to do things like this.