Ideological War Spells Doom for America’s Schoolkids
Students are returning to school this week. But they’re not heading back to class — they’re walking straight into a war zone. Our kids have become cannon fodder for two rival ideologies battling to control America’s future.
In one camp are conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education; in the other are politically radical multiculturalists and their de facto champion, President Barack Obama. The two competing visions couldn’t be more different. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately, whichever side wins — your kid ends up losing.
That’s because this war is for the power to dictate what our children are taught — and, by extension, how future generations of Americans will view the world. Long gone are the days when classrooms were for learning: now each side sees the public school system as a vast indoctrination camp in which future culture-warriors are trained. The problem is, two diametrically opposed philosophies are struggling for supremacy, and neither is willing to give an inch, so the end result is extremism, no matter which side temporarily comes out on top.
Both visions are grotesque and unacceptable — and yet they are currently the only two choices on the national menu. Which shall it be, sir: Brainwashing Fricassee, or a Fried Ignorance Sandwich?
Why Is Texas So Influential?
Now, in the struggle between the President of the United States and the members of a local school board, you’d think the president would have a big advantage. Not so. Because the Texas State Board of Education (TSBE) enjoys a uniquely powerful position: Textbook manufacturers don’t want to make 50 different editions of each book catering to the whims of each state, so they instead make just a few editions, one for each of the “major educational markets” such as Texas, and then the smaller states have no other option but to use those versions. So the boards of education in California, Florida and most importantly Texas essentially get to dictate what goes into textbooks nationwide. The TSBE tells the textbook companies which subjects must be covered and how they must be covered to be acceptable in Texas, and textbook companies are compelled to play along; if they try to go rogue, Texas will reject the book, and the publisher will lose most of its sales.
So when the TSBE holds its periodic meetings to set textbook standards, as it did last March and May, the educational world sits up and pays very close attention. And at the same time that the TSBE was meeting, the Obama administration announced new federal educational guidelines.
The tragedy for our nation is that both proposals are horribly flawed. But we’re caught between a rock and a hard place; due to the escalating culture wars, the middle ground is a cratered political no-man’s-land. Everyone’s in “you’re either with us or against us” mode, and the end result is that it’s almost impossible to find an even-handed analysis of the dreadful situation in which we’ve found ourselves.
Innumerable liberal critics condemn the anti-science and partisan revisionist lunacy coming out of the Texas school board meetings. And you know what? The criticisms hit home. It’s next to impossible for a sensible person to defend the TSBE’s often ridiculous proposals.
On the other side of the fence, you’ll find countless conservative pundits and angry parents increasingly outraged by the ever-escalating political correctness and equally egregious (but mirror-image) historical revisionism which dominates public schooling away from the Texas sphere of influence. And you know what? They’re right too. Left-wing activists have basically taken control of the educational system and have for years been brazenly transforming it into a training ground for young radicals.
But what you won’t find is anyone willing to say that BOTH sides are unacceptable. (Until now, that is. I’m saying it.) Either you’re on the left and you bash the Texas standards, or you’re on the right and you bemoan the progressive curriculum. Each published criticism only tells half the story, so the argument never goes anywhere, since each side refuses to even acknowledge the points made by the opposition.
In this five-part essay, which will unfold each day this week, I’m going to examine the intrinsic shortcomings of both the contemporary left-wing and right-wing approaches to education. I wish there was no need to do this, but unfortunately those two extremes seem to be the only two options on the table. The only way we’re ever going to return to sensible education is to call out, debunk, and then dismiss the two dominant extremes. In the series’ final section I’ll present what should be the obvious solution to the dilemma, a rigorous non-politicized back-to-basics freedom-centric educational framework that will infuriate the radicals on both sides but please the only people who matter: parents and students.
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| Illustration by Buzzsawmonkey |
First let’s introduce the disputants:
Team Left
On the left we have radical academia, the neo-Marxist educational theorists, and the teachers’ unions: their progressive blueprint, which they’ve been incrementally yet successfully implementing for over three decades by now, is to inculcate in students a “social justice” mental framework focusing on multiculturalism, an absence of competition, and a general loathing for America and distrust of traditional American values. In the past, when old-fashioned schooling still held sway, these activists denounced nationwide educational standards which prevented teachers from presenting “alternative” facts and viewpoints. But now that the once-alternative progressive framework has become ascendent and dominates the education landscape, the left (or at least the Obama wing of the left) has flipped policies, and these days they insist on imposing nationwide educational standards to prevent any local schoolboards or states from sneaking off the political plantation and exposing students to conservative values.
What’s topsy-turvy is that the federal government’s new standards now discourage traditional subjects like reading and math in favor of malleable courses like history which are more amenable to political manipulation and social indoctrination:
A plan to overhaul the 2002 education law championed by President George W. Bush was unveiled by the Obama administration. …
In the proposed dismantling of the No Child Left Behind law, education officials would move away from punishing schools that don’t meet benchmarks and focus on rewarding schools for progress, particularly with poor and minority students. …
The blueprint also would allow states to use subjects other than reading and mathematics as part of their measurements for meeting federal goals, pleasing many education groups that have said No Child Left Behind encouraged teachers not to focus on history, art, science, social studies and other important subjects.
Uh huh. The reason for this, of course, is that politically neutral fundamentals like spelling and multiplication tables get in the way of prime brainwashing time. Up until now the progressive agenda has been seriously hamstrung by the need to squander much of a student’s educational career just nailing down basic skills, in order to pass standardized tests. Now, Obama has pronounced: We will federally fund even those schools that let students drift into illiteracy just so long as they take classes in P.C. history and social studies instead. And if you are naive enough to think that “history” and “social studies” are politically neutral too, then keep reading. (Though it should be noted that the president’s insanely confusing and much-loathed “Race to the Top” education funding scheme has drawn withering criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.)
Concomitant with this official drive is a subtle but persistent push to change the educational atmosphere. Politicized re-orientation is not limited to facts and textbooks; it’s also about changing students’ philosophical frameworks.
These days, it has become standard policy in American classrooms for students to be rewarded for merely expressing their feelings about a topic, rather than exhibiting knowledge about a topic. Meanwhile, competition of any sort is rapidly becoming taboo. For example, until recently when each school chose a valedictorian for graduation, the selection was by definition limited to the one student who had the best academic record. In the modern classroom environment, however, this is condemned as elitist:
A June 27 story from the New York Times points a finger towards one of the many problems that contaminates the nation’s educational system – the belief that competition is an elitist, antiquated concept and those who try deserve accolades equal to those who achieve.
The article focused on the swelling number of valedictorians at the nation’s high schools.
One school has seven valedictorians this year, another has 30 and Colorado’s St. Vrain Valley school district has 94.
A June 3 story from KFSN-TV, in Fresno, California, reported that Bullard High School will have 62 valedictorians this year.
How can so many students be ‘Number One’? The Times explained, “Principals say that recognizing multiple valedictorians reduces pressure and competition among students and it is a more equitable way to honor achievement….”
It goes on: Class projects in American schools are now often assigned to groups rather than individual students, to dampen the sense of individual achievement if praise is earned — or soften the shame for those who flop. Students are too frequently passed along to the next grade-level, even if they’re not up to the task — so as not to damage their self-esteem (coughor the school’s academic rankingscough). The backhanded compliment, “I’ll give you an ‘A’ for effort,” which in my day was always dripping with sarcasm and usually immediately preceded a big red “C+” on the paper, is no longer sarcastic: Students really do get actual “A”s for effort, even if they don’t come close to finding the right answers.
This is the progressive dream: To eliminate hierarchy and stratification in schooling, and to make sure, by hook or by crook, that no student fails or feels bad, even if the only way to achieve that is to ensure that no other student succeeds or feels good. Because if there are winners, then there must necessarily be losers, and Team Left has banished the very category of “loser” from our vocabulary. Baby, meet bathwater.
Team Right
On the right we have conservative Christians and the Texas State Board of Education, who want to not only return to the basics of 1950s-style education, but to also put the fundamentalism back in the fundamentals, applying an unapologetically Christian overlay to what kids learn in school, and in certain areas dispose with scientific fact in favor of religious dogma.
The Texas State Board of Education has infamously for years been trying to eliminate the theory of evolution from the state’s science textbooks and to replace it with the anti-scientific non-theory of “intelligent design,” better known as creationism. Although this issue was not addressed in the board’s most recent 2010 meeting, at their previous meeting, in 2009, after much contentious debate, they resolved the dispute by agreeing to a watered-down watering-down of evolution, allowing teachers to point out the deficiencies of all scientific theories, not just biological theories, as a way of sneaking at least some kind of anti-evolutionism into the curriculum over the objections of scientists nationwide.
As someone who knows more than a thing or two about this field, I can only shake my head in dismay at the sheer ignorance and irrationality of the TSBE on this issue. Why, I ask myself, must they contaminate their legitimate grievances over the left-wing bias of school curricula? By coupling patriotism with creationism, they are discrediting not only their own but everyone else’s attempts to counteract the leftist agenda.
I’m still angry about it. The TSBE has done more to help the radical progressives than has any group or individual on the left. No need for liberal activists to undermine the TSBE’s credibility, and by extension the credibility of anyone potentially aligned with them — the TBSE undermines itself! Thanks, guys. Now will you please shut up?
No. They will not shut up. Because at this year‘s meetings, in March and May, the TSBE upped the ante and broached a whole new category of intellectual offenses, this time not about science but about history and social studies.
First, they defeated a motion to have students learn about the separation of church and state, a foundational principle of the United States; the board members seem to have no problem ignoring those parts of the Constitution (such as the First Amendment) which they personally dislike. To add insult to insanity, they then removed all mention of Thomas Jefferson as one of the writers who “influenced the nation’s intellectual origins,” since he was the bastard who insisted that the U.S. be a secular nation in the first place. Hey, Tommy-boy, who’s studying your so-called “separation of church and state” now, eh? Payback’s a bitch!
There’s more to come about the TSBE’s attempts to rewrite history, as we shall soon see in Part II of this essay. Their two-pronged assault on both scientific and historical facts makes it painfully clear that they are totally out of touch with reality and want to impose their particular brand of religious beliefs on the public schools.
But then again…
However grotesque Texas’ twisting of facts may seem at first glance, it’s positively mild compared to what’s going on coast-to-coast in the rest of the country’s classrooms. That’s because the Texas curriculum wars are not happening in a vacuum — they’re happening in response to a complete perversion of the American educational system that has taken place right under our noses over recent decades. Did you naively think that today’s kids have been studying the same core subjects in the same ways that you studied them, way back when? Think again. Education has been revolutionized, but the revolution was not even announced, much less televised.
In Parts III and IV we’ll examine the much more subtle yet effective long-term project by the American left to fundamentally transform our schools. And in Part V, if you aren’t too depressed by then, we’ll grope for a way out of this mess.
Continued in PART II: What’s the Matter With Texas?
Part I: Ideological War Spells Doom for America’s Schoolkids
Part II: What’s the Matter with Texas?
Part III: Indoctrination Nation
Part IV: In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony
Part V: Proposals for an Educational Renaissance
Nonsense. Why don’t you actually read the Texas curriculum (it’s on their website), instead of relying on distorted media reports. It doesn’t do any of the things you claim, for instance Thomas Jefferson is still all over the place, he was removed from one sentence about enlightenment philosophers, on the grounds that he wasn’t himself an enlightenment philosopher but only influenced by them.
I don’t claim that Thomas Jefferson was removed from the textbook entirely — just from the section about writers who influenced the origins of America.
The reports describing the vote to remove him from this section are numerous and reliable.
Reports? Second hand information is all you have? I’m tired of the “but they said so” defense.
I call BS without a primary source citation.
Whether you are an idiot aside, the answer to public education is easy.
The money follows the child, and the parents decide on the school. Which is to say that every parent can use their fair share of the tax dollars to send their child to the school of their choice. Public or private.
Send your kids to whatever school uses whatever books you think apropos.
See how easy that is. No fight over who is programming who’s kids.
I have long wondered why US Public Education continues to depend on textbooks which are so expensive they have to gain the approval of Texas and California to be produced. This is the age of the Internet, $50 digital cameras, cheap color desktop printers, self-published books on Amazon, photocopied reading packets – not textbooks – at universities, and online courses in every subject known to humankind.
Zombie, is it teacher laziness? Fear of decentralized control? Standardization needed by the Education Industry to measure itself? Parents feeling cheated if their kid doesn’t get back problems dragging a 5-lb shiny hardcover textbook to school every day?
Not to mention the fact that through taxpayer funds we support literally thousands of history professors, presumably at least a few dozen of which could be called on to write, separately or together, a credible history text.
I have wondered the same and what I believe is that it is another scam of our educational system. Textbook writing is just another way for college profs to earn money and burnish their curriculum vitae. Putting books online not only makes them cheaper, it allows for frequent (cheaper) updates.
It’s because they have a captive audience and can force schools/students to buy books. At the K-12 level, ‘grants’ pay for them, or taxes, so there is no incentive to be innovative. At the University level, it’s out and out scam. The textbook publisher changes the order of the problem and sticks in a new illustration, new edition — $350. They also push the gadgets, ‘clickers’ to take attendance – $50, online computer access to the homework assignment – $60. Of course, in the Universities case, the University gets a cut, so the more they require, the more their ‘profit.’
I agree with Fantom that vouchers would be the answer to the problem. Educating students boils down to three basic tasks. First you have to raise the money from taxpayers to fund the costs of educating the students. Second you have to set the broad educational goals, subject by subject, that need to be included in each subject taught. Third, you have to hand out the money to those who actually teach the subject matter to the students. Vouchers are a perfect tool to do the latter task. The left’s assertion that the separation of church and state is a bar to using vouchers is completely bogus, as parents and students are not forced to go to any particulat private or parachiol school, and can even choose to take their voucher to a public school of their choice.
Parents may wish to choose schools based on many factors, such as the amount of money they will have to contribute to cover the full cost of the chosen school, the average class size, the quality of the facilities, the slant of their teachers (liberal vs. conservative), the offering of religion classes or not, the discipline of the students, athletics and numerous other factors.
The idea in the public education systems that the “right’ school for any child is always the one that is the neighborhood school, regardless of the neighborhood’s characteristic’s is nuts.
Much better even than vouchers is tax credits for 100% of any educational expense. This would take the power away from those trying to control curriculums and make it much easier for private schools to compete and flourish. Vouchers give government too much opportunity to control who gets them and where they are spent — and they often don’t pay full tuition. People forget that tax credits were first proposed in the 60′s, but the opponents pulled out all stops because they knew it was a huge threat to their control.
Fantom, you are right on here. The Elites have decided that we locals are not fit to select our own school curriculum or set standards for teachers. The Elites are saying that we are either: 1-Too ignorant OR 2-Too dishonest to make these choices at the local level. How offensive is that? Don’t you think Jefferson would have favored local control?
In fact, with local control and responsibility, ie, limited government, we would see some instances of poor performance. However, as a conservative, I believe we would see many instances were locals set very high standards. What we have is awful. We allowed local control of local issues to be taken away from us. We must get it back.
People who claim to be “Conservative” or just “conservative” are supposed to be polite, well-mannered, and considerate of others. I would say that was one of the self-evident, primary attributes of being politically on the right. Perhaps I’m just being naive, since people rarely live up to their professed ideals. Nonetheless, a comment like this, which begins with the word “Nonsense” and radiates hostility and aggression from the get-go to a writer who obviously has put an enormous amount of work into this essay (which is only the beginning of a multi-part essay) deserves something better than that. The same applies to many of the other comments. People used to preface their disagreements with others by first stating a few points on which they did agree, before moving on to where they disagreed. That was politeness. That was good manners. Now they just blow their tops off like psychos on the street. It’s true on this web site and it’s true on thousands of others. It’s very ugly. It debases the writer, it debases the site, it debases the country, and it debases you. Why not say whatever you have to say with a modicum of good will and courtesy?
Brendan, in response to Wrath of Dragon: “Why not say whatever you have to say with a modicum of good will and courtesy?”
Good will & courtesy have suffered the ravages of the overall burgeoning decadence of our society over the course of the past 40 years or so. Much of what is behind it all is illustrated quite well in a piece Charles Murray wrote a few years back. Read it here: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MurProl.php
This is the Wrath of Dagon, what ‘respect’ do you expect, you mutated get of a shoggoth?
Besides, there is no real rudeness there–only an opening that takes the opposition from the get go instead of feigning agreement.
Perhaps your comments are an example of the left’s efforts to eliminate competitiveness, as Zombie states?
Man, you guys ought to read the other articles on this site. Adam Graham’s article about reforming the culture nails the problem this guy attempts to address. I’d give Jefferson the benefit of the doubt. He was influenced by the Enlightenment, but equally influenced by history and experience (which shows the Enlightenment theory of human nature to be insane). If you want the pure Enlightenment in practice, check out the French Revolution. Enlightenment thinkers considered man to be born a blank slate, and his nature to be shaped by his environment. Therefore, they thought that men could live according to their idea of reason and rationality. If men did not do so, it must be because they were influenced by their environment in unreasonable or irrational ways. Hey, why else would they disagree with the Enlightened Ones? So, they had to eliminate all the bad influences: religion, history, class, and most of all (although they couldn’t name it) Human Nature. Now men are hard-wired to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. This can’t be changed, but if you are Enlightened, you don’t believe this, so after the bad influences are eliminated, if people continue to live in ways that you don’t think are reasonable, it’s just pure contrariness. And we can overcome this by making them behave. Re-education, propaganda, brain-washing, and, of course, plain old violence. That’s why every Leftist (and the Left is the child of the Enlightenment) regime ends up becoming totalitarian, or is overthrown.
As always a knock out essay, Zombie. I look forward to the rest.
Great illustration by buzzsawmonkey.
I’m a Jew and I don’t see how a Christian based curriculum or overlay is grotesque. I went to school in the late 50′s and 60′s. Saying the Lord’s Prayer and learning the words to Rock of Ages didn’t damage me or threaten my absolute wholehearted, whole-souled commitment to Judaism and America.
If the grotesquerie is creationism or the divinity of Jesus Christ, the parents can just say to the child at the dinner table “That’s not what we believe, but you don’t have to make a stink about it.” No big megillah. This is America, the melting pot.
If the grostequerie is Marxism that is indeed a huge megillah and completely unacceptable. This is not the Soviet Union.
Bonnie, it’s time for the sanity so well stated in your comment. I’m with you.
Bonny Kate–forgive me for misspelling your name. Still applauding.
I agree, Bonnie. This article is alot of “the sky is falling”. Note that the right-wingers are “conservative Christians”. Guess there aren’t any other kind, right? The trouble is over the years I have observed they can often be far more open-minded and free-wheeling in their ideas than even secular academia. As for the anti-creation hysteria, I can’t say I lose any sleep over it or think about it every day at breakfast. It’s a non-issue, even more so when you study history of science or realize that the scientific method was created for direct observation. Evolution obviously can’t be determined based on that, and in sciences where direct observation cannot be done, you have something called data noise or whatever where you have to pick and choose what data you will interpret. Until we invent a time machine to directly observe it, I see no reason why we can’t at least discuss other theories.
This website is getting bizarre anymore, between this article and the “let’s all be prostitutes” headline. Uh, no thanks.
There is little doubt that the TSBE is promoting a Christian Conservative format. I don’t think Zombie is suggesting that all those on the right of the political spectrum are Christian Conservatives.
There’s no real attempt to hide the Left’s Marxist format either. Bill Ayres created a lot of the underlying methods.
Fantom has the right idea here. The problem is that there is an “official truth” created by the public school system that differs from objective reality. The only solution is to dismantle the public schools and return to local private schools – vouchers or no vouchers.
So Bonny, as long as it’s ideas that *you* think are ok, they can be included, but if it’s an ideology that *you* don’t like then it’s not.
Parents can just as easily say, “We don’t believe that Marxism works” at the dinner table.
I’m glad that you were able to keep to your Jewish roots and beliefs, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable for the government to promote any particular religion. I’m a devout Christian, but I teach my children about Christianity at home and at church. I don’t need nor do I want the government to violate the rights of others so that they can try to teach my children religion. It seems hard enough for the schools in many areas to just get across basic math skills and the scientific method.
Bonnie Kate — I could have said the same thing, and I’m an atheist!
They’re not reliable at all. Here’s the actual proposed redacted statement:
(C) explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and William Blackstone and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present; and (with Enlightenment and TJ removed)
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/social/HS_TEKS_1stRdg.pdf
Here’s the final curriculum, looks like they decided to keep TJ:
(C) explain the political philosophies of individuals such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Thomas Jefferson, and William Blackstone; and
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/ch113c.html
a detailed list of the changes to the textbook curriculum:
Even an article defending the TSBE says he was removed from that section:
yes, he was included elsewhere in the book, but I never claimed he was removed entirely.
But you made a huge deal out of it, same as the agit-prop media, when what they did was entirely logical. They inserted a couple of religious philosophers (without deleting the more secular ones) to counter the secularist bias. That list was supposed to be of philosophers who influenced the American revolutionaries, not of the revolutinaries themselves. In fact by restoring Jefferson in that sentence (due to the demagoguery no doubt) they muddled the point and ironically made education worse.
Well done Wrath, and God bless Texas.
“to counter the secular bias”
Here is the root of the problem. I mean it is a public school, right? Separation of church and state pretty much guarantees that school teachings should be secular, so there is no bias in that case. On the other hand, if a single town in Texas has such a fundamental belief in Christianity among its citizenry that they feel it should be in their textbooks, why not let them? As long as they don’t accept money for their school from any other locality, the state of Texas or the federal government. That is the very definition of local control of your school and the only acceptable instance in which secularism should not be the standard.
I think that there are a few problems with your reasoning here. First, the TSBE (as far as I know) is a state/governmental body. It’s not a question of local control allowing the promotion of any particular religion because in this case it’s a state-wide agency. Although I’ll also point out that the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law…” That doesn’t prohibit a state from doing so, although it has become generally accepted that any taxing, governmental body should be following the same set of rules. I don’t know what the Texas state constitution says on this matter.
Second, I would suggest that including religious figures in an historical textbook does not necessarily promote any given religion. The fact of the matter is that religion has had a HUGE role in determining the path of history. To try to cut that out of education would be a big mistake IMO. As long as the text isn’t specifically promoting any particular religion then I think it’s fine. The problem of course then becomes that this is a subjective measurement which makes it prone to the errors in judgment (or disagreements) of human beings.
I think that the real problem here isn’t so much what the TSBE did or didn’t do, I think the problem is the simple fact that the TSBE has so much control over what the rest of the nation’s kids end up reading. As others have suggested, I’d love to see “textbooks” replaced with E-books or similar. Some colleges have already gone this route, which is a big coup given the money normally involved with professors writing text books. Someday…
But Zombie, your proof that the TSBE “removed Jefferson” was to quote media distortions. Whereas Wrath of Dagon posted the ACTUAL CHANGE that was made — and frankly, looking at the ACTUAL CHANGE, I don’t see the big deal. Even if Jefferson HAD been removed from that section (and, as you concede, he still appeared in many other places throughout), well…TJ was a member OF a revolutionary movement. He was the one being influenCED. Sure, his writings had impact later in the FR…but, we are talking about an American History class, right?
Zombie: The wording you used in your article very MUCH gave the impression that Thomas Jefferson was completely removed from the Texas textbooks. You are being disingenuous to try and state otherwise now.
I expect such duplicitous writing from the lamestream media, but not from a trusted source on PJM. Zombie, you hurt your “brand” this way.
The Jefferson changes were something with “pizazz” that the media could grab onto. It was a horrible example to use and was just put out there for shock value. If you read ALL of the proposed changes though, there is plenty to be worried about. Most of it is too subtle or requires a bit of knowledge/thinking to understand the problem, which is why the media has pounced on the Jefferson thing – they assume (somewhat rightly so) that the American public is too stupid or too lazy to try to understand some of the really problematic change proposals.
Jim, Wrath, et al.;
Unless our Author is a fire-breathing atheist/secularist, he can’t possibly be suggesting that Christian reactionaries making minor tweaks to textbooks is equally problematic to the ‘social justice’ revolutionaries that have hijacked K-PhD. It seems more like a rhetorical device to place TSBE in opposition to them. Except that he pratts on about it. And on. And on.
Zombie, care to weigh in on why you think a few reactionaries tweaking the language in textbooks merits equal billing with the takeover of public education by marxist revolutionaries? Or was it just a way to strech the material to fit the dialectic formula? Either way, thanks for the effort and much needed conversation!
Is inserting Aquinas and Calvin supposed to be bad? They’re both relevant to this question and both seminal thinkers (in the sense of having inspired other thinkers).
Is it just that they were theologians? Really, I am having difficulty understanding the nature of the objection. Removing Jefferson altogether from an American History curriculum would of course be intolerable, but that doesn’t seem to have happened at any point. As for “Enlightenment thinkers”, not all those on the list are – Hobbes, for example, was anti-Enlightenment – so leaving the reference in that spot would be confusing at least.
One more thing: when preparing an extensive essay on an issue that has been politicized as much as the Texas standards have, there is no excuse for not going to primary sources. None. I hope to see direct quotes (from the standards, not from news accounts and “reports”) in future installments. You may not trust Texan religious types, but that’s no reason to promulgate distortions. Leave that sort of thing to the NYT.
(Note: please ignore dumb comment about Hobbes, I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I think the general point is valid.)
Wow! Thomas Aquinas and Enlightenment in the same sentence. That gives me pause. But Montesquieu is always a great example of the problem of theory vs practice. Monty wrote in admiration of the ‘balance of powers’ he saw in the English political system. He thought the equality of power among Crown, Parliament, and the courts was ideal. You can see how his thought influenced the Founders. The only problem was that, to make his analysis work, he had to lie. In fact, no British court ever had the power to void an Act of Parliament, except as void for vagueness. But. hey, it sure was a neat theory. I can’t blame the Founders for falling for a slick and reasonable-sounding line of con. But we can sure see why it doesn’t work today, with the unaccountable Supreme Court making social policy for all Americans. Self-governing Americans? Not since WW II.
“”"First, they defeated a motion to have students learn about the separation of church and state, a foundational principle of the United States”"”
I would say this is the first step in correcting 20 years of miseducation on the issue which has crept into every level of jurisprudence. Separation of church and state has evolved from the concept of no state religion (ex: Israel, Iran, England) to the suppression of religion. The liberal concept that religion is fine, as long as the doors are closed and I can’t hear it, is not what the founders intended. Until the teachers will teach the subject correctly, I think it is reasonable to just have them shut up.
Also, I find your whole series premise ridiculous. Thirty years of liberal indoctrination hits ONE speed bump in Texas recently and you present the sides as even and equal, and both sides must be stopped. The US k12 system is the worst in the industrialized west exactly because of the lefts crushing grip on it.
Wait until you read the whole series before condemning it on these grounds. I do not present as even and equal the problematic issues on each side. I say in no uncertain terms (in later installments of the essay, as you will see Tues-Thurs) that the progressives have a chokehold on education and that Texas is just trying to fight back — though in an unfortunately clumsy and unsophisticated way.
Aha! Zombie, ignore my earlier, somewhat snarky question. You answered here. My apologies…, but if I may? Good editing is your friend. If you’re going to submit yourself to the abuses of the reading public with a comments section, a good editor should be your BEST friend!
If you can find one. I think they’ve all taken jobs in IT.
“The US k12 system is the worst in the industrialized west exactly because of the lefts crushing grip on it.”
well said!!!!
I second this!!!
There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. The Federal government is prohibited from interfering in church/State relations. Some States had established religions, and wanted no meddling. That’s why Congress is prohibited from passing any law “concerning an establishment of religion.” This is the Big Lie in action. The plain meaning of the First Amendment is turned around 180 degrees, and religion is now suppressed by the federal Courts.
My belief is that Libertarians are essentially Leftists, in their war to destroy the foundations of Western Culture. Rightists need to be very careful in dealing with them. As the Graham article on this site points out, and as Gramsci taught the cultural Marxists, destroy the culture and the government is yours.
“There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution.”
Yes there is. The 1st says the Feds can’t spend money on religion , and the 14th says the states can’t either.
Remember that when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, there was no such thing as a public school system (that was set up much later, and rather slowly, during the second half of the 19′th century). Back then almost all education was private and so could be mixed with any religion you wanted and to any degree you wanted. You could make a case that today’s problems with separation of church and state comes from our fantasy that education can proceed without reference to some sort of foundational — and inherently religious or quasi-religious — philosophy. For example, you cannot even teach basic reading and writing without stumbling over this point. If you want to teach reading, what books and essays are the students going to be practicing on? If you choose material that leaves out references to God, then you implicitly affirm that God is relatively unimportant — and offend those who disagree with that — and if you choose material that includes references to God, then you offend atheists. The same thing happens when political references occur in what the students are reading. As for writing, how do you grade sample essays containing strong religious or political opinion? If you say students cannot write about that sort of thing, you again implicitly place those topics in a position of relative unimportance. It is difficult to see how you could teach anything involving language without sooner or later offending someone’s religious or political sensibility.
As to the content of education in the West, every country determines it’s own. But the culprit behind the total deterioration of the West’s educational systems are the teacher’s unions. The unions are only interested in pay, benefits, and keeping their members, however incompetent, employed and paying dues. This is why Western school children can graduate from high school bereft of any general knowledge, barely able to add and subtract, and unable to write a complete and understandable sentence or paragraph.
The last thing the teacher’s unions care about is the education of our kids, and the results speak for themselves, every year, louder and louder!
Hey, if kids were taught straight math and science, they’d see Global Warming as a crock. The falsified ‘hockey-stick’ graph is counter not only to scientific evidence, but it contradicts the historical record. Another bit of Big Lie spin: what they call now the Medieval Warm Period used to be referred to as the Medieval Climatic Optimum, as the warm temps spurred crop production enormously. It’s all crap — 100%.
The best decision my wife and I (and, to be honest, it was driven much more by my wife) ever made was to homeschool our children. Now, we can’t imagine ever subjecting them to organized education which, politics aside, is inherently, structurally flawed– a 19th century institution flailing to prepare kids for the 21st century.
Hey Jake… did you mean to say “flailing” to prepare kids for the 21st century? That fits right in with the 19th century institution thing though!
Zombie-May I ask what the “extreme right” happens to be? America before the communists under Gramsci and Alinsky attacked our institutions? the so-called “christians” are merely trying to restore balance to Americas schools, its the far left that is and has poisoned 2 generations of American schoolchildren. The “far right” would mean no governemnt at all, even the Libertarians dont go that far.
You’ll see my point as the full essay is published over the next three days.
I agree with you — and explore in depth — that the Gramscian project to take over education has been successful, and that Texas is just trying to undo the damage and reverse a stealth communist revolution. The problem I’m trying to highlight is that the TSBE is unsophisticated and is undermining their cause by being too overtly religious and partisan.
That was some attention getting start then. I can’t wait to read the rest of this after I reopen my mind.
I, too, thought you began this thread too heavyhandedly. We on the right are simply learning to use Alinsky’s rules against our betters. Excuse us, please, if we get it wrong once in awhile. We are still beginners. Part of that process is learning to avoid “overkill”. But because you generally do a balanced job in presenting issues, I will wait to read your other installments before posting final judgment. It doesn’t bother me that your own passions are showing through.
oh my alsharpton demonrats
I have been screaming for yrs that the education system is totally screwed!
I agree with most of your points. Both sides are hurting education, however the left is doing FAR FAR more damage.
The thing about evolution drives me nuts…teach it!! Thats the main problem i have with the right, on the left side i have so many problems with its too many to list. So…i would rather have the far right teachings.
The thing about evolution drives me nuts…teach it!!
Do you want it taught that random genomic changes starting with a single cell and fixed by natural selection can definitively explain all biodiversity, and that anyone who questions this is STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!?
Or would you prefer it to be taught honestly that this theory fails to entirely explain biodiversity?
umm i NEVER said anything about teaching that something is stupid, nice knee jerk reaction!
Where the hell did you get that from? All i said is we should teach evolution. So maybe ill clarify it some..Evolution is a THEORY and not fact. And thus should be taught as such.
Again, where did i say anything even remotely like “and that anyone who questions this is STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!?” WHERE??? WHERE in my post??? How the hell did you arrive…oh wait you ASSUMED!!
You know what they say about assuming??
Again, where did i say anything even remotely like
Oh, but I didn’t say you did
I asked you a question.
Evolution is a theory not a fact?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Thank you for illustrating how a person can exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect.
“You know what they say about assuming??”
It makes an ass of u and ming?
I always hated that old “ass of you and me” bit — just a stupid sanctimonious gag. We make a great many reasoned assumptions every day. We couldn’t function without doing so.
To say it fails to explain biodiversity would be dishonest. You lie to your children, then?
Creationist…
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth
Evolutionist…
In the beginning there was nothing, then it exploded.
While the first quotation is accurate, the second is one that you’ve made up in your head.
Why is it not possible for you to criticize evolution without making stuff up?
Right wing “extremist”? Nonsense. Because some people reject Left-wing extremest does not make them either extremest or “Right-wing”.
This is just Leftist propaganda.
You are so immersed in the Leftist mindset and so mired in cultural amd moral relativism that you cannot see this simple truth.
There is nothing in the Texas standards that was not common place and widely held 30 years ago. If anything it their requirements are too timid and give too much ground to Left wing lies. The Left wing lies. THere is no validity at all to their views. They are concerned will brainwashing the young, not educating them.
As another commenter noted, go actually look the changes in Texas. Stop repeating the lies and slander of the Left.
They are incapable of honesty or decency. They are Bolsheviks plain and simple. It is they who are harming the students, no some sort of imagined “Extreme Right Wing”.
And another thing, there is no such thing as any meaningful “extreme right wing” in America whatsoever. That too is just pure agi-prop out of the Left.
Stop repeating this lie as well.
They call opinions extreme when they are in fact wholly consistent with view shared by most Americas throughout its history.
You’re attacking a straw man here. Zombie is not defending the pedagogy of the left (nor am I). But the religious right is far from innocent in this battle.
As just one example: anyone who has studied the evidence, yet claims there is any doubt about the basic truth of Darwinian evolution is a fool at best and willfully dishonest at worst. Evolution is supported by an overwhelming array of evidence and is the fundamental unifying theory of biology, which at the moment is the most dynamic and exciting of the sciences. To refuse to teach evolution in school is to commit to raising a generation of anti-scientific ignoramuses.
The problem I have with how Intelligent Design has been handled is the the Darwinians’ reliance on politics and pseudo-science instead of perfectly good science. It certainly *is* possible to run experiments demonstrating irreducible complexity. They tend to be expensive, long term, and difficult but they are possible. I can’t count how often I’ve read and been told that such experiments are impossible and thus Intelligent Design cannot even be considered. That’s nonsense and no service to kids who are bright enough to think up a couple of ID experiments themselves and realize that what their science teachers are peddling is a lie.
ID needs to go to the lab. Those experiments need to be worked through and the results fairly evaluated and published. I suspect that in the end it’s not going to work out for the ID people but I firmly and explicitly rest that belief on theology, not science. My faith says to me that God wants to preserve free will and won’t permit himself to be “caught out” by experimenters working in labs. But my scientific side says let the experimentation commence and let’s get real, replicable results before we start including this stuff in a textbook. Right now, ID deserves about half an hour in high school science, 10 minutes to describe it and 20 minutes to work through some experiments that might prove whether there’s something there or not.
The only thing that Intelligent Design deserves in a science class is a statement that it is not science and a brief explanation of why that is. Smarter students would figure that out on their own, simply by understanding the Scientific Method and using it to determine that something that is not falsifiable cannot be studied scientifically, but it’s important that all students are brought up to speed on this simple matter.
Tell us more, Mr. Wizard! Like how macro-evolution is falsifiable.
Real science takes nothing for granted; if there is a (cost-effective and rationally feasible) way to test a theory, no matter how bizarre the theory sounds, it should be tested. The problem with the Darwinians and environmentalists is not that they are wrong; it is that they treat their theories like dogma, not science. Why not run experiments to see if intelligent design is feasible? unless you are afraid of it proving right?
The only thing natural science can do is discover and describe consistencies in nature. ID certainly does that, and it is certainly falsifiable. Simply show that something the ID methodology says to be designed occurred randomly or by natural contingencies or by a combination of those forces.
Attempts have been made to do this, btw so ID is clearly potentially falsifiable.
Jamie W. –
“Why not run experiments to see if intelligent design is feasible?”
HOW???? Step 1: Take an omnipotent being and have him create life…. Yup. Let’s get right on that.
This is getting beside the point of the article, but really… any time I hear somebody argue ID I think of that old cartoon where the two scientists are standing in front of a chalkboard. The chalkboard is covered with mathematical equations, and in the middle of it is written “and then a miracle happens”. The second scientist is saying “I’m having a problem with this part in the middle here….”
ID is not science until **scientifically** you can explain “omnipotent being”. I’ve time and time again gotten into this discussion with ID proponents who go for a while and then suddenly say “Well I don’t have to explain God, He just is.”
Feel free to believe that God doesn’t require explanation; but you simply can’t call that science.
2 + 2 andthenamiraclehappens = 47 See? I just proved that 2 + 2 = 47 is correct math!
My father spoke before the TSBE hearings as an invited guest in March of this year. I suggest that, before you say that anyone defames or refuses to teach evolution in Texas, that you read the actual transcripts of the hearing(s).
The hearings went into considerable depth and detail of the writings of the most prominent evolutionary scientists. Chapter and page number of these books were quoted IN CONTEXT. My father was one of those who quoted these books. It was BECAUSE of the writings of these prominent evolutionary scientists that the TSBE adopted the standards that it did. The head of this hearing committee (Don McLeroy) said “We are SCIENCE teachers, not religion teachers”. And considerable attention and hearing time was paid to the duty of the Board members to teach the SCIENCE as it is best understood. And so creationism will NOT be taught in Texas, but SCIENCE will be.
It is the stated hope that it will be a Texas student who some day arrives at the answer to the questions posed in these hearings. After all: a scientist always keeps an open mind and asks questions, else he or she is not a scientist at all.
And Zombie; if you want to contact my father, drop me a line. I’ll put you in touch, and he will bore you to TEARS with the details of the books. He spent years analyzing both the books themselves and their corroborating science, or lack thereof. His own documentation is a small encyclopedia, with indices and cross-references. Some of it was adopted as part of the TSBE hearing process.
You are a lot like the left in that if you can’t refute someone with facts you resort to name-calling. In other words, someone who claims there are doubts about the “basic truth of Darwinian evolution is a fool at best and willfully dishonest at worst.”
Would you please share even some of the overwhelming array of evidence supporting evolution?
Did you know that Dr. Anthony Flew, a famous former atheist, came to believe in the existence of God partly due to the arguments put forward by proponents of ID? And at the tender age of 81 years. There are some very bright people who agree with the those in the ID camp, so be careful who you call a fool.
Zombie:
“First, they defeated a motion to have students learn about the separation of church and state, a foundational principle of the United States.” What separation would that be?
It appears your whole critique of what the “right” wants is based on religion. Why does that bother you so much? Did you ever consider that the TSBE went to the right in order to get the students back to the middle ground? Or were you just making a knee-JERK conclusion? Did you talk to any of these “right”wing TSBE commissioners?
Seems to me that our education system was doing just fine until 1963 SCOTUS decision. Then it went downhill from there. Got any ideas why?
So let me see if I have this right: You want the students to learn something that is not writting in the Constitution or BOR; you want them NOT to understand that maybe, just maybe GOD had something to do with us being here and maybe had a hand in creating everything before the big bang and inflation?
I would hope that in the up coming parts, you will have some quotes from your talks with TSBE personnel.
Blotto, the separation of church and state is a foundational principle of American governance in so far as it prevents the establishment of a single official state religion. American government is “disestablishmentarian.” This is forever enshrined in our Constitution’s First Amendment, which spells out pretty clearly that Congress shouldn’t make any laws that touch religious establishments, period. Free exercise! Separate spheres!
Yes, atheists ever since have tried to say that God and religion should have no discernible part in public life, but their desire is quixotic, unrealistic, and counter-productive. In my opinion, everyone is religious. We just link ourselves to different metaphysical assumptions, of which even nihilism is one. And we act on those assumptions. Hell, much of our political life is *motivated* by religious motivations.
And crucial to the preservation of freedom itself is the assumption that some rights are simply inalienable, i.e., not created by the State. What the State granteth, the State can also (and often does) taketh away. Religion is good in all sorts of ways for political life. Alexis de Tocqueville had rather a lot of influential things to say on the subject.
As long as those ‘ignorant right-wing Christians’ don’t get any of their teachings into the school system, we’re fine. Never-mind that humanism (determined by SCOTUS to be a non-theistic religion) runs the show in our schools with its lie of tolerance (allow everything but Christianity) and its philosophy which openly states in its revised Manifesto of 1973 that religions of salvation are irrational and irrelevant.
Give me a break. The US spends billions on education and what are we getting for our money? Stupid little politically correct clones who can’t read, can’t write, can’t do simple math, can’t spell and hate God.
Science? Since when did buggery become a science? For thousands of years, homosexuality was considered to be AGAINST NATURE, now it’s not only tolerated, but espoused as a legitimate form of sexual expression.
Who do you think you’re fooling here pal? T’ain’t me, and t’ain’t a lot of other people either.
Finally: Brendan…IT’S A WAR. AN IDEOLOGICAL WAR. You don’t treat your enemies kindly in war, you destroy him, and that means you give him both barrels every chance you get and whiz on whether or not like don’t like it. The humanists have been doing it to us Christians and we’ve been taking it for nearly 50 years. Now we’re fighting back. So if’n ya don’t like it, get your butt off the battlefield.
IT’S A WAR. AN IDEOLOGICAL WAR. You don’t treat your enemies kindly in war, you destroy him, and that means you give him both barrels every chance you get and whiz on whether or not like don’t like it. The humanists have been doing it to us Christians…
Hmmm, are those lines from the Sermon on the Mount?
Jesus said all this odd stuff about turning the other cheek. What was he thinking? Really?
Dwight, Jesus also showed righteous anger. Read about how he handled the money-changers in the temple. So, there’s a time to turn the other cheek, and there’s also a time to stand up and have a backbone. I think defending and protecting the weaker individuals being preyed upon here (our children) makes more sense than throwing them to the wolves in this case. . . to let them be devoured would be the opposite of being a Christian. It’s not like we’re displaying wrath in a sinful manner to speak up and object to what is/isn’t being done.
Dwight, I’m tired of this argument that Christians are supposed to be beta males. You’ve bought into the liberal ideas of Jesus. . . He wasn’t a beta male.
1) Sooner or later you run out of cheeks.
2) Jesus kicked ass on the moneychangers in the temple. This doesn’t argue for Jesus as a total pacifist. He was willing to take violent action for a just cause.
I think the operative word is “Ideological” War…. consider what the apostle Peter said to the Jewish rulers who were beating and imprisoning them in Acts 4: “18Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19But Peter and John replied, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. 20For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” This is the kind of example which motivates Christians (or should).
Jefferson was removed from a list of leading Enlightenment thinkers in world history curricula, but he is included numerous times in U.S. government and American history, according to copies of the standards obtained by the Texan.
Jefferson was not a “leading Enlightenment thinker” and he does not deserve to be placed in a section about such people.
This is the whole point: They are correcting a lot of lies and, in this case, pure silliness. In no sense of the world can Jefferson be called a “philosopher”, and this, of course is what they mean by a “thinker”. He was influenced by them. Let us as well make the mistake that Jefferson did much else but give voice to the thought of the political thoughts of the late Colonial era in general, and his fellow “representatives” in particular.
You seem to think that pointing out that the BoED excluded him from the group of real thinkers of the Scottish and French “Enlightenments” is some sort of valid criticism or proof of “extremism”, but it is really more just proof of your own ill-education, ignorance, parochialism and muddled thinking.
In fact, they are quite right to do this, and this is indeed how Jefferson and his contribution was viewed throughout most of our history.
If they really wanted to do the student a favor, they could start deconstructing the whole construct of “The Enlightenment” or at least start a discussion about this dubious later characterization of that period and all the questionable historiography and harmful political legacies that have fallen out of this construction.
Your point here is not only invalid, it is nonsensical too boot.
I believe the term ‘Enlightenment’ was also removed — appropriate, since they included Thomas Aquinas and Calvin.
My wife and I have developed our own solution to this problem: we’re homeschooling!
Most of this article is spent talking about Texas. Part II is what is the matter with Texas? I personally do not see a big role for Texas regardless of your claim that it is an influential state. If Texas is taken out of the equation we still have an education policy that is lopsidedly leftist and mediocre. You are talking crap.
Texas is the second-largest textbook market, so its decisions exert a national influence on publishers and other state purchasers.
My kids are in elementary school. They do not get taught evolution. They do get leftist propaganda day in and day out. They are taught AGW theory. They are taught moral relativism and multiculturalism. That has nothing to do with the school board in Texas. So if they get taught evolution in biology class in high school, that does not compare to what I see as constant indoctrination in political correctness. Texas does not matter in the above. Why the focus on evolution in Texas? Why the absolutist stance? I don’t see much difference between Zombie and the leftist establishment.
I think zombie’s point is that Texas’s exertions won’t be productive or salutary because they’re just as ideologically-driven as the lefty pushers of lefty crapola. Anti-evolution is a convenient case in point. As for “productive,” we’ll just have to see whether Texas knocks some Gramscian bolts loose. As for “salutary,” well, I personally don’t see the point of including assertions that ‘God did it’ in a science classroom. I’m Roman Catholic, by the way, and I happen to agree a great deal with Karl Popper at the same time.
My kids are in a Montessori school with a strong farm program. I’m sorry to hear your kids are being fed all the AGW crap and propaganda. Mine get some peacenik noise, but it’s largely benign. I keep an eye on it. The boys are almost old enough to come with me to the firing range.
Actually, Steve, unless you live in CA, NY, or FL — your kids are probably using the books approved by Texas. That’s why the TSBE has drawn national focus: what they do affects the books used by kids in the other (smaller) states, because the book publishing companies can’t make a profit dealing with 57 different editions for all 57 states. (I R Edumacated By Mistur Obumma).
It’s not clear to me why school districts, or at least states, don’t replace textbooks from the large companies with their own compendia. Surely this would not be too difficult or expensive for the basics–reading, writing, elementary arithmatic. Simple stories, like the stories and nursery rhymes parents buy for their children, could be used for the beginnings of literature, real works of literature later on. History might be more difficult, but why not wait until the children are old enough to read original texts? The Greeks taught geometry by drawing constructions in the sand or on clay tablets; download a copy of Euclid from the internet and have the students use paper, pencil, compass, and ruler. Natural science begins with observation and controlled experimentation; surely these can be devised without resorting to commercial texts.
Perhaps these suggestions would make the teachers work harder than their unions would permit. Perhaps the textbook companies have made sweetheart deals with those in the educational establishments. Of course, when individual states, districts, and classrooms are taking more initiative, there is less opportunity for spreading propaganda. That might explain the obstacles, but that does not mean that a populace who are as angry about the present political trends as the Tea Party folks could not organize to implement something like them. But then, these are the kind of people who have already taken the initiative to school their kids at home.
5. Wrath of Dagon
Thanks for the links. It’s instructive to read the complete version of section 20:
(20) Government. The student understands how contemporary political systems have developed from earlier systems of government. The student is expected to:
(A) explain the development of democratic-republican government from its beginnings in the Judeo-Christian legal tradition and classical Greece and Rome through the English Civil War and the Enlightenment;
(B) identify the impact of political and legal ideas contained in the following documents: Hammurabi’s Code, the Jewish Ten Commandments, Justinian’s Code of Laws, Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen;
(C) explain the political philosophies of individuals such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Thomas Jefferson, and William Blackstone; and
(D) explain the significance of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
[snip]
The inclusion of thinkers like Aquinas and Calvin in subsection C strikes me entirely fair if the purpose of the standard is, as it says, to drive student knowledge towards a historical understanding of how early American political theory developed from various antecedents. Obviously you could pack subsection C full of names. I’m surprised the Mayflower Compact doesn’t appear anywhere. It was the first governing document of an American colony.
It is interesting that Christians are always made out to be the baddies; fear not in a few years the country will be post Christian and devoid of any concept of Christian ethics or morals. The the neo Americans can exercise their full life of unbridled hedonism and unbridled persecution religion per se. America the beautiful will in a short time become America the cesspool.
The assumption that everyone must study the same material is sooo 19th century – like the brick and mortar classrooms (with paper textbooks) where exceptional children are outcasts by design. Taxpayers are spending billions on a failed, antiquated model. When the federal govt got involved, education became politicized just like most American science, with disastrous results, including enforced atheism.
With computerization and the internet, each individual student can now be taught at home or in a quality daycare without destroying parental values. Education is NOT GOVERNMENT; it is a parent’s responsibility. The technology and infrastructure for home-schooling exist and are becoming more and more the choice of caring parents, certainly if they want their children to believe in a Supreme Being.
Your view of the European racist Darwin who reflected pre-space-age thinking (everything on earth HAD to have evolved here) is offensive to people of non-European heritage, or haven’t you read Darwin’s theory that non-Europeans were LESS EVOLVED…..Read his ‘Descent of Man’ and other later views, and you’ll see why many are offended that this is required reading…..What will be the views of a hundred years in the future?
emmaliza
“The assumption that everyone must study the same material is sooo 19th century”
So let’s obliterate all schooling that does not occur in individual homes.
You are okay with, say, Islamist madrassahs becoming as widespread as public neighborhood schools, along with Scientologist Dianetics Academies — aren’t you?
Unmentioned so far by Z on this thread is the “relationship” issue between textbook publishers and school districts – all around the country. Dig deep in any district’s budget and find out how much $$$ goes to publishers, and then try to imagine the whole teaching “industry” is evenhanded and above-board with textbooks. Not so. There are other serious malfeasance issues here but our attention is being diverted to those rascals in Texas instead of giving us facts to see the bigger picture. Not saying it’s intentional, but to most “educators” there IS no problem with their relationships with publishers. It’s only taxpayer money, so it’s not real.
Lemme see.
PUBLIC SCHOOL
-Trust the CiC who hasn’t provided ANY of his collegiate records and was a C student.. in Hawaii! An
-’Education Secretary’ who himself has NEVER been a teacher.
-Whereas public schools have as Zombie mentioned, no alternative discussion though the opponents have factual evidence to the contrary. Al Gore’s mockumentary is standard viewing in MANY schools.. yikes!
-Many public schools have a curriculum that teaches of ‘Important LGBT contributors’. Hmmm, I didn’t realize the public schools before this taught only of ‘heterosexual contributors to our nation’ prior..
-Most public schools do not hold students responsible for turning in their homework on-time. Nor lose credit if turning in their homework late. Seriously.
-Many after school programs, sports AND TEACHERS in these fields are getting 86′d due to budget constraints, yet ESL teachers and recognizing Hispanic and Black, err, ‘Africvan American’ holidays are standard. What about recognizing Asian holidays? You know, the demographic that is surpassing ALL other demographics in our nation’s public education system.
-Public school teachers spend far more time with their ESL students than their fluent in English, more so college bound students.
-The English fluent student’s parents CONTRIBUTE to the public school system far more by being able to assist with homework needs, participation in school programs, events and PAYING taxes. Whereas the ESL parent’s enjoy school provided breakfast, lunch and in some instances DINNER nowadays. MANY of the ESL student’s parents have cash only jobs, thus NOT paying for said lunches, said education, computer lab services, tutoring, etc., But they sure do get to benefit from ‘em, don’t they?!
-Heck, in Montgomery County, MD – you know the ‘#1 County 2 years running in the nation’ for education scores don’t require their ESL students to take final exams to graduate! These students can get a waiver! Who said you can’t get something from nothing.. then again- what do you expect from a sanctuary city/county.
I’m ‘shocked’ productive Montgomery County residents are fleeing the County. I thought they enjoy paying outrageously high taxes, at the same time looking the other way in regards to gangs, drugs and prostitution occurring in their community.
And, 600 more students than anticipated this school year whereas a majority of these students are Hispanic.. again – Totally ‘shocked’.
HOME SCHOOL
-Most homes have a stay at home parental unit as their teacher.
-The parent/teacher usually instills a strong work ethic, Christian (Granted some may be ‘uber’ Christian, suffice to say the child(ren) may play with non home-schooled children and find a balance. Or be totally repulsed by public educated children altogether.. who knows?
-Home schooled child will more than likely be dressed appropriately to focus on the tasks at hand, whereas the public educated child with their nose ring, barbed wire tattoo or ‘tramp stamp’ is expressing their herd-like tendency.. uhh, I’d meant ‘individuality’. Yep..
I’ll stop there and give more credit, validity to the home schooled bunch.
I have to say it’s nice to see a Zombie article that does not feature hundreds of pictures. DOn’t get me wrong I love the pictures but it’s nice to actually read and be informed through words only from our Zombie. Well done!
My Uncle and my Brother are both Math teachers (though my Uncle is recently retired) and I have to say their POV on the whole thing can make paint curl! They are both very vocal about how dumbed down schooling is esepcially in their field of expertise.
If there is a contest between the two, you can be damn sure which side many Americans will be on. And it isn’t the Marxist crap side either. Since everything is politicized today, simply teaching facts is a dispute. Whose fault is that? Children were educated for generations without this viciousness being inserted into everything people encounter in their every day lives. People are fed up with it and tired of being used as pawns in a power struggle. But… if you want to lay blame on how, why, and when it began, the fault lies squarely at the hobnailed jackbooted feet of the left. They just don’t like the fact that the other side has jumped into the fray. They asked for it. Now they can deal with it. Read all materials that come from the schools, make a lot of noise when you see something you don’t agree with, question their motives, and put them on notice. When that happens, EVERYWHERE, they’ll get the message.
Again, zombie’s basic point is that serious reform of the Gramscian system isn’t well-served by lurching in an equally ideologically-driven direction.
Zombie, I think that’s debatable. Strong lurches in opposite directions, as you well know, are designed to create new middles. We’ll just have to wait and see if this round of exertion works.
It’s probably futile to try to convince Texans to stop looking like stubborn ‘Christian Nation’ fundamentalists out of a political sense of strategy or tact. They’re not interested in strategery. Their bashing on the Gramscian system might knock some systemic things loose, and that’s progress in my view.
People have the right to be free, and that means the right to be wrong. If this means letting science teachers take a few minutes in class to point to purported problems with Darwin’s theories, fine. That should just raise a beautiful “teaching moment” opportunity to discuss Karl Popper and the relationship between science and not-science. And directions to the nearest “Religious Studies” classrooms, if they exist, to the school library, or to the catechesis programs of XYZ religious communities.
Where did you get your degree in Advanced Condescension?
except there is no real ‘lurch to the right’. Zombie, like so many of us, has been conditioned by schools that hug the edges of the far left. Any movement away from that–even if it is simply back towards the center–is going to be portrayed as moving towards the far right.
In part this is due to the fact that so many things that were once ‘middle of the road’ are now seen as far right. Add this to the inevitable leftist screech and you get situations where moving back towards normalcy can be spun as something sinister.
This is where we are today, and we cannot fight it if we aquiesce to the screeching. In fact, the left expects that aquiesence.
There are Christian elements to our nation–not the least of which is this love/hate relationship with evolution that so vexes us.
It is the sad truth, for Christians, that even micro-evolution(which many Christians accept and use in ID arguments) is pretty much proven beyond doubt–and it does not jibe with the Bible. So there are scientific facts that undermine their premise–but those arguments do not negate the role of faith in our founding, our history, and our society–no matter how much the left would like those topics verboten.
Math is a very, very dangerous subject. It teaches that there is right and wrong. Actually, it is even worse. It teaches there is only one right among an infinite number of wrongs! That is too much politically incorrect. And anti-multicuturalist too!
Reading is bad too. It provides kids with the tools to read other things rather than the political-correctly accepted. Better if they just listen.
(sarc off)
Hysterical, but unfortunately we’ll probably get to that point.
One thing I forgot to point out in my earlier comment elsewhere here was that decades ago when I had history, we stopped at 1945 after we won the war. Do they actually teach kids these days about the 80s and 90s? I never even learned about the Korean War!
I find it hard to believe that even the smallest school system can’t find the books it would want. There are plenty of hungry text book writers out there and plenty of publishers that would print books by those authors.
It might cost a bit more but if they were really concerned about teaching it wouldn’t be so impossible.
I have either taught, substituted or student taught in three different school systems. I taught Chemistry, Physical Science and Biology — There were no new textbooks. The textbooks were 10 to 15 years old. Most teachers never even used them. It was and still is my job to find out from the state standards what needs to be covered and then do an internet search to find appropriate materials to print out and copy for each of my students.
My current employer is now counting every photocopy I make. I don’t know what materials I can give to my students when I am no longer allowed to photocopy.
So I don’t know why we are talking new textbooks — I bet there are more than a few school systems that just haven’t bought any in 10 or more years. It’s all what’s on the internet.
My current employer does not buy textbooks, lab supplies, lab chemicals or any reagents for biology or dissection animals. Basic tools to educate. And putting it on a list for parents to buy just brings whines of frustration because the parents can’t afford anything either.
You miss two important points. First, the media the kids will be exposed to for the rest of their lives will be neither fair nor balanced, so they might as well get used to being told half the story by a side with an agenda.
More importantly, public education exists not to educate, but to create compliant citizens. Ths smart ones will figure it out by themselves. The rest will fufill their roles as compliant citizens. Any concerned and questioning parent can easily teach a child why they are being taught what they are and what agendas are in play. Once learned, that’s a lesson that is never forgotten. Nobody will ever care for your kids more than you do.
I am looking forward to reading the whole essay before casting stones. I do have issues with the ‘Separation of Church and State” especially since the phrase is nowhere in the Constitution. The thrust of the article looks like it may be leading in the correct direction. Please do tough it out Zombie. This could turn out to be very interesting.
I call BS.
Has anyone actually gone and read what Texas ratified? And do you know these are the minimum standards? And how the standards were created and then approved?
For example, Patton was replaced by the founder of the Tuskegee Airmen.
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=6148
If you look around, you can find the proposed standards with comments and changes to the original documents.
So far, I agree with the comments that call you out for your leftist bias. I am particularly interested to see you cite specific examples of the Right’s efforts to “in certain areas dispose with scientific fact in favor of religious dogma”. Contrary to popular belief, the term “scientific fact” can only be used to describe an observable, repeatable, falsifiable, scientific phenomena arrived at through the scientific method. But the majority of evolutionary biology is based on extrapolations from scientific fact which are not able to be observed, repeated or falsified. When you use empirical science (i.e., which is observable, repeatable, falsifiable) to make guesses about what happened in the past (and the past is NOT observable, repeatable, falsifiable), you must necessarily make certain assumptions. It is the ASSUMPTIONS, not the SCIENTIFIC FACTS, that the creationists are challenging. In short, we all have the same scientific facts. It is in the INTERPRETATIONS of those facts where we differ and our interpretations are greatly influenced by our philosophy and worldview.
“It is the ASSUMPTIONS, not the SCIENTIFIC FACTS, that the creationists are challenging.”
If that’s all they were doing then they wouldn’t be creationists, they would be skeptics. Being a skeptic is fine. Trying to bring religious dogma into the classroom is not. There is no excuse or justification for trying to promote creationism in a public school setting, period.
It seems to me that teaching what actually happened is the main requirement. Or if you can’t agree on what actually happened, teaching both versions. You want to exclude one side altogether because it is “religious”. Which means, in effect, that you want the atheist religious position to be enforced by law.
Obviously things going on over millions of years can’t be “observed” in the same way that something going on right now can be. However, that doesn’t mean that one can’t draw correct conclusions from the evidence.
What most IDer’s, Creationists, whatever, fail to learn from the history of science is that what undermined the literal interpretation of the Bible (only 6K years of history etc.) was geology. This happened long before Darwin. Also, linguistics undermined the Tower of Babel story by showing how the languages spoken now evolved (sorry!) from older ones. In the case of linguistics there were real proofs involving unknown languages which had the predicted structures and properties when they were discovered.
Chemists and physicists dealt with atoms and molecules as very real things for a very long time before it was actually possible to “see” them with an electron microscope – if you accept that you are indeed seeing them with this indirect method. But everything worked the way it was supposed to, and when atoms and molecules actually became “visible” it was almost an anticlimax.
People who say that you can’t observe evolution are just revealing their own ignorance – you can observe it in the fossil record just as scientists did completely valid chemistry and physics long before they could actually “observe” atoms and molecules.
Please, people – Zombie is dead on with this. While the origins of life, and sciences relating to this, as opposed to less emotional topics like geology and linguistics, easily become very emotional topics, we mustn’t let wishful thinking or religion interfere with science. The famous Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz was the first Christian evolutionist, and many people here have pointed out that there’s no reason for science to interfere with faith.
Insisting on a faith-based approach to science will alienate the very people who should be on our side, for no very good reason.
Please, pull back from this sort of wishful thinking. In truth, you can’t prove that the world wasn’t created five minutes ago with all our memories, the newspapers, the fossil record, etc. as part of creation. But it didn’t happen thus. Putting up exhibits of dinosaurs sharing the world with cavemen is just ludicrous, and gives anybody who does it just about no chance of succeeding with their arguments.
This seems like such a superficial explanation of the growing dilemma facing our nations educational system. There are so many factors that play into why our educational system is in shambles, blaming either the left or the right is simply absurd.
Education begins at home and has become the first line of failure. The success of our great nation has awarded us the luxury of getting through life being fat and lazy. Parents rather park children in front of a Television than deal with them.
You can’t place a child with messed up social and educational skills and still expect them to thrive in any educational system. There are some fundamental lessons that must be taught to children to prepare them for life in general, that simply aren’t being taught anymore.
When it comes down to it compared to most of the world we have it really easy and most kids won’t find out what hard work and perseverance really are until its to late. Then we try to compare them to some student from India and China which have to constantly struggle and work, not because they choose to but out of basic necessity.
There are many other factors as well. There are many teachers who have simply given up and who can really blame them. It eats away at you having to deal with kids that simply don’t care, year after year.
Politics have become so convoluted that its no longer about whats best for our nation or our children, it has become about getting ahead of left or the right by any means.
The Texas State Board of Education has infamously for years been trying to eliminate the theory of evolution from the state’s science textbooks and to replace it with the anti-scientific non-theory of “intelligent design,” better known as creationism.
No, the theory of “intelligent design” is not better known as “creationism.” Creationists are Bible literalists who believe the heavens, earth and man were created just as Genesis says they were. Intelligent design advocates believe the universe and everything therein did not come about randomly but through intelligent cause. There’s a world of difference, one that many Darwinists refuse to acknowledge. And furthermore, I don’t believe the TSBE has been trying to eliminate the theory of evolution from science textbooks. I believe they are concerned that evolutionary theory not be taught as “settled science” (will we ever be rid of this odious term). And they certainly have a point. The fossil record is what it is, but it’s not all that (for example, I believe no record exists showing one species of animal becoming another). As our knowledge of genetics and DNA increases, so will our knowledge of evolution and textbooks should instruct on not only what we know, but also what we don’t know at a given time about a given subject (and in this age, there is no reason for textbook facts to become “stale”). As a commenter mentions above, the study of evolutionary theory might be an ideal time to introduce students to Popperism.
I graduated from high school before public education was hijacked by the left. We studied Darwin in biology class. In college, I took a year-long course in evolutionary biology that was fascinating and instructive (textbook by Isaac Asimov). At no time in the course of those studies was my essential faith in a Creator shaken (not even the Vatican denies evolution). Surely even the most ardent Darwinist can entertain the theory that there is an intelligent, if not Divine, hand in the making of the universe, even a universe in which selection appears random.
I’m sure you have prepared a very fine series. I’m also sure that I will get much more out of it if, in future installments, I find you’ve climbed down from your Darwin/intelligent design high horse.
Still, advocates of Intelligent Design tend to want to draw the conclusion that a supernatural entity imaged like the traditional Christian or Jewish person-like conception of God constructed the design (rather like William Blake’s depiction of Jehovah constructing the universe with a geometric compass). A school of philosophy running from Aristotle to Hegel, however, argues that the design or formal structure inheres in the phenomena themselves, the natural universe being neither random nor designed from without. Their arguments, however, rather stand outside the British Empirical tradition which informed the thinking of America’s Founding Fathers. Today both Darwinists and advocates of Intelligent Design accept the Lockean/Humean reduction of causality to the material and the efficient. Aristotle, however, argued that there are four forms of causality, the formal and final being as valid as the first two. By form each individual as an instance of its species finds its matter differentiated into something unique rather than being merely a evaporating moment in an inchoate flux. And all things come not only from what has preceded but also incline towards fulfillment; humans (when they act as ethical humans, not concupiscent beasts) self-consciously.
I realize that this conception seems outlandish and that it does not carry much force in contemporary debates in America. I suggest, however, that an engagement with this way of thinking might begin to establish both an intellectual and a political via media that might help resolve the extremes Zombie has described.
Space does not permit further explication here, but anybody whose temperament runs toward philosophy might consider reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Frederik Beiser’s Hegel. (Hegel himself, without preparation, is too “Germanic” for most of us.)
I also concur that intelligent design does not equate with Creationism (which is normally taught as a Christian God who create the Universe 6000 years ago). Intelligent design instead claims that (at least for life on Earth) that there is evidence of “directed evolution” rather than Darwinism which claims it is all driven by natural selection (which is a tautology when investigated). Darwinism as taught in the schools is also not science because it is not expressed in a disprovable form, in fact as normally taught it is not even presented as a theory.
However it IS also true that many of the proponents of intelligent design in the USA are in fact Creationists who are using it as a cat’s paw or Trojan Horse.
“Intelligent design instead claims that (at least for life on Earth) that there is evidence of “directed evolution” rather than Darwinism which claims it is all driven by natural selection (which is a tautology when investigated).”
If by tautology you mean that it is as obviously true and correct as that 2 + 2 = 4, then you are correct.
Why do I get the feeling Zombie’s Doom is going to end up a Charles Johnson Little Green Nightmare?
No chance. None. Nil. Nada.
Start with the obvious fact that Zombie has to be 6,837 times smarter than CJ. When CJ first banned Creationist ideologues it was because they wouldn’t shut up, more than anything else. His later, worrisome, descent into pointless drivel probably demonstrates only that the power of the leftist narrative was in the end too strong for him to overcome.
I was around when he banned Zombie, and it wasn’t pretty. That was exactly when evil triumphed over there, imho.
Y’know, right up until they get to the creationist stuff I’m not too averse to the Texas program, it’s mostly better and certainly no worse than having their heads filled with AGW.
I’m hoping that I can sit down and start to read the Will Durant ‘History of Civilization’ series with my daughter before either side of the education bureaucracy sits on her brain.
I usually agree with most of your conclusions, but your mischaracterization oT the Texas School board battle is unfortunate.
A lot of the battle is over the narrative in history, which is, for the most part, not part of your evil Christians vs. evil Progressives narrative. As a former history teacher, the battles being fought in Texas are the battles between teaching “America as a force for good” vs. “America is a cesspool of evil.”
Nice idea for a piece; you have one half. Now, you just need to find the other half.
Hey, we practiced what you preach, Zombie. We are conservative Christians and we homeschooled three of our children and sent them forth into the world … well, actually we sent our two youngest sons to the University of Illinois (one graduated cum laude and the other magna cum laude) and our oldest when to Southern Illinois University because it had one of the four top automotive technology schools in the nation and he graduated cum laude and was in the top 5% of his graduating class.
We used Christian-based curricula in our “Cornerstone Academy” homeschool and in retrospective our sons are clearly well-rounded winners and all three have an admirable work ethic to boot. Our youngest, 23, has now entered law school (probably not the best place to be right now but that’s what he wanted to do) the other two are actually using their degrees in their respective careers.
Also, I helped coach a private baseball team at Judah Christian High in 2003 here in the People’s Republic of Illinois. They were probably the greatest bunch of young men you’d ever see on the planet. Six out of seven seniors on the team went on to join various branches of the armed forces and five have already served with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan. A couple will be going back for a second tour though they despise Obambi as their Commander-in-Chicken.
I just don’t see the “argument” if public schools were to become more “Christian” like our homeschool (we didn’t turn our home into a monastery, btw, it was open to all their friends in the neighborhood including several Muslim neighbor boys down the street) or like Judah Christian High, how that could be anything but a positive.
Look, I went to public school back in the early 1960s when out of deference and respect for Catholic students (the guys were the worse kind of swearers except for one of my friends who ended up becoming a Catholic priest) we had “fish on Fridays”. Big Deal! I didn’t feel like I was being forced to worship in a Catholic Church because of that and I didn’t feel like religion was being crammed down my throat because we had morning prayer every day and the Pledge of Allegiance. BTW, my parents weren’t big about “going to church” being nominal Christians and I was a complete pagan as a teen though I definitely believed in a personal Creator – like the founding fathers.
Maybe all this hyper-secular dogmatism which always attempts to demonize ANY kind of Christian influence in public schools is part of the reason our public schools today SUCK! What I’m saying is public schools with even heavy Judeo-Christian influences in years past were probably infinitely more capable and balanced in their approach to the 3Rs than the present hyper-secular abominations that are essentially the re-education camps of secular humanists and secular liberals. Here’s something to think about … with all the billions we now pour into primary and secondary education, WHY DO PUBLIC SCHOOLS TODAY SUCK! You know how much federal money my elementary school got when I was on the school rollcall, less than $300. Of course our schools weren’t top-heavy with administrators back in my day but the way the curricula today is put together by raging hyper-seculars and the complete lack of discipline and that heavy-dose of social cynicism and disrespect for authority (which was never a problem back in my SFISD boyhood school district), no wonder the $9,000 in federal education aid per student school districts get today may as well be flushed down a toilet. There’s definitely an educational culture problem and I personally believe it has a lot to do with completely disconnecting the Creator to whom we owe our unalienable rights from the educational process. Let’s face it, atheist fundamentalism is an irreligious religion and has essentially monopolized the public education sector as well as most of our government.
The bright kids today aren’t a product of our broken educational system, but rather they end up educating themselves IN SPITE OF the public school system … or they go to Christian and private schools that aren’t so paranoid about atheist fundamentalist sensitivities.
My five cents worth.
I feel your placing far to much importance on god and should take more credit as being a good parent. Having good parents will far outweigh whether or not you believe in God or are learning in a Christian environment.
I graduated high school just five years ago, my high school was ranked 1st in California in teen pregnancy and was riddle with gang violence. The majority of kids didn’t amount to much, but within my social circle most of us went on to do great things. One of my friends became an Aerospace Engineer, another does Ads for Nissan Infinity and another became an Architect, as for my self I went into Software Engineering.
Now how do you account for us being able to achieve this inspite of the fact that we were all atheist in a horrible school system. Maybe there are some more important factors than whether you believe in god or not. Like having good parents and carrying good company with you.
Just so you know, you are really waving your anti-Christian bigotry freak flag high here. And it’s not a very attractive commentary on who you are as a human being.
You seem a bit confused — it’s the good for nothing right wing nutzo’s who are trying to undermine US education, and have had moderate success at attacking scientists and science in general.
Reading further down.
The national socialist media (otherwise known as the lamestream or legacy media by some informed people) along with influential macro-evolutionists have falsely demonized the real ID people as “creationists.” Actually the real deal ID people are micro-evolutionists who had the gall to challenge the present dogmas of post-Darwinian evolution.
What the ID people are trying to do (but they keep getting demonized by kneejerk evolutionists whose paychecks are on the line) is bring a little bit of honesty into the debate about human origins and the actual biological mechanics involved in evolving one lifeform into another kind of lifeform. I still want to know what property is inherent in matter or a combination of matter and free energy, that evolves lifeforms into ever higher complex lifeforms. You can’t simply say “evolution” because that would merely be a tautology. If this is strictly a physically materalistic universe in which no outside force (God?) is acting upon inanimate matter, then what intrinsic property or possible mechanism does matter, atoms and molecules have that causes them to organize themselves into ever more complex combinations to the point it actually becomes animate matter? And therein lies the Great Divide, how did the inanimate become the animate self-replicating building blocks of life when cosmic radiation and other hostile natural forces would have instantly and continually scrambled whatever lucky combinations just happened to “evolve” by random chance? How many times in a row can you throw sevens in a crap game?
What micro-biologists like Behe and other credentialed biologists, with more capital letters after their names than most of us here btw, are saying is there were far too many assumptions and theories being floated about within the evolutionary community without the requisite hard biological evidence of how one kind of animal or plant actually evolves into another. You can trot out all the slick little DVD presentations that’s all CGI’d up to try and wow your audience into blindly accepting how little eo-hippus horsey thingies eventually evolved into great big Budweiser Bush Clydsdale through computer morphing programs, but people like Behe are saying, “Okay guys, where’s the hard biological evidence at the molecular that such things like that happened and how are these great evolutionary leaps in some biological internal systems actually made when a whole butt load of characteristics have to come together at one time in such a way that keeps the organism and the population viable while they are evolving? I mean, I’d like to know those micro-biological steps, too. So some primordial creature keeps scratching at an irritation and then this act is compounded by several million years and presto change-o, you got an eye! C’mon that’s not science, that’s assumption. And just how did the eye evolve on three separate occasions, eh? Just some questions I’ve had (as a former hard-core evolutionist myself, btw) that I’ve never gotten a fact-based honest answer to.
I’ve found once you cut through all the “possibly happened”, “could have happened”, “must have occurred”, “it’s theorized”, most macro-evolution true believers are usually left saying, “We know it evolved this way otherwise how would you explain its existence?” Talk about tu quo quo and circular reasoning!
Hankmeister
You can trot out all the slick little DVD presentations that’s all CGI’d up to try and wow your audience into blindly accepting how little eo-hippus horsey thingies eventually evolved into great big Budweiser Bush Clydsdale through computer morphing programs
There’s no need for fancy computer programs: just look at dogs. Look at paintings showing dogs from a few hundred years ago and images or sculptures of dogs from before that. Now look at Irish Setters, Pekes, Great Danes, Shih-Tzus etc.
Then go take a look at what happens if you isolate bacteria and play games with the bacterial environment. Weirdly, you get bacteria that thrive in the most hostile environment mad scientist can think of (yes, I am being a tad sarcastic here).
As for eyes evolving on multiple occasions, that’s an easy one. If any light-sensing apparatus confers a survival advantage, it will get adopted. Rinse and repeat, and you get eyes.
I am not a “Darwinist” or an “Evolutionist”. For a start, I don’t consider it beyond the ability of an all-powerful, all-knowing God to kick the whole thing off (the Big Bang) with all the right conditions for life – and intelligent life as well – to develop.
You know that the varying dog breeds are the direct result of intelligent input on the part of breeders over time, not anything natural occuring, right? I mean the day that science creates an actuall life cell, not just bacterium, I’m going to say “congratualtions, look what 150 years of intelligent design can accomplish.”
Yes, polarization is good for the idiots on either end but lays waste to everyone between the poles. I’ve thought this about the ‘right to choose’ vs. ‘right to life’ crowd for years. They don’t seek common ground (making abortion less necessary or desirable). They create enormous bureaucracies, legal structures and political manipulation apparatus. People get rich on the fight. But no one ever dares try to solve the problem except in a winner take all Armegeddon.
This polariztion grips us in many areas of life. But don’t ever think that those manning the ramparts at either pole want the problem solved. They’d have to get real jobs and figure out ways to productively use their time.
Robert Fuller
Hopewell, NJ
My fear has long been that the leftist destruction of standards in language, history, math and literature will render us all incommunicado.
Ayn Rand, so prophetic about much of what we are experiencing today, wrote in The Objectivist about 1970 an article on that very topic. Unfortunately, age and years of reading Newsweek and Time have turned my mind to mush and I cannot remember any specifics.
“To refuse to teach evolution in school is to commit to raising a generation of anti-scientific ignoramuses.”
I’m betting Sir Issac Newton would dispute that assertion.
And what what lead you to that assumption, considering Newton was dead long before Darwin was even alive, let alone the theory of evolution being proposed.
You just answered the question. Newton’s teachers couldn’t very well teach evolutionary biology, because it hadn’t been invented.
And, yet, somehow, his generation produced people who weren’t “anti-scientific ignoramuses”.
But isn’t the relevant question then, were things being kept from Newton that were known at the time, but considered heresy? We have gone beyond Newton and to make further progress we should not hide things. I have no problem with evolution being taught or the addition of things like “we still have no answer for the unmoved mover” or many of the missing links in evolutionary theory; but you can’t hide or discount the damned fossils and what they appear to tell us.
I used to be a Charles Johnson fan until his “Little Green Football” site went completely whacko. What’s that guy smoking?
The sheer hatemongering and the unrelenting demonization of mainstream conservatives and Christians (who, if the truth be told, share the exact same principles of liberties and Judeo-Christian ideals of the American founding fathers) is approaching pathological. I never thought Charles and the barking moonbats now posting at his site would fall back upoon the secular left’s crayons of hate.
Unfortunately, Zombie’s analysis is only half right. What you actually have in Texas is politically radical multiculturalists versus everyone else. I have actually lived in Texas and taught in the Texas public school system, so I know what I am talking about. Zombie really need to be more careful and thorough when providing evidence, as he quotes nothing except left-wing sources as “proof” of the evil Christianist influence. Think about it: USA Today, ABC, TXCN, Yahoo! News – all hard-left “news” organizations. Is it really possible that Zombie did not smell the rat?
As someone who also knows more than a thing or two about this field, I can only shake my head in dismay at the sheer ignorance and irrationality of Zombie on this issue. This is vintage “divide and conquer” on the part of the multicultural Left, yet Zombie has swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Tossing away potential allies – let’s face it, your only allies at this point – is sheer lunacy. Yet that is exactly what Zombie is doing.
Zombe’s Obama-esque argument (reminds me of the constant whine “It’s all Bush’s fault!”) is untrue. It was not the “Christianists” who bullied the GOP into nominating two “centrist” candidates to the TSBE who are likely to lose to hard-Left Democrats in November, thus agrivating the situatio he claims to deplore. You did that all by yourself. Thanks for nothing.
I also doubt that shrieking “STFU!” is going to win many people to Zombie’s cause. It’s the same sort of argument any 9/11 Truther or global warmist makes every day. How original. Include me out, please.
Let’s be clear about something – the liberal indoctrination goes back a good fifty years at least. In the mid-1960s the wisdom of the New Deal was NEVER QUESTIONED in the public schools I attended.
“Of course our schools weren’t top-heavy with administrators back in my day”
To me, this is one of the areas that caused public education to lose its way in the past several decades. And it’s not just that there are way too many administrators, but that those who take on these positions are pretty much required to stop teaching when they do. (The term “principal” originally referred to the principal teacher of the school, not a non-teaching administrator.) And when admins stop teaching, they change; they become bureaucrats and politicians, more concerned with their own power. Sure, they have to deal with issues that didn’t even exist 50 years ago, but they’re doing so from a non-teaching standpoint, and I think this hurts the profession.
So what’s the answer? It’s really simple: Require every administrator, from the newest assistant principal up through the superintendent, to teach one class per day in addition to his/her other duties. This would keep admins engaged in the field of teaching as it exists today–not 20 or 30 years ago, the last time some of these people actually taught–and would do a great deal to dismantle the proverbial ivory tower in which so many of them currently reside. (As an added bonus, it would also drive from the profession those who have lost their heart for teaching.)
Sounds like a good odea, Kev, but I’ll bet there is so much required paperwork now that we’d just have to hire more people. I think we’d have to look at what they do before we rewrote the job descriptions. Nice thought, though.
“I bet Sir Isaac Newton would dispute that assertion”
Along with Pasteur, Galileo (yes, he was still a believer persecuted by the Catholic Church – shame on the pope), Kepler, Copernicus, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Brahe, Planck, Fermi, Eddington, Gauss, Mendel, Fleming, Bacon, Pascal, Boyle, Gregory – all devout people unashamed about their Christianity. Do the names seem familiar? They should, large segments of our scientific knowledge today rest on the scientific foundations built by these scientists of faith.
And please don’t ladle out the crap that if these devout Christians hadn’t discovered and documented what they did that some atheist could have done it better. And I’m not saying atheists don’t make good scientists, just don’t demonize or patronize what real Christians yesterday and today contribute to the sciences. I know any number of devout competent Christians toiling away in laboratories and university departments around this nation who don’t buy into a completely materialistic theory of human origins.
For what it’s worth, here (http://www.gilbertindependentbaptist.org/NoJava/Articles/creation/great_scientists.htm) is a short list of scientists who were “creationists” – that is, they didn’t blindly embrace the strictly materialistic view of evolutionary dogma.
Now I have to go watch my Cardinals get the snot kicked out of them by the Astros. All that pitching talent plus Pujols and the Cardinals still suck.
Oh, please. Nobody’s claiming you have to be an atheist to be a scientist. But when you use your faith as a starting point for your analysis what you’re doing isn’t science.
Galileo was a believer, and had he not mocked the Pope in his writings, who was willing to entertain this defense of the Copernican Heliocentric model, he may not have ended up being convicted of heresy and been regulated to house arrest the rest of his life, though he did some great works for physics during that banishment.
However, Galileo was just one battle in a multi-century battle between the geo-centric Ptolemy model, and the heliocentric model. It transcended religions and was fought at every level of science with even high ranking members of the Catholic Church holding to Copernican ideals.
Some would have you believe it was just the church that was holding back the idea the Earth revolved around the sun, and nothing could be further from the truth.
I don’t think anyone is disputing the fact that many of histories scientific contributors were religious.
In all likely-hood if I were born in that same time period, I would probably be religious myself. We’re products of our environment and at the time you were religious or you were a heretic to be persecuted.
I think you nailed it about school administrators, Kev. You won’t get any argument from me.
My elementary, junior high, and high schools (in Texas, btw) each had one principal, one secretary and one janitor. That was it! There was a school superintendant who oversaw any number of schools in our district but I don’t have any idea of what his staff consisted of … probably one secretary.
Zombie,
As a conservative, long-time Zombie fan, somewhat well-known blogger and native Texan, I have followed the Texas SBOE controversy fairly closely. I have written a couple of things about it and researched the subject in the past. I have not had the time this year to devote to critiquing a local process I consider bizzarre and complex while citing and attributing the multitudinous rants from all sides is a blogger nightmare.
I would simply caution you to be careful about your characterizations of the opposing sides in the Texas schoolbook wars. It is not nearly as cut and dried as you portray it to be. And the players are not always so easily predictable and finite.
The Left on the SBOE has made some outrageously ridiculous propositions and certain members on the Right have made controversial, yet perfectly reasonable, assertions of their own.
Recently departed board members are, in my opinion, like Cynthia Dunbar, certifiably nuts, but so, most definitely, are some of the liberal board members.
It is not the easy canvas you wish to paint.
Con cautela, amigo.
Please everyone, wait until you read the whole essay. A lot of people are becoming indignant without yet knowing what I’m going to say.
I would have liked to make it all be in one single post, but essays that are too long tend to scare people off, so it was decided to issue it as a series. And there was so much so say on this admittedly huge topic that it couldn’t be said in just a few words.
But I think when all five parts are online, there will be a lot less indignation, if you get my drift.
Hey! We like being indignant. It gives us something to do while waiting for the rest of the series (write faster please
Zombie,
Don’t worry about the vitriol from readers! I look forward to reading the remaining essays of your series. Unfortunately, many readers of this site are having a hard time comprehending your thesis. This shows that we still have a uphill battle when it comes to ideas. Bad ideas from the left wing and right wing are ruining this country. Education is always the battleground, whether in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Children are always used as poltiical tools. I’m only 32 years old, but I am nervous about the future of our society. Both Republicans and Democrats have a vested interest in inculcating dependency on government(or some leader), and fostering in children an inablility to think independently. This makes it easier to control and create serfs.
The good news is many parents are removing their children from public schooling. Despite having to pay property taxes to these institutions that mangle minds, they realize that putting their children in government hands is disatrous. I’ve liked reading all your columns Zombie. Keep up the good work!!
As I remarked earlier, we’ve become so politicized that we’re incommunicado. Our opinions – formed to a frightening extent by an educational establishment that has wrecked the concept of common standards – are formed by what we perceive as “code words.”
Given that folks here aren’t even bothering to read what you’re saying before deciding what it is you *must* mean is troubling. Soon, we’ll be completely incapable of speaking civilly to each other across the divide.
Thanks for trying, but you might as well never have put a pixel on the screen.
“Despite the uncertainty on how life began, it is generally accepted that prokaryotes inhabited the Earth from approximately 3–4 billion years ago.[238][239] No obvious changes in morphology or cellular organization occurred in these organisms over the next few billion years.[240]”
“The eukaryotes were the next major change in cell structure. These came from ancient bacteria being engulfed by the ancestors of eukaryotic cells, in a cooperative association called endosymbiosis.[102][241] The engulfed bacteria and the host cell then underwent co-evolution, with the bacteria evolving into either mitochondria or hydrogenosomes.[242] An independent second engulfment of cyanobacterial-like organisms led to the formation of chloroplasts in algae and plants.[243] It is unknown when the first eukaryotic cells appeared though they first emerged between 1.6 – 2.7 billion years ago.”
There you go. There’s a little evolutionary biology theory for you, courtesy of wiki. Now, that you know that (and you’ll probably forget it all, after about eight seconds, unless you’re into paleobiology)…what good is it going to do you?
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
“2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
“3 And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.”
“4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.”
“5 God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning— the first day.”
“6 And God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.”
“7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so.”
“8 God called the expanse sky. And there was evening, and there was morning— the second day.”
And there’s a little creationist theory for you, lifted out of the Torah.
Now, that you know that…what good is it going to do you?
Spending more than about ten minutes on either topic is a big waste of time, unless you’re planning on being a paleontologist or a theologian.
Useless knowledge.
I agree with you on both counts. The actual mechanics of evolution are not vital for most people to have a working knowledge of. I know I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in high school and undergraduate biology courses because the majority of it was dry, boring, and completely inapplicable to my everyday life. With that said, there is a key distinction between the mechanics of evolution and verses from Genesis: the former is ideologically neutral, the latter is not. If one accepts, on the basis of faith, the biblical account of creation as existential truth, then one is also obliged by that same faith to adhere to the rest of the bible, with its instructions for morality and conduct. You can take creationism out of the bible, but you can’t take the bible out of creationism–thus, teaching creationism, or “intelligent design” if you really want to argue that distinction, is necessarily a backdoor for Christian ideologues to circumvent the separation of church and state and brainwash impressionable students. This is why allowing the teaching of creationism, in any way, shape or form, in public schools, is completely unacceptable–it isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as the counter-point to Darwinian evolution and a necessary presence for a balanced education, as some people dishonestly try to cast it.
Telling word, “mechanics.” Could it be that the advocates of the Darwinian theory of evolution assert that life is mechanical only?
Ideologically neutral? You are sure about that?
Say what you mean. If you don’t think the theory of evolution is ideologically neutral then explain your position.
The idea that we are all here by accident is not ideologically neutral. If all you could teach with regard to how man came about is evolution, then you certainly going to profoundly affect the worldview of the person to whom teach it and hence their ideology.
There’s nothing inherent to evolution that says “we all came here by accident”. An “accident” can only happen in the presence of a self-aware decision-making entity acting of its own free will, because it necessarily implies an outcome that has happened in spite of the intent of the actor responsible–in other words, God or some other “higher power”. Evolution does not speculate on the existence of that. Many Christians believe that evolution was a process started by God: in fact, that’s the official position of the Vatican itself. Are we all clear now on why evolution is ideologically neutral?
An “accident” can only happen in the presence of a self-aware decision-making entity acting of its own free will
Actually, no.
While even the first definition at the above link– an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally does not require the involvement of a “decision-making entity” it should be clear that in the context of this discussion we are using the third definition any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause although feel free to use the fourth.
Anyway to teach that the differences between all critters including man is solely and definitively the result of random (undirected or “without a deliberate plan” so to speak) events is clearly ideological, and is basically insisting on the impossible as an explanation for reality.
You want to argue that we should in our schools broach the possibility that life evolved according to design by some intelligence, fine. Is that what you are advocating?
Zombie
I will only repeat the following from the comments above – I do so hope that in the end, you find the leftist influence to be far more dangerous to the minds of young ones than the TSBE trying to get an alternative to Darwinian Evolutionary Dogma and the truth about “Separation of Church and State” in to the curriculum.
Your comment on Intelligent Design is uninformed, unscientific and reeks of a bias born of indoctrination, not thoughtful scientific research. Many Darwinists today acknowledge that straight materialistic processes can not account for the origin of life. There are two primary areas where the Darwinian Theory fails. One, it does not account for irreducibly complex systems like the blood coagulation system or the eye and it doesn’t address the huge amount of specified information found in DNA. Stephen C. Meyers book “The Signature in the Cell” exposes these deficiencies. Further, Meyer, who has a PHD in scientific philosophy, also shows in devastating detail how the materialists objections to ID are quite simply wrong in the best cases and tragically inept in the worse. So bad are some of their arguments that if applied to Darwinian Evolution, it too would not qualify as “real science”.
If you haven’t read this book, you must. I would also suggest you read “Darwin’s Black Box” by Michael Behe. Don’t rely on what the so called “Experts” say, because they have yet to make a valid rebuttal of the two points outlined above, but instead rely on their own metaphysical belief that there is no intelligence behind life and refuse to give the evidence of ID serious consideration.
ID emphatically is not the same as creationism and it is not a religion! ID posits that intelligence is the best explanation for what we observe and makes no claims about the designer. To the ID proponent, the only thing that matters is the evidence and the evidence points to a designer. Unless or until materialistic theories are developed that better explain the specified information contained in DNA or irreducibly complex systems and structures, the time honored scientific approach is to go with the current “best” explanation.
I challenge anyone to point to large quantities of specified information that didn’t arise from the mind of someone or something.
“Irreducible complexity” is pseudoscience and has been thoroughly debunked by the scientific community. Whether or not “intelligent design” is a facet of creationism is totally irrelevant. At best, it is deism dressed up as “science” in order to appear more legitimate. At worst, it’s stealth biblical creationism.
I have to admit, Brad, that you you were able to provide nearly every falsehood about science and almost every empty and fallacious talking point about ID in your short diatribe.
All anyone needs to know about ID was their attempt to rewrite the Wedge document to avoid the word creationism and wound up with “Cdesign Proponentsists.”
For the remainder of your screed, you are simply scientifically ignorant, ideologically blind or both. I suggest you expand your reading list, even Behe admitted under oath that ID was not science using its common definition. He also admitted that under his definition, astrology would be a science as well.
Get a grip on reality, son. There is no magic, it’s all in your head.
What I really don’t get is the “home schooling” people. How does one become qualified to do this? What else does a home schooler do at home? Perform his own surgery? Do household electrical repairs? Plumbing? Vermin extermination? Is it really true that competent teaching requires no qualifications at all?
I know a couple of people who actually do home schooling, and every one is absolutely batshit crazy. But as there are few requirements for home teachers, they are allowed to raise their batshit crazy kids as they think they see fit. Now of course I would not conclude from this that everyone who is into home schooling is also batshit crazy. But I do have to wonder where they drum up their qualifications, and where they find the time for what should be a full-time job. Well, 3 or 4 hours a day, anyway.
Your list of activities not to be attempted by the ‘unqualified’ made me laugh. You must not be a homeowner. Do you feel yourself qualified to cook your own meals?
What does it say about our education system that someone with a high school diploma (never mind that many homeschoolers have college degrees) is not considered qualified to teach a child the same things he or she was supposed to have learned in school? Just what other qualifications do you think are needed?
Oh, Tom, surely the guardians know what is best for us all. We need only submit, as did the Spartans to Artemis Orthia.
Was this a (successful) attempt at self-parody? Teachers in general come from the lowest quartile of college graduates. I don’t mean to denigrate all teachers – I’ve done it, it takes a certain set of skills, but those skills are accessible to mortals, even those who have not graduated from college. (To be clear, I graduated with high honors, and did not home-school my children – other than explain some math concepts that the real teachers couldn’t, but that is not germane.) I have also, horrors, done my own electical wiring, legally, and have had it inspected and passed on the first try. It’s not rocket science.
There are a lot of professions that have set high barriers to entry. It’s worth remembering that every one of them was started by uncertified, self-trained and motivated individuals.
I don’t disagree in particular, but I’d like to make a distinction between the “conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education” and what most Americans my age view as “the way I was educated.” I haven’t examined the Texas Curriculum, but I remember learning the great quotations from our founders and from Abraham Lincoln. I remember being taught non-denominational religious hymns like “God of Our Fathers,” without being shamed by atheists for promoting belief. I was taught that whoever gave the non-denominational prayer at a football game, you respected their beliefs as long as they didn’t expressly attack yours. I was a Mormon kid in Iowa and Illinois, but it never occurred to me that I would promote my beliefs by preventing others from expressing theirs, especially when they were pretty much universal American values such as “divine Providence.” I suppose today, we’d have to be more considerate of Buddhists, Hindus and Animists, but I think it’s always been assumed that there will be atheists among us and that they have the right not to believe in religion, but not to prevent others from expressing their faith.
I’ve concluded in later years that the Freedom of Religion Clause in the First Amendment, and the Establishment Clause should be read together, not separately, and so read, they mean that religion shall be free from government interference and burdens, but that no denomination or religion will be favored or supported by the state over any other. The correct reading of the two together is that the policy of the Constitution toward religion is tolerance and mutual respect. Note the word “mutual.” “Religions” which preach against religious liberty or seek to undermine the Constitutional prohibition of an establishment of religion through political power, seem to expect freedom and tolerance without granting them to others, and need to eliminate that kind of thinking or face intolerance. That is America’s message to the world. It’s worked and we don’t apologize for it. You come here, obey the laws, work hard, assimilate and you’ll be accepted.
I see nothing wrong with pointing to the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States as long as it is made clear that this is a cultural point not a legal or political one. I do see something wrong with the government preventing monuments to the Ten Commandments, Christmas Trees and Menorahs or whatever spreads good cheer and peaceful feelings. If those things bug you and make you call the ACLU, I think part of my education was not to be thin-skinned and whiny. It’s a big tent. You can join the party or go sit in a corner and suck lemons, but you can’t apply your own rules to everybody else.
“I’ve concluded in later years that the Freedom of Religion Clause in the First Amendment, and the Establishment Clause should be read together, not separately, and so read, they mean that religion shall be free from government interference and burdens, but that no denomination or religion will be favored or supported by the state over any other.”
And exclusively reciting Christian prayers or hymns in a public classroom is not favoring or supporting that religion over others? Of course it is. That is why prayer does not belong in public school, period.
There is no Creationism or Intelligent Design in the Texas Curriculum. Evolution is still taught as always, it’s a phony issue.
After witnessing similar events in Kansas, and after much prayerful consideration I have come to the following conclusion: attempts at using the sword of Caesar to do the LORD’s work, are un-Christian at the most basic level (St. John 18:36).
Like health care, while government may have an interest in seeing that it is available to all citizens, that is exactly where its involvement must end. In this argument, we see the complications of using government to actually accomplish what should be a private matter.
Not only does government involvement involve trampling on liberty, government cannot teach morality, except the most bland kind. That is because morality is the outward manifestation of deeply held belief systems most often rooted in some type of transcendental belief system, even if the citizen claims to not be influenced by any organized religion.
Government cannot be economically efficient. In some school districts it costs almost $1 million to graduate a single student from high school who is proficient at his grade level in math and science.
We must return our schools to their rightful place in American society.
There are so many errors and distortions in this essay that I can see no reason to read any others in the series.
To me, It is scientific to reason that Everything cannot be created by nothing. Most have no problem with evolution “within kinds”. There would be nothing if there were not natural laws. Where did natural law originate? All our wonderful inventions could not have been created if there was not created intelligence and imagination that could discover how to utilize those laws. Where did intelligence and imagination originate? Teach evolution as a “theory”, but not as absolute fact. Charles Darwin, who evolutionist adore believed that the weak, sick, deformed should be allowed to die. He believed that only the strong had a right to survive. I don’t want my children and grandchildren taught that.
This is what I’m talking about. Unreal.
If the Texas State Board of Education had their way, the entire country would be as pathetically ignorant as you are.
Is that what we want? And if so, why?
The fact that the far left has destroyed actual education in the country does not justify spreading a different kind of misinformation in the name of counteracting the lies of left. Overreaching in the other direction is still overreaching.
(And no, I don’t engage in arguments with people who have zero idea what they’re talking about. As a longtime veteran of the online evolution wars, I know that to do so is a complete waste of time.)
Zombie, your condecension is repulsive.
Surely you are highly qualified to fry your lizard brains to a burnt crisp however demanding others delight in the taste of your over-done left-overs make you both a lousy cook and an ill-mannered host.
Well before you wrote your five-part essay on ‘doom’ you pre-determined to end it as a Charles Johnson slime-green nightmare.
At the very least offer honesty rather than condescension; you have zero interest in pursuing ‘enlightenment’ and ‘open-mindedness’.
Zombie, your condescension is repulsive.
Surely you are highly qualified to fry your lizard brains to a burnt crisp however demanding others delight in the taste of your over-done left-overs make you both a lousy cook and an ill-mannered host.
Well before you wrote your five-part essay on ‘doom’ you pre-determined to end it as a Charles Johnson slime-green nightmare.
At the very least offer honesty rather than condescension; you have zero interest in pursuing ‘enlightenment’ and ‘open-mindedness’.
Well, you do come off as completely self-righteous and fanatical. It’s ‘evolution or nothing and anybody who challenges me is an idiot.’ Okay, I’m done reading your stuff.
From the TFN link…
“The board stripped Dolores Huerta, cofounder of United Farm Workers of America, from a Grade 3 list of “historical and contemporary figures who have exemplified good citizenship”
Good. Because that’s just pure lefty propaganda.
“The board added a requirement that American history students learn about conservative heroes and icons such as Phyllis Schlafly….”
Bad. That’s conservatives doing the same thing liberals are doing.
Neither Huerta nor Schlafly merit wasting ten microseconds of time in K-12 classes.
This kind of stuff is pure propaganda, and it’s just more useless knowledge.
I like what Neal Boortz said one day. We need a separation of School and State. The Separation of Church and state is not law, it is not constitutional. It is not a part of the language of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It is a Jeffersonian quote that has been so maligned by politicians and anti-Christian humanists, probably starting around the time of John Dewey, but I’m sure others might point further back. Texas has the right to teach whatever the heck it wants. The Federal Government has NO business telling Texas how to educate Texas children. Texas has no business telling California how, through the Federal Government how to educate their children. If Texas wants to declare Christianity their state religion, there is nothing constitutionally preventing that.
I think what another poster said succinctly settles the issue. School Choice. That’s what anyone concerned with freedom and the right of self direction should be concerned about.
“If Texas wants to declare Christianity their state religion, there is nothing constitutionally preventing that.”
It’s 2010, Rik. The First Amendment was incorporated to apply to the states over 60 years ago.
“The First Amendment was incorporated”
Baloney. The 1A appies to Congress only. There is no such thing as “incoporated”.
Oh, okay, Supreme Court Justice Dave Surls has spoken and unilaterally reversed a century of judicial precedent with a single blog comment.
“Supreme Court Justice Dave Surls…”
If I had the energy, I’d sue for libel.
And there you have it. Legislature doesn’t make law, the Supreme Court does, and somebody doesn’t see anything wrong with that. Hmmm.
No, actually the 14th Amendment and its Due Process Clause was in fact written and ratified by Congress in the usual method.
“Texas has the right to teach whatever the heck it wants. The Federal Government has NO business telling Texas how to educate Texas children. Texas has no business telling California how, through the Federal Government how to educate their children. If Texas wants to declare Christianity their state religion, there is nothing constitutionally preventing that.”
I agree 100%, Rik.
Note, however that at this time, the Texas Constitution appears to forbid the establishment of a state religion.
“Sec. 6. FREEDOM OF WORSHIP. All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences. No man shall be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his consent. No human authority ought, in any case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship. But it shall be the duty of the Legislature to pass such laws as may be necessary to protect equally every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship.”
But, if they wanted to change it, it’s none of the Fed’s business (not my business either…my opinions are just opinions, and the people of Texas can ignore them at their pleasure…that’s just the way I would do things if it was up to me).
I WOULD LIKE A RESPONSE FROM THE WRITER OF THIS ARTICLE TO TELL ME WHAT DOES HE SUPPOSE WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL THE PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT JUST STOPPED WHAT THEY WERE DOING SO AS NOT TO BE PART OF THE PROBLEM??
As I say in the essay, I’ll get to that in Part V on Friday.
The difference between Dolores Huerta and Phyllis Schlafly is that Huerta played no significant role in American history while Phyllis Schlafly is one of the three principle architects (along with Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell) of the political realignment that took place in the 1970s. Phillis Schlafly, during her crusade to defeat the Equal Right Amendment, helped to turn a scattered politically-neutral collection of social conservatives into a unified political force that was able to offer the first strong political opposition to leftist social re-engineering. This political realignment completely reshaped American politics, and the architects of that movement surely deserve some discussion in American History.
“The difference between Dolores Huerta and Phyllis Schlafly”
The similarity between them is that nither of them is important enough to waste time on in a high school American History class.
Gee, Dave, next to my explanation of how someone cannot understand the American political landscape of the late 20th century without understanding what Phylis Schlafely did, we have your firm opinion that it is a waste of time to mention her in a high school history class. Silly me, I wasted my time thinking about the actual history when I could have just relied on your firm opinion.
Simply can’t understand why Zombie thinks Texas is trying to drag us back to the 1950s educationally, which, by the way, would not be a bad idea! Let’s take intelligent design. You are NOT even allowed to teach this in most states. There is little science in Darwinism & much in intelligent design if you would study it. The problem is that publik skrools now teach opinion & theory as fact. Bad science is rampant-evolution, global warming, & the pc history curriculum is simply pathetic. TX is doing it right. I can say as a former public school teacher from CA that any Christian in public education has an uphill battle against the liberal curriculum, the NEA & anti-christian districts & principals. In fact, here in Bulgaria where we currently live their is FAR more academic freedom in all public schools & universities than in the States. What a great irony!
WITH THIS VIEW ON CHRISTIANITY I KNOW NOW WHY THE NAME IS ZOMBIE
Excellent article. A good example too would be sex education. One side succeeded in introducing a radical program in the 70s which was then answered in the 90s by abstinence based sex education. Both programs are without value – no valid research supports their purported goals – and they soak up time in the school day that should be devoted to standard disciplines.
Having participated in this battle in the late 80s, I am extremely pessimistic about the outcome. It’s now down to you can have your program and we can have ours. Everyone gets to keep their jobs….
My son went to a small private school that used no textbooks. That is one answer. Free the public schools from the text book requirements. Of course, that means you must have teachers with knowledge of the substance of standard disciplines and these teachers are in very short supply in the public system.
Demolish liberalism’s tribal studies (multiculturalism and race doctrines) and replace it with civics where kids learn the constitution and it’s orginal intent and they learn history in a theme of progressing towards constitutional freedom for all. In addition introduce kids to the world outside school so they have a good survey of the jobs and careers available to them during the summers and after graduation or to pursue in higher education. Forget the elite’s foreign idenity manipulations to “prepare for a global economy” and give kids a common American idenity based on constitutional ideals and the expression and protection of those ideals in American life. They can mess with preparing to engage in the global economy when they get to college if they choose to do that.
Zombie:
“First, they defeated a motion to have students learn about the separation of church and state, a foundational principle of the United States; the board members seem to have no problem ignoring those parts of the Constitution (such as the First Amendment) which they personally dislike”.
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot? I have read the first amendment of the Constitution twice now – I keep a copy at my desk. I cannot find “The Separation of Church and State” in it nor in any part of the Constitution. Can you please tell me where it is located? I would greatly appreciate clarification on your part.
Thanks
Education is local in the United States. The Feds have no authority to dictate curriculum at the state level. States could tell the Feds, “Thanks, but no thanks!”
Texas does not dictate national curriculum. I don’t buy the whole textbook argument. There are plenty of new companies ready to dive in and take over the monopoly some of these national textbook sellers have.
The Obama administration – by focusing on history, is trying to get away from some of the drill and practice forced on school districts throughout the land by No Child Left Behind.
The notion that the “progressives” or Marxists are taking over with teaching children about feelings, group work, social intelligence, higher-order-thinking skills ect. is not true. These are all valid methods if used at the right time with the right students. Good teachers dictate when.
The pendulum swings back and forth between these two kinds of instruction and it has been swinging for decades. This is nothing new.
Let education be local. I mean really local. At the school district level.
Interestingly the Federal Government has the most influence of local schools through Special Education for students with disabilities.
The Obama Administration is bullying states into adopting the federally mandated Common Core State Standards Initiative through the Race to the Top funding scheme. Basically, if you don’t adopt the Federal curriculum, your chances of getting funding go way down. Since states are desperate for school funding, they’ll do whatever it takes to be eligible. So far, as the link shows, 47 states have caved in and adopted it, with only Texas, Alaska and Virginia resisting.
The Feds may have no authority to dictate curriculum, but they have ways ($$$) to twist arms.
The irony of course is that the “Race to the Top,” which was supposed to be the opposite of the competitive No Child Left Behind program, turns out to be even MORE competitive and random in the way funding is allocated, and most of the states which jumped through hoops and adopted the Federal standards in a bid to get funding ended up not getting funding anyway, because some other state beat them in the subjective “race to the top.”
This has pissed off a majority of states now, and is one of the reasons people are seriously starting to get disenchanted with Obama and his program.
Zombie: Why is your FAITH in Evolution more valid than my FAITH in Creation?
Just because something is given the moniker ‘Scientific’ does make it indisputable proof – The are so many incredibley intricate co-dependent systems existing in nature today that could not have ‘evolved’ into being because the prime components of each system are simultaneouly required for either system to function or grow. Unexplanable ‘Science’ is just as much a religon as any other belief system that required Faith.
You are the problem and the reason why the left is winning the education debate, and yet you don’t even realize it.
So depressing.
Zombie
Sadly, you are the problem. You treat ID and two of it’s many claims with derision, not once outlining why the ID argument is wrong! The typical mystical Darwinist’s demarcation argument goes something like this.
“All science must have a materialistic bases for explanation, if it does not, it is not science. Since ID is emphatically not materialistically based, it is not science. Therefore I do not have to pay attention to those who put forth the ideas nor do I have to consider their arguments as it is not science.”
Nice circular logic that! It is merely a way to ignore the case made for ID without actually knowing anything about it.
I find it laughingly funny that you and your ilk continue to post comments like ID=religion or irreducible complexity is a sham, or large quantities of specified information arose out of the pre-biotic soup because there was plenty of time and opportunity for it to do so. Never once providing any cogent argument against it. One can only conclude that you are either an elitist who thinks it wise to ignore those who challenge your strongly held beliefs or – MORE LIKELY – you are simply ignorant of the current science being done on the origin of life.
The fact is Darwinists, by definition, take more on faith to believe in than does ID!
No transitional forms, no problem – punctuated equilibrium! no proof, just a belief that ANYTHING other than a designer is responsible therefore any idea put forth that furthers materialistic based beliefs doesn’t need to be defended against those who point out the deficiencies, especially if they believe in ID.
Cambrian explosion, no problem – see punctuated equilibrium.
The fact that the odds that the large quantities of specified information found in just one protein molecule coming in to existence by pure chance are 1 in 10 to the 70th if we accounted for all particles in the knowing universe interacting at Planck time intervals since the beginning of the universe, not to mention the fact that even the simplest one celled organism would need at least 100 different protein molecules to function as well as irreducibly complex structures to work, no problem – posit the ridiculous millions of universes solution to make the pesky probability problem go away.
Etc.
Your condescension is ill founded and says more about your narrow mindedness than all the negative words you have written about the TSBE says about them.
It’s truly astonishing what people who’ve never studied formal logic can come up with… Very depressing.
The difference between science and religion (and I invite you to look in the mirror!) is that a scientist tries to uncover reasons why he’s wrong. A religious person is always looking for proof that he’s right (and that the other guy is wrong).
A lot of people who think they’re right can gang up and put down the other side (from either side of this, as Zombie points out so eloquently) but that doesn’t make them right.
Einstein was once accosted by reporters telling him how so many scientists thought he was wrong. His response – it would only take one scientist with a proof to convince him he was wrong.
In the end, Einstein was indeed wrong about quantum theory – interestingly because his faith in God got in the way of his science. He said “God does not play dice with the universe.” but in fact he does – quantum theory with all its uncertainties turns out to be correct, which is why you have a CD player, among other things. So even the great can be confused by religion.
What’s ironic is that a lot of religious types quote Einstein, not realizing that this is the very moment he departed from reality!
James,
I accept your invitation to look in the mirror; and propose that it is not only a Scientist that looks in the mirror but any honest person, including ‘religious types’ that have the audacity to believe that God can withstand the scrutiny of formal logic.
I also accept your premise that even the great can be confused by religion, some get so confused that they miss the point entirely. The point of religion is not to explain the natural world; the point of religion is to explain God.
I know it’s a bit presumptuous but I bet God would be willing to agree with Einstein’s response to the reporters – It will only take one scientist with Proof that God does not exist to prove He is wrong.
However because you (nor anyone else) can prove He doesn’t exist & I can’t prove empirically that He does we are left where we began – with a set of beliefs. You unfortunately are depressed by this. I however still have Hope & Joy – no sarcasm, just the way it is.
James
You are the classic case in point!
JA – “It’s truly astonishing what people who’ve never studied formal logic can come up with… Very depressing.”
Brad’s response – Cast aspersions without so much as an attempt at a rebuttal. You’re so sure the materialist answers are correct that you completely ignore the points made. In more polite circles this is called avoiding the subject! The case I make for circular logic is plain and simple to understand. You believe in A and not in B, therefore B can’t be true ergo you don’t have to pay any attention to claims that B is true. The key word here is “Believe” There is no solid scientific foundation for eliminating intelligence as a causative agent in the origins of life other than your own prejudices.
I guess the SETI folks are morons too for believing that if they found signals emanating from distant star systems that contain structured and specified information, the best explanation of the source is intelligence acting outside of materialist cause! Yet DNA is just that – vast amounts of structured and specified information, that many of the scientists you probably rely on for your information have acknowledged is problematic at best for classic Darwinists and materialists to explain.
JA – “The difference between science and religion (and I invite you to look in the mirror!) is that a scientist tries to uncover reasons why he’s wrong. A religious person is always looking for proof that he’s right (and that the other guy is wrong).”
Brad’s response – You obviously read that my post contained a defense of ID and jumped straight to your response, which I wouldn’t be surprised to learn is saved in a “Debunking” folder for just such occasions. The fallacious use of logic is yours sir, not mine. ID says nothing about the creator, the designer or the nature of the source of intelligence. It merely points out that the best explanation for what we observe in the study of the origins of life is an intelligent agency. You’re desperate to equate this argument with “religion” because it makes it oh so much easier to ignore! Your personal prejudices aside, what is your explanation for large quantities of organized and specified information? Here’s a hint, Darwinists and materialists are at a complete loss to explain it.
Further, you won’t even do the courtesy of following your own advice which you are so quick to admonish the ID crowd with. You are correct, a scientist asks why is my theory wrong? Well, it’s not my theory, I merely believe that the work being done in this arena points to intelligence as the best explanation. Many scientists, far too many, won’t even address the evidence, they just dismiss it out of hand. That’s not science either. Is there a materialist argument which better explains what is observed? So far, none have explained it better. Now the ball’s in your court. Rather than relying on your knee jerk reaction and your feigned depression about how “Stupid and gullible” those of us who, in a strict scientific sense believe ID is the best explanation for the origins of life, why don’t you expend some of your energy and effort in to actually learning about the basis of the ID claims and debunk them with reasoned logic rather than canned responses which say nothing about the claims ID makes.
I know, it’s just easier to stick to the tired argument that ID = Religion so you don’t have to deal with the real issues and questions the ID crowd raises so you can go blithely unaware in to the unknown future smug in the knowledge that you didn’t succumb to yet one more cultish like belief.
Grow a set and do some research of your own and stop relying on the so called “Experts” whose prejudices you so joyously embrace.
“It’s truly astonishing what people who’ve never studied formal logic can come up with… Very depressing.”
James, speaking as someone who has studied formal logic, I don’t think you have or you would know how inept it sounds to accuse someone of violating logic without pointing out the exact place. Formal logic is like algebra. If you tell someone that he got his algebra wrong, you point out where the mistake is, and anyone who knows formal logic will be able to see the mistake. It’s not a judgment call. If you can’t point out the mistake then you are blowing smoke.
As a simple but unemployed PE teacher (two years going), I have learned a lot from both the author and the commentary that followed. I did not give Zombie a chance to fully explore his topic before reacting. Mea culpa. I await in anxious anticipation for the rest of his thesis.
But the rest of you have inclined me to want to read more about education, philosophy and the issues in education-someday I may be back in the classroom. I taught in poor to very poor districts where the biggest problems were the polticization of schools, the lack of discipline, the actual practice of soft bigotry related to grade inflation, and the increased behavior problems excused or mitigated by administrators for socio-economic or political reasons.
So thanks to all.
Blotto
#45 Jeff Gauch:
“But when you use your faith as a starting point for your analysis what you’re doing isn’t science.”
What you fail to realize is that your belief that life evolved from inanimate matter is faith. There is no scientific evidence for it. We’ve never been able to duplicate it in a lab (using all the intelligence we have). It is therefore not testable, repeatable, or observable.
The common assumption is that it must have happened because we are here, but that is a tautology as a comment above pointed out. Why do you believe that the inanimate became animate when there is no evidence for it? You must have faith that it happened. Therefore, you are (unwittingly) guilty of doing what you claim the creationists are doing by interpreting scientific facts in light of your faith.
Wow, PublicSchoolDad – just because we haven’t managed as yet to make something happen in the lab means that it’s impossible?? Where did that leap of logic come from? New things happen in the lab every day that we couldn’t do before.
And fyi, there have been experiments taking basic inorganic compounds that would have been around in any pre-life environment, and getting basic organic compounds to form with electricity (i.e. lightning). This is something so obviously interesting to a lot of scientists that they’ve been pursuing it for a while.
But I suppose until they crank out a multi-celled organism you won’t get how the possibility of life coming out of non-life by the natural construction of organic compounds demonstrates how this might have happened in the real world.
But clearly it did – Isn’t God marvelous?!
Interesting article from Zombie; I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.
Also, interesting comments so far.
I teach Latin in a northern state, and have two children who’ve gone through the education system. One is still in high school, about to take AP US history this year–so I’m really primed to watch out for Howard Zinn and Eric Foner-type teachings (I don’t care if they have to read or hear them, so long as they don’t have to sign on and believe them).
Sadly, in most school systems I’m aware of, teachers don’t have the authority to select their own textbooks, or compile them using portions of different books (plus their own contributions, if possible), though of course that would make sense, these days. There are administrators in charge of curriculum who control all that. (Unless you’re the only teacher in your district, teaching a subject like mine–I’m able to figure out what my students need pretty much on my own.)
Even more sadly, many of the people who are going into teaching today are being abysmally taught. The incredible dumbing-down of high school from what it was (we all thought it was dumbed down for us, back in the 1970s! Multiple-choice tests: what a laugh!!) takes its toll; then, the content of the (happily, very few) education courses I’ve had to take to get “certified” to teach a subject I already had a master’s degree in was execrable. A lot of grievance-mongering, victimology, our society stinks, if kids fail it’s got to be the system’s fault, etc. And yes, all that “how do you FEEL about stuff,” not “what do you THINK (much less KNOW) about it,” even in the (so-called) college classroom!
It’s also true that some of the strategies our school district spends lots of money to present to us (on those conference days)involve repressing or finessing competition–you’re supposed to group kids to work together on ‘projects’ in such a way as to level out the talent among the groups. Group grades, definitely. I can’t imagine proceeding like that, since in my subject, everyone has to know the material for himself–you can’t read a passage ‘as a group’; either you can read it successfully, or you can’t. I see my job as ensuring that both I (as teacher) and you (as student) do whatever it takes to get you to read the passage to the best of your ability. The kid who could already read it yesterday or last week should have moved on to a commensurately harder passage by now.
I could (and did) teach my children at home, before they started school, how to read; and when they were good readers of English, I started them on Latin. Of course, I encouraged them in their studies to the best of my ability, as did my husband; but we would hardly have thought ourselves competent to homeschool them in subjects like math and science. It’s kind of fun to have school-debunking conversations at the dinner table, or while running errands, or what-have-you, where you discover what the level of indoctrination is about environmentalism or social justice or pacifism, and then you get a chance to offer some competing information. One of our children liked knowing what we thought, but kept this to herself; the other one enjoyed challenging teachers and kids at school. Of course, I would prefer them to be taught only by geniuses who aren’t ideologically driven; but I doubt the world has ever offered that kind of schooling to large masses of students. Parents have a lot to do, even if they’re not home schooling.
I’ll add for the record that I’m not any kind of Christian, though I have immense respect for that religion (and am grateful that I am the beneficiary of a culture and a country founded on Judaeo-Christian principles).
Good luck to us all, and especially to our kids. This is a tough time to be coming of age. We have to help them, by hanging on to some modicum of what we had in the past, of what made this country great; and pass it on.
#28 Ted
“Being a skeptic is fine. Trying to bring religious dogma into the classroom is not. There is no excuse or justification for trying to promote creationism in a public school setting, period.”
Ted, I’m really not trying to pick a fight, just trying to make my point. But I’ll be blunt – my “excuse” for trying to promote creationism in a public school is that it is true.
Before you call me anti-science, consider this: you are trying to insert a different dogma in public schools. Your dogma (even if you don’t think of it as religious) dictates your belief that there is no such thing as the supernatural and that the material world is all there is. That is why you must believe that science can find an answer to everything, including the origin of life. By excluding the possibility of a supernatural origin, you are putting yourself in a box that by definition must exclude what is to many people a rational possibility – that God created this world. Respectfully, I don’t think you recognize the difference in your own thinking between what is based on science and what is based on faith.
A belief that there is no such thing as the supernatural is not based on “dogma”, it’s an observation of the fact that the supernatural has no empirical proof of its existence, and in fact cannot have proof of its existence because then it would cease to be supernatural if it could be empirically observed through material means. If the supernatural does exist, then it is impossible for us to perceive. Either way, attempting to study it is not a valid scientific pursuit, and any honest scientist, even if he privately holds devout religion views, will tell you as much.
Ted, Your response assumes that we have at our disposal all of the mean needed to measure the supernatural, I submit that we dont. before microscopes we couldn’t see microbes – only the result of their activity.
We can today see the result of supernatural activity even if we dont yet have the means to observe their source.
This always comes back to belief in some set of conditions which may or may not exist – that is Faith.
That’s a faulty comparison. Microbes exist in the natural world and they always have; that’s why we can perceive them with the right tools. The supernatural cannot be measured because it does not exist in the natural world; if it did, then it wouldn’t be supernatural.
Ted,
I see the point you are making, but isn’t that just relying on semantics to avoid the point?
What then would you call an immeasurable yet demonstrable result?
Why cant if be true then that what we currently think of as supernatural are only ‘super’ because we don’t yet understand the scope of the natural world.
Wouldn’t it be fair to say that any immeasurable result is supernatural because it is outside of our explanation of the natural?
As the means of observation change Supernatural becomes natural; this doesn’t threaten Science it should, if anything, give impetus for new discovery.
I think we will find as we continue to discover more & more that Science & God are not mutually exclusive – One leads to the other.
This is a childish response. At one time, microbes were ‘tiny animals–so small as to be invisible to the eye’. They may have been in the ‘natural world’, but we had no direct evidence of that.
When we were finally able to see them our understanding of the ‘natural world’ expanded.
Despite the fact that we call something ‘supernatural’ today, it is entirely possible that this thing, too, will be something that expands our understanding of the natural world if we get something that confirms it.
Again, not trying to pick a fight – just trying to make a point.
Merriam-Webster’s third definition of dogma is “c : a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds”
If my view that God supernaturally created the world is “dogma” because “the supernatural has no empirical proof of its existence”. Then why is your view, equally without empirical proof, not dogma?
Whether you acknowledge it or not, you and I are both exercising faith. I look at the empirical evidence of the intricate complexities of a living cell, the incredible ability of DNA to store information, and the amazing details of the human body and I rationally conclude they are the product of Divine intelligence. I can’t empirically prove this, but that does not mean it is any less true. I call this faith, even though it doesn’t take a lot of faith to recognize God’s handiwork in His creation.
You look at the same empirical evidence and your faith that the material world is all there is forbids you from considering the possibility that God had anything to do with it. You have discarded the possibility of the supernatural, even though you have done so without adequate grounds. You now seek to impose your view that the material world is all there is on everyone else, including public school students, in the name of “neutrality”. But your position is as much a matter of faith as mine. Even though your faith is disguised under the term science, it is not science for it asserts positions that cannot be proven by the scientific method and are influenced by your faith.
I’m not sure I understand why it’s so important to those who would like their kids to learn creationism that it be taught by the schools.
Why can’t the parents impart this belief to their kids, just as they themselves (or their church) take responsibility for teaching religious beliefs, ethics, values, etc.? Their kids could perhaps engage in a little subversive eye-rolling when they need to study the elements in the science curriculum that they may have been taught not to believe in, at home.
I guess if the parents actually see the science curriculum as downright evil (like a pernicious political doctrine), then they couldn’t bear to have their kids learn it. I assume such parents are in the minority; I would think that those who “just want creationism” (or intelligent design) “taught, for the sake of balance,” could undertake to do the balancing for their kids at home.
I hope they’re not so worried about the belief systems of the other kids…
Or those parents could send their children to a private school that DOES teach creationism. If they can’t find such a thing, even in an explicitly religious private school, then maybe that says something about creationism when even the devoutly religious reject it.
Suzanne,
I think you will find your hope confirmed. The vast majority of parents that hold a creationist view do not have any desire to have the school system sway the children of those that do not believe in creation to ‘our side’.
By and large we do educate our children at home about the disconnect between school & faith. BUT, as an educator you know the maleability and impressionability of the youthfull mind – we are in a defensive struggle to protect our children from what we see as an intrusion into what should be kept as a personal belief system. The way we see it the schools are potentially harming our children by only giving one side of the story.
Creationism falls into the realm of philosophy that has no place in science because when you open the question of whether or not the world was created by a supreme being, you open up the debate for people to try to disprove the existence of God openly without restraint. I prefer to leave that stone unturned because my belief is not subject to “reason,” is a matter of faith. When human reason fails, my faith sustains me.
Rather, creationism should be discussed in philosophy classes, in English classes as part of living mythology (mythology as religious stories, not a system of fairy tales), religion classes, government classes, or history classes so students can learn how these ideas have shaped the way people think and structure society. No teacher should try to influence what their students believe about God, but provide a venue for kids to figure out for themselves what they believe. Note, in the end, this could be as disturbing as “indoctrination” because when you provide students with multiple perspectives, they may come to a conclusion that is completely different from the one we would want them to believe.
One question I have for those who advocate for creationism or intelligent designs, for whose theory of design are you advocating? Would you be satisfied to have science teachers teach the theory that a supreme being designed and created the universe, leaving the kids to decide what to call that a supreme being, or does it have to be the God of the Bible and Torah? Is it acceptable to give equal time to other belief systems? I have found that many people who advocate for intelligent design or creationism tend to be advocates of teaching Christianity in the schools. My interaction with such people is limited so I am curious, is my observation
So Creationism is right! That’s simple and elegant…
I take it that this means that you are not willing to put it up for grabs as falsifiable. Which of course it isn’t, since you already know it’s right.
Not falsifiable = not science. Take it over to Sunday School, please.
Only skeptics allowed in the science room – and that obviously includes a lot of Christians, as well as Jews, atheists, Buddhists, and who knows who else. United in their search for truth which is at this moment unknown, not proven, etc.
And you would say you are right about evolution. Isn’t that simple and elegant? You disdain Public_School_Dad for his belief, but you don’t recognize your own claim to the truth based on extrapolation of the facts, not proof. That’s also called faith, as Public_School_Dad has said.
This should be mandatory reading for every school kid:
http://www.slate.com/id/2265515/
Great article. Excellent points.
One thing that may dilute the future influence of Boards of Education is technology like Kindle, which would allow local districts latitude to use different versions of textbooks while saving on book costs.
For thousands of years in many societies, when people reached the end of observable fact Faith has been the answer – why is that wrong & why is that depressing to you? You dont really think you’re going to figure out all the answers do you?
Faith in Evolution is used to control & manipulate people just like other faiths have been and are today. Discussing faith doesn’t have to be divisive if people are willing to accept that I’m allowed to be wrong just like you’re allowed to be wrong. No ones got it all right; even those that think its only a distraction in the debate of how to fix our schools. The pragmatism of giving ground here to gain ground there only works when the other side is willing to give ground – the left is not.
I stop giving ground when someone wants to tell my kids that they are the product of some cosmic accident and the right combination of nucleotides.
Where do you stop giving ground ?
Do you really think it didn’t produce any “anti-scientific ignoramuses”?, are you really trying to make your point by using Isaac Newton to represent an entire generation?
Lets see what else happened during Newton’s life, how about the Salem Witch trials, you wouldn’t consider the people involved in that to be “anti-scientific ignoramuses”? Newton did not represent a majority, he was a very unique person and his generation was not know for their enlightenment, so your argument is baseless.
“…his generation was not know for their enlightenment”
Oh?
“There is little consensus on when to date the start of the age of Enlightenment and some scholars simply use the beginning of the eighteenth century or the middle of the seventeenth century as a default date.[5] If taken back to the mid-1600s, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, published in 1637. Others define the Enlightenment as beginning in Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 or with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica which first appeared in 1687.”–wiki
When I said enlightenment I wasn’t referring to the specific 18th century European movement. Rather the fact that majority of the population is usually behind enlightened ideas and that there will always be a few exceptional people like Isaac Newton which must pave the way.
My point is making the association that Newton didn’t know about evolution but was still a great scientist is really irrelevant, so what if he didn’t know about a concept that was 300 years ahead of his time.
“Enlightenment was a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.” -Dorinda Outram
“When I said enlightenment I wasn’t referring to the specific 18th century European movement.”
I’d say that was pretty obvious.
apparently not since you grabbed a quote referring to the age of enlightenment.
The curriculum in most elementary schools is made up of fluff (e.g., Kindness Seminars). When I was still teaching a couple years ago, we were given the choice between two daily schedules for first and second grade classrooms. The entire day was to be spent on language arts, with the exception of two, 30-minute periods per week during which the teacher could elect to teach social studies, science, or health. This is no balanced curriculum.
People who were educated by rote learning a hundred years ago could run circles around the kids today in every subject. But our neo-educators of today seem more interested in bucking up kids’ self-esteem and giving everyone an award (just for being, I guess) than in teaching substantive reading, writing, math, science, geography, and history lessons.
What does it all matter in the end? If we’re able to beat back the far-left progressive agenda, we’ll then have to deal with the Muslims, who, by the way, the progressives are aiding and abetting at every turn. And the Muslims will certainly make all the arguments made here moot.
All I can say is “So?” Texas has always marched to its own educational drum.
The state has comprehensive tests. If the students don’t pass, the school gets closed. The textbook writers need to include a very particular, demanding, long list of subjects. I was raised in an upscale Texas public school sytem.. My sons are getting a better, more thorough, education in a poor public school today.
I think that Ann Coulter, Michael Berlinski, Michael Behe, Ben Stein, and so on, are making a very good case against Darwinian evolution. I would prefer that evolutionists at least get the idea that their compelling visions of just so stories are just that- just so stories. We get people in from California hoping to persuade people to do something based on ” What cavemen might have done” as if this were a compelling rhetorical device. Things like ” how to invest” based on narratives of cavemen, or primitive people in jungles. It’s entirely perplexing that a fake anthropology is supposed to be rhetorically persuasive. The people they condescend to are usually Baptists, or Church of Christ conservative- which means they are on intimate terms with the bible, and its’ full pages of history, and with preachers of all protestant history- many of whom wrestled with science, economics, political theory. A cute caveman is just that- a cartoon.
Where do you get the notion there is a single, common middle of the road educational experience? Minnesota?
Whinging on about Texas being Texan is a bit ridiculous. We’ve heard about how Texas is second rate for hiring real scholars, rather than ed school students. We’ve read Texas is ignorant b/c teachers are poorly paid. We’ve heard Texas is ignorant for not having an enormous NGO class, or having a huge public bureaucracy. Note to self- people came to Texas fleeing all of that. In my family- three generations, and my spouse- the specific reason to move to Texas was to get away from that entire set of notions. Oh- Texas is ignorant for having a great many variety of churches. That, too. Outside of the fact that the churches are the “viable” “community responsive” “nimble” “efficient” NGOs around.
ari
And, do you get that the county educational board buys the books? At our school, at the end of the year, they hand out the thick, unused textbooks- the teachers don’t use them b/c they are too- stupidded up- and graphicked up- and distracting and pointless for the kids to learn, and the teachers to teach from. The teachers at this school do write their own curriculum, or buy their own curriculums. It is generally far more demanding than the ones purchased by the district. Plus, teachers fill their classrooms with educational books. You know the Great Illustrated Classics? The fifth grade teachers have those biographies, b/c,bluntly, real American history is not taught in most textbooks.
Tif
So many people here post, in effect, “Well, sure, what I believe is dogma, but you scientists/Darwinists are just the same – equally dogmatic.”
What’s really interesting about this point of view is that it’s essentially the same as the post-modern point of view – they too assert that it’s all the same, that there is no truth, which is to say, you have your truth, I have mine, this culture says X and that culture says Not-X, so there’s really no point talking about this since they’re all equally good.
Or bad, presumably.
But although their point is supposedly that we’re not to judge, if you talk to any post-modernist you’ll understand pretty soon that they believe that they are right. Just as the Creationists insist, in an open discussion, of all places, that they are right.
Science is not just another way of looking at things, as both the postmodernists and Intelligent Designers argue. Science, unlike postmodernism and ID, insists that certain things are true, based on observation, and certain things are not true. And that that which can’t be observed, like the supernatural, is not part of the game. So science is qualitatively different from all other philosophies or religions, because it leads to actual truth. Not all truth, and not the truth that a lot of people would like it to prove, but nonetheless a consistent, repeatable, visible set of results that are independent of who does them (race, color, creed, tall or short, male or female) and of any other such criteria. This is why Galileo was so relieved that after philosophical arguments going back to antiquity that he could finally say with assurance that, for instance, the earth moves around the sun, and that it wasn’t necessary any longer to argue about that, no matter how eloquently one could argue.
Science, by allowing only that which is real, has come up with knowledge which dwarfs that of the ancient sages, when it comes to having real effects in the real world. This is why nobody dismisses science any more, but rather tries to capture it. This is true of both postmodernists (see Sokol’s “Fashionable Nonsense”) and Creationists, who want their dogma in the classroom on an equal basis with what is demonstrable.
Science, however, is what it is. Not all people even have a clue about this, because they want science to be magic, or the proof of what they already believe, or “know” is right. The twentieth century was full of philosophical inquiries into how cold science is, and how it leaves us feeling unimportant and pointless, instead of all warm and fuzzy the way belief-systems did.
Get over it. It is what it is, and if we want to live long and prosper in the world today we have to learn what it teaches us. Luckily, it teaches us nothing about the supernatural, or the human soul, so that people who are more tuned in to those things than they are to lab work can continue to serve people with something perhaps equally important to us as human beings.
Let science be science. Please…
James,
‘Science is not just another way of looking at things, as both the postmodernists and Intelligent Designers argue. Science, unlike postmodernism and ID, insists that certain things are true, based on observation, and certain things are not true. And that that which can’t be observed, like the supernatural, is not part of the game.’
I think this argument has already been put forth – essentially if we cant measure it & explain it right now it’s not real. That doesn’t hold water – 100 years from now we will have means of observation & measurement that don’t exist right now; some of the things that we call supernatural right now we may call fact in the future. You can’t ignore the progressive nature on accumulated knowledge and say that if it’s not a fact now then it’s not a fact at all.
I think you may have exposed a little more of your ideology than your desire for scientific truth in your last paragraph – its interesting how in your narrative those in the lab will be served by those that are more in tune with ‘Those things’ – Being dismissive of the other point of view or diminishing those that hold it is not a sign of strength.
James
As long as you keep to your guns that ID = Religion, there can be no discussion of the facts at hand.
The ID argument simply states that an intelligent agency is the best explanation we have for the large quantity or organized and specified information we find in DNA.
You and no other materialistic scientist has a better explanation, yet you are certain that it is just a matter of time before a materialist explanation is put forth that will better explain what is observed.
That my friend is no different than religious based faith. It is both metaphysical and dogmatic in that it will not allow you to entertain any other possible scenario.
“The ID argument simply states that an intelligent agency is the best explanation we have for the large quantity or organized and specified information we find in DNA.”
It is an argument which has no empirical support whatsoever, not the least trace of it. For example, much the DNA of humanity is random garbage with, at this time at least, no known function–genes known to have come from past infective organism, and randomness.
“Not falsifiable = not science. Take it over to Sunday School, please.”
As soon as you demonstrate that this proposition: “genetic mutation causes species A to morph into species B” is true, then I’ll worry about trying to falsify it.
Bombard some bunny rabbits with alpha particles, cause them to produce vampire bat offspring, and we’ll take it from there.
How long do I get?
Given the right conditions, it could be done–though not by bombarding a rabbit with alpha particles. The standard background radiation, combined with environment and breeding urge would be enough.
1.) Take your time. There’s no rush.
2.) Alpha particles should work just fine.
3.) If you can make bunny rabbits evolve into vampire bats in one fell swoop…that would be quite a feat. I would be very impressed.
#70 James A
No need for sarcasm. Let’s discuss it rationally and may the best arguments win.
You said: “just because we haven’t managed as yet to make something happen in the lab means that it’s impossible?? Where did that leap of logic come from?”
You misread my post. I did not say it was impossible. I merely pointed out that it hasn’t been done yet. For you to assume that it_can_be done, when it hasn’t yet been done, is for you to insert a statement of your faith, not science.
Additionally, you said: “there have been experiments taking basic inorganic compounds that would have been around in any pre-life environment, and getting basic organic compounds to form with electricity (i.e. lightning).”
You assume much that science cannot prove empirically. Who can say for sure what “basic inorganic compounds” would have been around in a pre-life environment? That is not empirical evidence, that is at best a guess and reflects your faith that life evolved from inanimate matter. Notice that none of the models used for such experiments use oxygen as one of the environmental gasses. Is this because they know empirically that oxygen was not present in the so-called pre-life environment? No, it is because they know (empirically) that the presence of oxygen would render the experiment useless and therefore they assume that oxygen was not there.
Additionally, your example about getting organic compounds to form is flawed, even though it is commonly believed that scientists have created life in a test tube. Organic chemical reactions naturally create amino acids that are split equally between left-handed and right-handed molecules and this is consistent with what scientists produce in their experiments. But the building blocks of life are overwhelmingly left-handed. Here is an article that attempts to explain this phenomena from an evolutionary standpoint: http://www.livescience.com/history/080408-meteorite-life.html Notice the “would have” “could have” “mystery” statements in this article? There is no way to empirically prove these things. It’s not within the realm of science, just speculation (i.e., faith).
BTW, here is an article from creation scientists on the same subject: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/cfol/ch1-origin.asp These guys don’t deny they bring their faith to the table when trying to understand the scientific data.
The evolutionary scientists are also bringing their faith to the table, they’re just not usually willing to admit it.
#80 James
I really wish we could sit down together over a beer and talk this through face-to-face. You really strike me as a guy who is genuinely searching for what is true.
You said: “Science…insists that certain things are true, based on observation, and certain things are not true. And that that which can’t be observed, like the supernatural, is not part of the game.” Believe it or not, I unequivocally agree with that statement. But I hope you understand that once you move outside the scientific method (observable, testable, repeatable), science cannot speak _authoritatively_ about what is true. This distinction comes sharply into play when scientists attempt to speak about what happened in the past. Science can help you postulate/theorize/speculate what might have happened, but it can never prove it.
By way of example, the smartest scientist in the world cannot prove (using the scientific method) that Teddy Roosevelt rode with the Rough Riders. Note: I am not denying that it is a fact of history. I am merely saying that you can’t prove it empirically. For an historic event, reliable eyewitness testimony is much more informative than the scientific method.
As a Christian, I have a reliable eyewitness as to how the world came to be – the God who was there and made it with His own hands. You may doubt the reliability of the Bible, but that is what is really at the heart of the whole debate. Who do you trust to tell you the truth about life…and its meaning…and those other non-material concepts that science can’t speak to? I hope you’ll give God a fair chance to show you that He is trustworthy.
I still think you don’t understand what Zombie is about here – my beliefs are not germane to the debate, nor are yours.
Eyewitness testimony is known in criminology to be quite unreliable, and in fact I’ll take the scientific method any day over anybody’s personal description. It would take many people giving pretty consistent testimony for one to really accept some historical account – and that’s exactly what science is: a way for many different people to examine the same things and come to the same conclusions, which is what happens in scientific inquiry.
How the world came to be is called cosmology in science, and it’s a very small corner of the universe of scientific inquiry. I personally find it amusing, but so far from what’s important to me personally that it’s almost irrelevant. Getting our educational system back on track from the hijackings by Team Left and Team Right matters a great deal to me.
For you to say that you have, in God, an eyewitness to the creation of the world turns this into a religious discussion, and I don’t think that this is relevant, although I appreciate your respect for me and I wish to return it.
The kind of truth you consider important, which has to do with how we should conduct our lives, is NOT the point here! Science doesn’t have a whole lot to say on this subject. This is more of a problem for you than for me because you find this aspect of truth to be so very important.
Indeed it is something that school education may not be in a position to deal with, which is why we leave it to parents and the home. You wouldn’t want somebody telling your kids what to think, nor would I. I don’t want my kids being told that the Bible is infallible, which seems to be your position, because it is obvious from geology and linguistics, to say nothing of biology, that this is not true. Sorry.
Whether or how I accept God isn’t part of this debate. What Zombie is talking about is how to restore education to a more ideologically neutral ground, where students learn hard facts and techniques, not interpretations – whether left or right, religious or non-religious.
That is the point here, and it is a very important one. My problem with people like you, and I suspect Zombie’s as well, is how to deal with people who want to bring their personal beliefs and feelings (like relying on what God tells them) into the science classroom, where they don’t belong. This handicaps those of us anxious to combat the madness of your counterparts on the left, since they will say we are on your team whether we are or not.
We’re not. We’re on neither team.
“Creationists, who want their dogma in the classroom on an equal basis with what is demonstrable.”
Kind of like the Big Bang theory, eh?
Care to demonstrate a Big Bang for me. I’d purely love to see one….from a distance.
Here is some info on big bang theory
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html#evidence
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#bestfit
There is actual reasoning and observable evidence which lead to this theory, unlike creationism.
You be sure to let me know when someone can create a Big Bang in a lab, and I’ll be sure to let you know when I see God create some Heavens and Earths with a wave of his magic God wand.
Neither theory can be demonstrated to be true.
As a former teacher administrator at a top notch public high school, I usually find discussions of the state of current public education hopelessly generalized and politicized. I have heard the uproar about the Texas standards on Jefferson removal and ID, but it SEEMS (if I can believe what I hear here) that some of the uproar is lefty spin. Zombie, it would be nice if we had a hard-nosed clear look at what the Texas standards do or do not say, although I will admit, that important stuff may also be in gray areas, where they might permit teachers to avoid teaching evolution…or anything else, if they chose not to. The point of standards is to insist what WILL be taught, and to be able to test it, with all the limitations of large scale high-stakes tests, notwithstanding.
People are right to insist on good teachers, but you also have to accept the fact that a good teacher does not necessarily share your religious or political beliefs. If the teachers are rigorous, challenge kids in appropriate ways, but also leave wiggle room for freedom of expression and belief, then go with them. You could do worse.
But as someone said earlier, it is unrealistic to expect that every, or maybe even most teachers are going to be excellent for your child, especially since the students themselves are all over the place with varying strengths, weaknesses, needs etc. As an administrator, I learned that some of my “worst” teachers by most objective standards, were the perfect teacher for at least a few of their students. That does not mean that I would hire them, had I been the one hiring and not inheriting, but it does show the complicated “reality” involved. Although a teacher’s job is to teach children and push them academically, teachers are also surrounded by the needs, breakdowns, abilities, neuroses, psychoses, special needs, and on and on and on that their students have. Good grief, just look at how many people have allergies, compared to fifty years ago and assume some similar phenomenon in many other areas of physical, mental, and emotional health.
I don’t know if it made me a better or worse teacher that I did not consider it my job to get a student to agree with me. It was my job to expose him/her to certain skills and knowledge, test him/her on those skills, and let the chips fall where they may. I knew that when I taught the Bible unit, that I had students who were essentially atheists, nominal Christians and Jews, and a few fundamentalist Christians and Jews. One could play with Genesis and simply say; some people believe this literally, some people think that it it completely mythical, and some think that it spells out a general design of how things evolved etc. I suppose that a science teacher could not be quite so open-minded about this. One would never say, Genesis can’t be true because it does not mention fossils and dinosaurs, but one would always plant the question; now about those fossils and dinosaurs?
Faith helps a lot of people keep on keeping on, and I can see why they would want their children to have it too, but as a public school teacher it was not my job to promote or destroy their faith, even as I knew that much of what I taught would of necessity call into question an absolutist view of things. So it goes.
Dwight,
One of my sons does have a very!! enthused teacher who the other teachers giggle about. But I figure that this hyper-enthusiasm is probably good for my son as it draws him out of his shell. If I personally was subjected to it for a great length of time, I might strangle her, but I’m not my son, and I’m not six years old.
As to Genesis not mentioning dinosaurs, let me point out that the King James Version was translated considerably before 1840 when a guy, who might have also been named Dwight??, invented the word ‘dinosaur’. However, the Bible does have behemoth, leviathan, dragon, dragons in the seas (or close to that), and flying serpents.
As to fossils, the most obvious cause is a worldwide flood which is mentioned in the Bible and about two hundred other historical accounts from all over the world.
As to Zombie, I don’t think it an unreasonable burden for Zombie to prove that he is not actively seeking the dimunition of Christian or Conservative (not Libertarian, but Conservative) influence in America considering how many times this type of arguement has been made to that effect.
I shall raise my mighty magic wand and diminuate the power of a hundred million people! Shazam!
Thank you for being relatively thoughtful about the topic.
Yes, there were also “giants in the earth” in those days, which happens to be the title of a Rolevaag novel on Scandinavians in the prairie, which I taught for many years. The flood stories in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh are fascinating to compare and contrast. Well, I thought it was fascinating; the students…were students. To me, the bottom line was/is that the Bible is a great book with endless cultural relevance. It communicates time-tested truths about human nature, but is also, finally, a product of collective man, (and not all of man, but the ones who began as nomadic sheep-herders caught between powerful empires) and our concept of God. At some point the power of the God idea takes on a life of its own, which goes beyond (maybe) the sum of its parts, or maybe isn’t quite as powerful as the sum of its parts, since there are so many parts, which go back so far. The Bible is a template to hold up to “modern” culture; the truths the Bible espouses are stubborn ones, but it is the somewhat cynical author of Ecclesiastes, (what a great batch of poetry as presented in the KJV) who tells us that there is “nothing new under the sun.”
But there ARE continually new things under the sun, which have to be held up against the Bible and the Constitution as a common sense check on their newness. Most of what I see in human nature tells us that we divide up between those who say, “ah, newness, which will improve our lot and improve us as people”, and those who say, “this newness is not really new and will make us worse, because it undercuts the old goodness.” Then we fight it out. Almost any new development, pain-killers is a great one, has been opposed by the most conservative, who said, ‘that goes against the Biblically proscribed “pain in childbirth screed of Genesis and God’s obvious plan for us to experience pain, since he made us that way. Most of us have left those concerns far behind us; the practial application of the new anaesthetics quickly trumped the concerns. EVERYTHING new goes through this same filter. The people holding up and sticking to the Bible have A truth, they don’t have THE truth, at least not the whole truth. SOMETIMES, the new stuff is bad, sometimes it is good; almost always a mixture of the two. God grant us the wisdom…etc.
Zombie,
The issue is not the relative amount of power, but your intent. I see this as yet another skirmish that if you are successful will strengthen the RINOs you probably dislike.
Dwight,
It is well that you have made an in-depth study of the Epic and the Bible. This gives you an advantage I envy. But to me, the chief fascinating part is how people on the far side of the world, how Chinese and Native American tribes told Noah’s story.
You state what you think the Bible is, and then use that as support for your arguement on not taking the Bible seriously as history. I’m not sure, but I think that’s called begging the question.
As to newness and old texts, I, at one time, was a fan of Louis L’Amour. He stated in his autobiography, if I recall right, ‘Journeys of a Wandering Man??’ that his Western characters could have fit in sailing with Odysseus. I say that Mankind in its essence does not change. Properly interpreted, the Bible and likely the Constitution will be relevant for all time.
Culture changes. TRR thought war a good thing for manliness. Modern progressives abhor war. One missionary I heard of to some Northern groups had to insert ‘baby seal’ instead of ‘lamb’ for at least one passage in the Bible. But the idea was the same, the idea of a pure, innocent young creature.
Tennwriter wrote: It is well that you have made an in-depth study of the Epic and the Bible. This gives you an advantage I envy. But to me, the chief fascinating part is how people on the far side of the world, how Chinese and Native American tribes told Noah’s story.
You state what you think the Bible is, and then use that as support for your arguement on not taking the Bible seriously as history. I’m not sure, but I think that’s called begging the question.
————
Check out the Epic some time. The stories are so similar, (and short) but with different Gods and characters. Both have one human who is warned, who builds an ark, animals taken aboard, the raven-dove thing, a rainbow, and a covenant. The similarities and differences are fascinating for what they imply about Hebrew and Sumerian culture and religion. Polytheism vs monotheism. As an aside, I half-believe that polytheism describes the world as I know it, as least as well as monotheism.
I take the Bible VERY seriously as history, but that is very different from taking it literally. Here is how ancient man explains/remembers some events in what I take to be the evolution of humans. There are hairy folks like Esau and Enkidu (in Gilgamesh) who seem not to be as evolved as less hairy ones. Hmmm. To me, the Fall, as seen both in Genesis and Gilgamesh is about the birth of human consciousness; not only to know right from wrong, or that there even are such things, but also the fore-knowledge that we will all die. That being clothed is a control of animal sexuality etc. I apply these stories to the concept that we BECAME human over thousands? millions? of years. Here are some core stories about that evolution. Like most myths, they are true, even though they are not true.
Hmmm, this is what I get for being retired. I have the time to cast out over the internets.
Zombie…..May I recommend Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Knopf, 2003)?
HOW much can a child be taught ? start with math reading and spelling those are the foundation but with out book what can a teacher teach???
“Trivial
I feel your placing far to much importance on god and should take more credit as being a good parent. Having good parents will far outweigh whether or not you believe in God or are learning in a Christian environment.
I graduated high school just five years ago, my high school was ranked 1st in California in teen pregnancy and was riddle with gang violence. The majority of kids didn’t amount to much, but within my social circle most of us went on to do great things. One of my friends became an Aerospace Engineer, another does Ads for Nissan Infinity and another became an Architect, as for my self I went into Software Engineering.
Now how do you account for us being able to achieve this inspite of the fact that we were all atheist in a horrible school system. Maybe there are some more important factors than whether you believe in god or not. Like having good parents and carrying good company with you.”
That’s it in a nutshell “Like having good parents and carrying good company with you.”
The majority of children today do not have good parents or any kind of support.
These are the children that they go after, they are taught that they’re victims
of society and that they have no chance of ever making it without the government helping them.
school choice, let people transfer public school money to private schools of the parents choice.
Conservatives should not succumb to the same failing liberals conceded 30 years ago: That political content is more important than intellectual content. Multiculturalism must not be replaced by fundamentalism.
Your very argument against Texans’ right (and it IS a right) to choose the curriculum they want to teach their own children is specious and fatally flawed.
You argue, essentially, that Texas must compromise with what people in other states want because the textbook manufacturers dont WANT to make too many editions because supposedly to do anything less would be unfair to smaller states.
As if ANY state in the country would have a hard time finding someone to write and print their textbooks that will have a guaranteed audience of hundreds of thousands.
Texas should teach their children EXACTLY what Texans want their children taught, and any state, anyone who doesn’t like it, including YOU, Zombie, is free to produce a different textbook which suits their own sensibilities.
Shame on your for such a specious argument that in and of itself utterly rejects our founding free market principles.
You totally misapprehend what I’m saying. I in no way imply that Texas needs to bend to the will of smaller states’ demands for textbook content. I simply point out the pre-existing fact that, due to the unpredictable vagaries of fate, everyone pays attention to what Texas does, and the Texas school board is fully conscious of this power position they’ve been handed. I’m only pointing out that while the spotlight is shining on them, the TSBE consistently fumbles the ball. It has nothing to do with what smaller states might want.
Do you know what most schoolhouses used for textbooks in Jefferson’s day? And for decades after? Bibles. That’s because they were often the only books widely available. Separation of church and state, of the sort I suspect you are thinking of, did not appear until after the First Amendment was deemed incorporated by SCOTUS in the 1940′s (Everson v. Board). The Warren Court, which came later, is mostly responsible for what most people now think of as “separation of church and state” which is a far, far cry from the role religion played in public life for the first 160+ years of our nation’s existence. Also, under modern Constitutional jurisprudence, the Establishment Clause was subsequently blown completely out of proportion in comparison with Free Exercise (remember that one?).
Anyway, “separation” is a wholly modern construct based on, in my opinion at least, a fraudulent and illogical perversion of the Constitution and specifically the 1st and 14th Amendments. Which doesn’t mean I think it shouldn’t be “taught”–it exists and shapes our laws. But it’s not a “founding principle” of any sort, except as the plain language of the Establishment Clause suggests. It was, until the latter half of the 20th Century, a non-issue. Zombie, before you criticize curriculum you might want to go back to school yourself.
Your mistake: “I wish there was no need to do this, but unfortunately those two extremes seem to be the only two options on the table.”
The answer is SCHOOL CHOICE. The Texas school board and the teacher’s unions only matter because they monopolize the educational field. And every critic like Zombie who presumes to have some cockamamie solution that’ll make everybody happy is just pushing his OWN idea of what every child in America should be brainwashed into believing. You’re going to write a week’s worth of articles criticizing two groups that think the same way you do, but the only thing that needs to be said is SCHOOL CHOICE. Two words. If the pro-brainwashing set would only agree to release their iron grip on the minds of America’s youth, none of us would have to care about these two groups you’re demonizing.
Uh — my solution is school choice.
I am NOT pushing my “OWN idea of what every child in America should be brainwashed into believing” — that’s the whole point.
Don’t thrown stones until you see what I’m going to say.
I look forward to the other four parts of your series. I think there will be much to learn by both sides, if they can keep their minds open. Wanting what is best for our kids should be the overwhelming driving force in any curricula.
Narrow dogma is not the way to there, for either side.
Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. – Ulysses S. Grant
The modern era tried to separate the spiritual from the secular. It can’t be done. Whether you like it or not, one’s world view affects how one views (and teaches) science, history and every other subject. Or is your world view the correct one?
I do not like your essay. You are too ascertive in branding each side as extreme, thusly making what your side the commen decent side? The seperation of Church and State does not exist in the Constitution, and that it is being taught today, as a basic concept was never intended. Jefferson’s side letter to one Church, securing their support, was promising them that no State or larger church would dominate. And that “quote” of the wall of seperation, was used by 1 judge, to enact a law, that is the foundation of that concept and of the Liberal agenda.
And btw the first amendment limits Congress… it says nothing of the limits on We The People… The Constitution LIMITS the Federal Govt… it does not LIMIT us, our states and counties from making our own laws. Though Liberals and I suspect you, believe the Constitution is an imposition upon us… And that… as a king or a piece of paper, would be tyranny. Just the way they like it.
Zombie was brought up in the modern era. As such, Zombie learned modern ideas about conflict resolution. One of these mandates that each side has a point, a point that is somehow ‘valid’.
Gone are the days when the person insisting that 2+2=5 is told flat out that they’re wrong–they have a ‘point’, and that ‘point’ must be heeded in some way.
Consider that, in schools, if there is a fight, attacker and victim are both suspended for ‘fighting’–even if one simply served as punching bag to the other.
A leftist mindset warps our every conversation.
First, they defeated a motion to have students learn about the separation of church and state, a foundational principle of the United States; the board members seem to have no problem ignoring those parts of the Constitution (such as the First Amendment) which they personally dislike…
Uh sorry to rain on an otherwise perfectly fine parade, but the First Ammendment actually only protects the citizenry from a government-ordered “state” religion (ie..the Church of England). Nowhere in the text of the actual Constitution will you find this “seperation of church and state” that you so blithely cite as a “foundational principle.
If memory serves, the term “seperation of church and state” came from Jefferson’s letter to the Maryland (?) Anabaptists…and he was again re-iterating the protections offered by the first ammendmnet against the government sactioning one particular religion over another. He was NOT advocating the perversion that subsequent generations of progressives have made of this phrase!
Ok first of all a correction….
Jefferson’s letter was in response to a letter he recieved from the Danbury Baptist (not the Maryland Anabaptist….sue me!) As I stated though, he was responding to , and reassuring, a religious minority that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution indeed protected them from the Federal Government imposing any sanctions on them based on their religious identity. It should be noted that Jefferson confined his remarks to the Federal government, and did not delve into the permissibilty of an individual State imposing such sanctions at all. My question then is this, how do we arrive at today’s perverted understanding of the Establishment Clause and hold up Thomas Jefferson’s letter …. this letter…
To messers Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.
Gentlemen
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. [Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of another nation as the legal head of its church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.] Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association assurances of my high respect & esteem.
(signed) Thomas Jefferson
Jan.1.1802.
… as PROOF that what the framers really meant was what the modern “intellectual” has decided they meant?
The term Jefferson employed was “a wall of separation between church and State” in a letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury Connecticut.
The salient text of the letter goes thusly…
‘Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their “legislature” should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.’
A bit of advice…never rely on memory when you have an internet handy.
My correction was trapped in moderation Hell as you wrote that…..
Yeah the old memory isn’t what I used to pretend it was!
Sorry, I would have let you fix it yourself, if only I’d known!
Re: memory…Now, that I’m older, I have to put my car keys in the same place every time I put them down or else I forget where they are. Didn’t use to be like that.
My rule for posting is to research everything before EVERY post, even if I’m totally familiar with the subject, just so I don’t have to make corrections of fact. It’s a good debating technique, because it make you look like a total Brainiac…but, it’s really all about having all the knowledge in the world right at your fingertips thanks to the internet.
Regarding Jefferson, he really was pretty adamant about keeping government out of religion, and vice versa, and would have been pretty comfortable with the modern liberal position (that happens to be my position as well, though I think liberals take it to absurd extremes). Same for James Madison, he wanted the Constitution to say that states also could not make laws respecting an establishment of religion (or more correctly, he proposed an amendment that said “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases.”), but it was voted down…but, Madison’s proposal was voted down, and we have a 1A that restricts Congress (only) from passing laws respecting an establishment of religion, instead of a 1A that forbids ALL government from passing laws of that sort.
And, that’s the state of the law no matter how much liberals on Boards of Education and dopey judges on the SCOTUS lie about it.
Heh! Thankfully I’m not THAT bad yet to where I can’t rmrmber where I put my car ke….. Oh Dangit..where DID I put those stupid keys. Hold on..gotta go look!
Ok I’m back. I think you and I pretty much agree on this topic…. my point is the same as yours…the modern “prog” has totally mucked up what should be perfectly clear language so that it can be used as a magic talisman to ward off the bogey-man of (GASP) God in the publicc square. It’s pretty undeniable, from even a casual perusal of the founding documents and the writings of the framers of both Federal and State Constitutions, that this country was founded with a strong belief in God and the public acknowledgement of Him as the source of wise rule. SCOTUS even makes this point pretty clearly in the “Trinity” decision. It amazes me that the so-called “smart” people have to go around trying to divine some obscure meaning from stuff written in the same language we speak today. But absent that massive, concerted effort to revise the historical record, the Libtardian agenda could not march boldly forward….
Thanks for knowing and expressing this so clearly. What you write provides an interesting context for the current debate. Madison tried but failed to get the states included in the restriction. Two hundred plus years have passed and no one would question that religion has become a smaller part of American culture than it was then. The states with their official religions have given them up long ago. We also had the Fourteenth Amendment. Put these things together and the position (which you agree with) that the states should not do the religious thing is obviously reasonable. It is, as you point out, the degree of restriction on religious activity, support, acquiescence which should be the issue. The fact that there are a lot ore religions who might be permitted to be celebrated, or not, in schools, town
As far as memory, I rarely pre-check my sources, but I also tend to take a centrist position, which is already based on the fact that any position in question has been argued both ways for a long time, and I usually understand (I would like to think) the general strengths and weaknesses of the positions, whereas many people here jump of the deep end of the righty absolutist position, and thereby end up sputtering and ranting in the face of a reasoned position. Checks and balances, checks and balances.
Oops, here how one sentence should have concluded. “The fact that there are a lot more religions who might be permitted to be celebrated, or not, in schools, town….property etc could logically call for more restriction, not less, just to avoid the hassle.”
Someone should let Glenn Beck know that the dastardly Madison tried to undercut the states’ support of religion, and he can add it to one of his chalk talks.
Give it up, Zombie; you are too smart for most of them. Write a book. They will not learn.
This is all talk about a secondary issue. The issue at the heart of this is the most basic of all; who does the child belong to and who is primarily responsible for the decisions involved in raising him? I believe that natural law and thousands of years of civilization call that to be the parent (not to mention that God has long ago determined that)
If you think the state has control, then of course you effectively agree that the state the can determine who is allowed to have children, how many and when – communist China is where your heart is and -good luck.(This is the essence of Obama’s views on everything)
The role of the state is to aid parents in raising children – The family is the basic unit of a civilized society and that’s precisly what the left is (in this and other issues – obamacare, gay marriage sex and drug liberation etc.) and has been, trying to destroy for decades now.
So your child belongs to YOU, but one day he/she will belong to him/herself. You own your child…until you don’t, right? Sometimes this ownership is about love, sometimes control, and who can tell the difference? If I am teaching your child, I certainly don’t want to run everything by mommy and daddy. When mommy and daddy home school, they solve one of those problems, and may, or may not, be doing right by their kids.
another home run Zombie,i look forward to the next installment of your essay.i also appreciate the level of intellectual discourse in this thread..i have been spending way too much time lately clue batting leftists on their home turf(it’s addicting)
Ahhh, the Left is wrong and the Right is wrong, only Zombie has the answer. Of course, Zombie has his own world view, his own “lens” for interpreting history, his own biases and opinions about religion and “science” and everything else, and his is the only one that matters.
“As someone who knows more than a thing or two about this field (evolution)…”
I have a Masters of Science degree, and also know a thing or two about this field. First of all, “intelligent design” and “creationism” are two different things (so I question how much you really know this field). Second of all, there is a condescending air about how you treat this subject, as in declaring that the science is settled, the time for debate is over, it’s been proven, blah blah blah (the same tactics that the Global Warming crowd used).
It is a sensitive subject and goes to the heart of one’s world view. It is a shame that both can’t be placed besides each other, with the pros and cons of each hypothesis (old earth vs. young earth) listed. And it’s a shame that there are not more public debates about evolution vs. creationism. One side doesn’t want to debate, though…
do you really think evolution is ‘scientific fact’ and not religious dogma? please, there is nothing in the fossil record that supports evolution, nothing in the lab, the tree of life is thrown out, as is the whole concept of ‘junk dna’. evolution is the religious dogma, not ID. Evolution is nothing more than an atheist fairy tale. For example you believe the eye evolved, but you cannot list the mutations that ‘evolved’ they eye, no you just take it on faith that the eye evolved…because it had to evolve, because the alternative is unthinkable to people like you.
evolution is nothing more than atheism posing as science, and it opens the door for the entire relativistic agenda of the left. I would really like for the schools to teach all about evolution though…including the entire eugenics movement, and the ugly racist roots of the theory of evolution, I’m sure you will agree that the whole story and history should be taught.
You are a prototypical example of the ignorance of people who don’t even understand the simplest fundamentals of evolution. Every statement in your comment is a worn-out vapid talking point that’s been debunked a jillion times. This is why it is no longer worth debating the topic online — because people like you are so commonplace, and nothing anyone ever says seems to make it into your ears. And your ignorance also demonstrates why evolution should be taught to all children, so that there will be fewer people basing their opinions about evolution on a complete absence of information. Once evolution is explained properly, a lightbulb goes off over a student’s head, and after that, it’s like, “Duh!”, the principles underlying evolution become self-evident.
Zombie
Nice how you rely on “received knowledge” to know that all of ID’s “silly arguments” have been discredited. If science worked this way we would all still pray to a pantheon of Greek Gods!
So, your assertion that ALL of ID’s silly arguments have been debunked, yet you offer no evidence other than your belief that is is so. Sure, Guys like Dawkins and Gould thought they had debunked the arguments and for them that was enough. They don’t entertain the rebuttals and continue on their way as if the matter were “settled”.
I have repeatedly challenged you to show the evidence that has debunked just two assertions made by the ID crowd and you haven’t addressed either one. Let me make it simple for you, debunk just this one:
“What, other than an external guiding intelligence, can account for the large amount of organized and specified information in DNA?”
It’s a simple request really, your absence of a serious response says more about you and those whose water you apparently are carrying than it does about those who posit that ID is the best explanation we have.
How far back do you want me to go, Tom? Eyespots–or all the way back to cytoplasmic air bubbles that heated when the sun came up?
I could make quite a list of stages of the eye–but I am fully aware that you would dismiss them because there’s no ‘fossil evidence’ of the ‘transitional form’ and will see nothing wrong with demanding that I provide soft tissue from the dawn of the planet.
#83 James A
Good Morning! (although I’m sure you may have moved on to more important pursuits) Thanks for your comments and for the discussion. I appreciate civil discourse because it is so rare these days. Of course, I don’t agree with you that geology or linguistics or anything else has shown the Bible to be false, but that is not for me to decide for you. Each person must decide that issue for themselves. If anything, I hope that I’ve cracked open the door for you to really questions what exactly has been “proved” by science and what you are being asked to take on “faith.” You have my best wishes and my best regards.
Sir:
The reports on which you rely are most emphatically not reliable–there was gross distortion of the facts by some in the academy and the media. I invite everyone who is interested to actually read the standards for themselves. Please, please review these standards yourself before repeating any of the junk you read from the AP.
I reviewed the standards myself, and compared with media reports. Please do Astounding.
Here’s my article on it, which was published midway in the controversy : http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704133804575197723035341114.html
Here are the final standards. http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=3643. It is easy to open the documents, and do any word search to find, e.g, “religi,” etc.
If you value your intellectual integrity, you will look into this matter yourself before publishing anything further.
PLEASE continue reading onto Part II of the essay, in which this issue is addressed, and in which I link to the original source material (i.e. the standards themselves):
Part II: What’s the Matter With Texas?
#103 Asathoth
Will you indulge me by providing a simple schematic to support your position? Pick any line of evidence you believe establishes evolution as fact (finches beaks, colored moths, etc.) and diagram it as follows:
[event] -> [result] + [event] -> [result] + [event] -> [result] + [event] -> [result]
If my diagram is oversimplified or insufficient for your purposes, you are certainly welcome to create your own. Once you’ve finished your diagram, please label with an asterisk (*) each event that can be proved using the scientific method.
My guess is that limiting yourself to empirical science will reveal many gaps in your line of evidence. My question is then on what basis do you assert that your belief is any less dependent on faith than mine?
Z, P.S.D, ‘z’, not ‘s’. Thanks.
I think we reach some of the crux of the whole thing with your diagram. ‘event’ ‘result’.
That’s not really how it works.
Evolution ‘favors’ only one thing–sucessful and plentiful reproduction. That’s it. Every change becomes a trait solely because the lifeform bearing that trait can breed better than it’s fellows.
Take some squirrels. One among them can jump a bit further than his fellows. He will get more food and thus have the energy to have more offspring. Evolution has ‘selected’ him. The next generation will have more of his offspring than the offspring of others. Something made him just a bit better. Was it determination, or something he was born with? Who can say? But, chances are, his offspring will have an edge over their fellows as well. Why? Better fed for one thing–and some possible extra edge of some sort. Over time, his offspring may come to dominate the squirrel genome. His species will have evolved to some ‘next level’–without ever ‘changing’ from being a squirrel.
Or, that little change might have been skin that stayed tauter when he jumped, allowing a slight–miniscule–glide. If so, this guy could wide up as a flying squirrel some day down the line–and if you go further down the line you might see something that looks like a bat.
And all of it happening through simple natural variances–like human ear shape, or nose shape, length of fingers–all kinds of things that can pop out of one’s genetic inheritance at random.
‘Limiting myself to empirical science’. Please, P.S.D., tell me how I can get soft tissue from 3,000,000,000 years ago to experiment on. I am looking back on the path we mnay have trodden, so, until I can travel in time, my researches with matter from that time will be strictly limited.
This is why I’m leaving out any progression. OF COURSE it will involve conjecture–I can’t go back there and bring you the physical proof. But you guys always demand that–because it’s science, and science should be able to do that.
And I can’t ask for proofs from you because it’s faith. Sigh. Hey, Romans weren’t ‘faith’–are there any Roman records of Jesus’ arrest and crucifiction? How about Jewish records? What about Egypt–is there Egyptian coonfirmation of the plagues?
But I can make evolution happen in a lab. I can alter conditions, see to it that only my favored animal breeds. I can, given the time, take one animal and control it’s breeding to the point where its’ descendents can no longer breed naturally with the animal they started from(we call that ‘speciation’).
That’s how we know evolution works.
Can you give me an empirical test for Creation? Even some mini-Creation?
And none of this means that there is no God–it just means that your bible is wrong, at least where Genesis is concerned. This is kind of understandable, don’t you think? There were no men around to document the process, after all.
I’ve looked at Tablet XI of the Epic up until U. starts talking to G.. There are indeed a number of similarities (although I didn’t see the rainbow or the covenant).
So what’s your explanation for this Flood story, and Noah’s or the other 200?
I do detect one weak point in your explanation of Genesis as poem. We’re supposed to say that pre-modern man tried to explain events, but could not do so literally. But he retains memory of these events for hundreds of thousands of years. That is the weak point, you say thousands or millions. Thousands is reasonable, but hundreds of thousands is what evolution demands. Now you can either submit to reason or ideology. Can’t serve both here.
I read about a guy who could identify certain farms in England that didn’t do well because ‘ol’ Willy burned them’. Eight hundred years later, some remnant of Williamm the Conqueror’s impact remained in oral history. But the timespans demanded by evolution? No.
As to monotheism vs. polytheism, consider Occam’s Razor. Is it good to multiply causes beyond the minimum necessary? Consider also Science which is founded on the philosophical premise that the universe is orderly, logical, and knowable. All of that is based on the idea of Yahweh, who is Loving, Lawful, Desires to be Known, and is a God of Order. So, should we change that for a polytheism, a celestial chaos?
Tennwriter, Bravo for checking out the Epic. As I recall the rainbow has some association with Ishtar’s jewels and the covenant is a mere token remembrance, not the irin-clad promise which God makes to Noah. And, I just remembered, they both make sacrifices. If you stay interested, I will go back and re-read it. So far, I am doing it from memory.
Explanation? Most of the world has been ravaged by terrible floods at one time or another. It is clear that the Sumerians and Hebrews share a tradition. Abram came from Ur (Uruk in Gilgamesh) and would go back to Haran to get wives for whoever needed one, as opposed to taking one from the Canaanites. Abraham is a symbol for the birth of monotheism. He is spoken to by ONE God out of the many he was brought up with. He leaves the ziggurats of his forefather and their gods and heads for the desert, where he has his vision(s) and also messages from God, most of which have to do with stay away from those corrupt cities. (Some good parables for our civilization, eh?) When the monotheistic flood story takes shape it has many similarities to the earlier? Sumerian one, but it is a tidied up story with less fickle gods, a God who destroys people for being evil, not just being loud. He gives a much more satisfying Covenant, and his story “works” a lot better, producing Judaism and then Christianity, and then Islam, whereas the polytheists did not produce anything comparable. Oops, the Roman Empire is a glaring exception, but eventually Yahweh and Jesus trump Zeus/Jupiter and Dionysus (although the “I am the Vine” side of Jesus and his terrible death and Resurrection are so parallel to Dionysus…but that is another story.
As for the logic of monotheism vs polytheism, monotheism is more soothing, but has a lot of trouble explaining why such bad stuff happens to good or average people, whereas the polytheists know that many of the God’s are fickle and sh*T happens. It takes faith to believe in God with all the random evil going on, but the polytheists have a more “logical” explanation. The topic deserves far more than this simple gloss, but that’s my one paragraph version.
Dwight,
Indeed, there have been terrible floods. Nashville just got nailed by one recently, and thats in my neck of the woods. 24 hrs. of water just really smashed the place.
But you have places in India with a thousand feet thick of bones. That’s quite a ‘local’ flood.
And while you might be able to make a connection as you say, instead of the connnection that Noah told his kids who told their kids, and one of their descendants founded Uruk. Its pretty much impossible to do the same for the 200 other flood tales which, smile, you’re ignoring.
I’d refer you to CS Lewis who talked of the Monomyth or the True Myth regarding the truths in the Bible after encountering them after studying the ancient myths. I’d also point out that the ressurection of Christ is solid.
Let me suggest that Polytheism is merely refined Ancestor Worship with Japheth, son of Noah becoming Jupiter, King of the Gods.
Prove it. Then prove they aren’t just fossils many millions of years old.
At the risk of being tediously repetitive – here’s a comment I wrote at another site on this issue;
“Having just attended GECCO 2010 – the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference – and ALIFE XII – the twelfth international conference on Artificial Life – hearing people argue about Evolution is like an Astronomer working on Stellar Evolution hearing about arguments for a Flat Earth.
Yes, Macro-Evolution has been demonstrated in labs. And yes, we have a pretty good handle on pre-biotic evolution that explains biogenesis, how life can evolve from non-living material.
Can we prove that it did? No, no more than we can prove that diamonds took millions of years to form within the mantle. Can we prove that it could have? Oh yeah.
Consider the Brazil Nut effect. Take a bowl full of mixed nuts – cashews, peanuts, almonds etc.
Shake them slightly, randomly. The large Brazil nuts end up on top, even though no-one deliberately picks them up and puts them there. It’s just a consequence of the laws of physics that some systems are self-organising.
One can argue that some External Power set up the Universe in a way where Life became inevitable, and would evolve. Certainly we have no reason to believe that the Universe had to have been set up this way – just that it was.
But as for Supernatural Intervention – it may have happened, and we can’t prove that it didn’t. Just that it’s not necessary, any more than a Deity hurling thunderbolts is necessary to explain lightning.”
Or for that matter, the noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster are necessary to explain Gravity, even if we don’t have a photograph of a graviton to exhibit.
I’m sorry, I just don’t get the controversy. Most of us have accepted that the evidence shows that there’s no storehouses of hail and snow up in the sky, as the Bible says there are. That rain is not caused by the windows of heaven opening to let the “waters above” leak in through the firmament. Such views haven’t been held for a while now, at least, not by more than a few. Perhaps a greater knowledge of the arguments in the past of biblical literalists vs evidence-based natural philosophy would give some in this dispute a few clues that their arguments are mere repetitions (with minor changes) of controversies from centuries ago. I truly wonder if the Enlightenment could happen in the USA today, when so many have such contempt for mere evidence.
WARNING! Heavy snark alert!
“Most of us have accepted that the evidence shows that there’s no storehouses of hail and snow up in the sky, as the Bible says there are. That rain is not caused by the windows of heaven opening to let the “waters above” leak in through the firmament. Such views haven’t been held for a while now, at least, not by more than a few.”
Uh Science-geeky dude…that there is something called the “poetic form”, one of the many forms used in writing the Bible. You know, kinda like Shakespeare describing that beauteous act in which you’ve obviously not participated, as “making the beast with two backs”….shut up…Shakespeare is ALL about the poetry! Ok..Ok..let’s go with this one…”What light through yonder window breaks? Tis the east and Juliette is the sun!”… Unless you think Willy was trying to ell us that his heroine was a luminous ball of flaming gas…. ’tis poetry dude.
“Perhaps a greater knowledge of the arguments in the past of biblical literalists vs evidence-based natural philosophy would give some in this dispute a few clues that their arguments are mere repetitions (with minor changes) of controversies from centuries ago.”
Perhaps a greater knowledge of the various literary forms found in the bible would give geeky Science-dudes a clue that they are speaking out their hindquarters! Just sayin’ man!
Sheesh…you prolly believe in AGW too doncha big boy?
OOOOPS! Sorry there ZoeBrain…that would be dudette?!? And Big Girl?!?!
Dang..I should really take Dave Surls’ advice and research stuff before I post……
All of the aforementioned points remain valid despite my incorrect usage of the proper pronouns….
Shifty1 – one could make the same arguments for the Adam and Eve bit of course. Being poetic and all, “creation” being a poetic myth.
In fact, those parts of the Bible dealing with the way the world’s set up contain a pretty good description of Babylonian Cosmological Theory as described in other contemporaneous writings. They meant exactly what they said.
And no apology required, your Snarkiness was more Boojumic anyway. It had wit, clarity, and lacked malice.
AGW? I think anyone who says they know for sure what’s happening with the Climate, and what the causes are, is, um, incorrect. The data’s ratty beyond belief, the computer models a hopeless joke. But let’s leave that container of nematodes unbreached.
Re pronouns: I’m one of the best documented cases of protandrous (ie female) dichogamous pseudohermaphroditism on the planet. There’s far more protogynous (ie male) dichogamous pseudohermaphrodites due to either 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency (5alpha-RD-2) or 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency (17beta-HSD-3).
Anyway, my birth certificate says “boy” just the way theirs says “girl”, even though some of the guys have fathered kids. Not everyone (quite) who has a “sex change” is transsexual. It just happens to some of us. And if you think Evolution causes problems for Theologians, our existence causes cranial implosion. Fortunately for everyone, we’re rare. (see the “Guevodoces” of the Dominican Republic, the “Turnim-Men” of New Guinea – both due to various forms of 5alpha-RD-2 – and the “Transferrers” of Jubayah in Gaza, due to 17beta-HSD-3)
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophie.
“one could make the same arguments for the Adam and Eve bit of course.”
Yeah, could be the literal truth too, and any objection one makes to the story can be swept away by the following: “God is All-Powerful, he can do anything.”
That’s why it’s so great to be a creationist, you have an unassailable fallback position.
Here’s how the argument (any argument to do with creationism) goes…
Dave: God created the earth 6,000 years ago (or whatever number you like).
Doubter/Denier/Atheist/Whatever: Then, why are there rocks laying around that are 4 billion years old?
Dave: They aren’t 4 billion years old. God just made them look that way.
D/D/A/W: How?
Dave: God is all-powerful…he can do anything.
Argument over. You want to move onto why? O.k.
D/D/A/W: Why?
Dave: God works in mysterious ways my friend, if he wants us to know why…he’ll let us know in his own good time.
And, round, and round, and round we go…and the D/D/A/W will never win the argument, as long as Dave has faith in his premise that God is All-powerful. It just ain’t possible.
And that’s why I don’t try and argue with Dave, ’cause I CAN’T beat down his argument with logic or proof or anything else, so I just let him believe what he wants to believe, on account of:
1.) IMO, Dave has a right to believe that if he wants to.
2.) It isn’t going to hurt anyone if Dave believes that (well it might send an atheist Big Bang believer into a paroxysm of rage because someone is daring to preach heresy…but, they’ll get over it).
3.) Dave could be right.
At least that’s how I see things.
Zoe…
Why do I get the feeling you just cussed me out in some weird alien space tongue?
“your Snarkiness was more Boojumic anyway….protandrous (ie female) dichogamous pseudohermaphroditism on the planet. There’s far more protogynous (ie male) dichogamous pseudohermaphrodites due to either 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency (5alpha-RD-2) or 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency (17beta-HSD-3).”
Great so now I get to spend all night googling this lot and trying to figure out if you just said something bad about my mother! Thanks a pants-load!
“Most of us have accepted that the evidence shows that there’s no storehouses of hail and snow up in the sky, as the Bible says there are.”
Well, if I understand what God was telling Job, correctly you aren’t supposed to see it, so that’s not too surprising.
Good luck with settling those pesky evolution vs. creation and church/state separation debates, y’all. But let me open up another couple fronts. I’m unsettled by Zombie’s suggestion that a rough equivalency of disinformation is what drives the know-nothingism of the revised Texas schoolbooks.
I note sympathetically Zombie’s grumbling about some anecdotal self-esteem overkill (but actually, before we get all high and mighty about it, how have those schools with 50 valedictorians been doing? If they’re good schools, maybe we SHOULD let 50 kids be valedictorians).
But about this war: What horrible propaganda, exactly, have these heathen Marxist teachers and professors been filling the poor dears’ heads with? Anything that’s factually incorrect? I haven’t been inundated with stories about, say, “Iowa history teacher tells students that Stalin was better than Jesus.” In fact, it seems to me that teaching falsehoods is frowned upon at most schools and colleges, even today. So what evidence exists that there’s any difference between Zombie’s stated interest in balanced teaching and a simple interest in swaying the canon as far right as is possible? And in what way is our general way of life, bombarded daily with advertisements, media outlets and commentators extolling the glories of capitalism, in danger from even the most entrenched socialists among … college professors? Ooh, scary. As if anyone is actually even taking college history classes anymore.
Also, for someone decrying the re-emphasis of, ugh, history in curricula, Zombie seems to spend a lot of his time (selectively) citing history. I myself think history is as essential to modern education as math and science, and I’m curious to hear an argument that the average American today is already quite well served by his thorough education in history and doesn’t need any more.
Yes, Macro-Evolution has been demonstrated in labs. And yes, we have a pretty good handle on pre-biotic evolution that explains biogenesis, how life can evolve from non-living material.
Can we prove that it did? No, no more than we can prove that diamonds took millions of years to form within the mantle. Can we prove that it could have? Oh yeah.
Consider the Brazil Nut effect. Take a bowl full of mixed nuts – cashews, peanuts, almonds etc.
Shake them slightly, randomly. The large Brazil nuts end up on top, even though no-one deliberately picks them up and puts them there. It’s just a consequence of the laws of physics that some systems are self-organising.
One can argue that some External Power set up the Universe in a way where Life became inevitable, and would evolve. Certainly we have no reason to believe that the Universe had to have been set up this way – just that it was.
But as for Supernatural Intervention – it may have happened, and we can’t prove that it didn’t. Just that it’s not necessary, any more than a Deity hurling thunderbolts is necessary to explain lightning.”
—-
Cool! I like the fairy tale of the evolutionary religion of the Darwinian church. I can put some Si and O2 in a bowl and shake it up. Out come the supercomputer of the day! You don’t need to no stinging intelligence. Just the power of the Evolutionary “God”. Welcome the church of Darwin.
BTW, this is another common fairy tale of the Evolutionary Church of Darwin. YOu can see that we don’t need a Deity to explain that people can adapt to the changes in the environment. For example our skin gets lighter in colder region and darker in warmer region. This illustrates how a fish can adapt/change into a human. Just like how cars can adapt to different driving conditions. So this adaptation ability can explain how a car can “evolve” into an airplane. Very cool fairy tale!
Emily wrote (in a thread I lost track of) Dwight, I’m tired of this argument that Christians are supposed to be beta males. You’ve bought into the liberal ideas of Jesus. . . He wasn’t a beta male.
Emily, I have read the scriptures many times. I understand that human nature, especially male does not want to be told to turn the other cheek and American culture has pretty much gone the, “I will shoot you in the eye, and do it pre-emptively if I have to” route which is vintage human nature. But that’s not what Jesus was teaching.
The creative miracle of America, and much of Christianity stems from their taking Jesus in very small doses. What he asks is too hard, certainly too hard for me, but I no longer profess to be a believer. It is those who believe and will throw the left hook or fire a deadly shot that are the marvelous hybrids, who have evolved. Nine parts testosterone and one part Jesus. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
#106 Azathoth
Sorry about the “z” vs. “s” thing. I noticed it after I posted and I don’t know how to edit a post (if that’s even possible). No offense meant, I hope none taken.
I appreciate your candor and your willingness to engage in civil discussion without flamethrowing. In your reply, you mention: “simple natural variances–like human ear shape, or nose shape, length of fingers–all kinds of things that can pop out of one’s genetic inheritance at random.” We probably agree on this point as it is pretty clear that there is magnificent diversity evident in humans, not to mention other species.
The question which remains unanswered by science is whether there is a genetic limit to such diversity. You mention “speciation” which you define as when genetic change progresses to the point where two descendants of an animal are no longer capable of successfully interbreeding. That phenomena is entirely within the realm of empirical science and no self-respecting creationist would disagree that it is a scientific fact.
Where I would disagree with you is in your assumption that the same genetic mechanism which causes speciation can, over time, change a squirrel to a bat. The speciation you refer to is always a result of a_loss_of genetic information. The net result is a creature with_less_genetic diversity, not more. A classic example of this is evident in dog breeds. Humans have for thousands of years used their intelligence to explore the genetic limits of possible dog breeds. Saint Bernards are significantly genetically diverse from Chihuahuas, but both dogs have less potential genetic diversity than a mixed-breed mutt. And despite the thousands of years of intelligence-driven genetic tinkering, no one has ever been able to change a dog into something else.
So when a scientist tells me that a squirrel can change into a bat, I understand that there is some empirical science that supports that assumption, but I also recognize it contains (if you’ll pardon the expression) a “leap of faith”, too. While the idea that a squirrel can change into a flying squirrel and then into a bat sounds logical enough, I hope you recognize that the statement is based, in part, on the faith that it_can_happen. It has never been observed, it is not a testable hypothesis, and it is not repeatable in a lab. It is more philosophy (or faith) than science, really. And the more you study the evolutionary literature, the more you’ll be able to recognize faith terms like “might have” “could have” and “would have” which abound in it.
That brings me back to my original question: if both of our beliefs cannot be proven 100%, on what basis do you assert that your belief is any less dependent on faith than mine? You may argue that the belief that a squirrel can change into a bat is more rational than the belief that God made squirrels and bats separately. I would answer that you only think that way because you have voluntarily placed your mind in a box. This box requires you to assume that everything we observe_has_to be explained in natural terms and can_only_be the result of natural processes. When people enclose their mind in this box, they unwittingly elevate unproven assertions (e.g., squirrels can become bats) to the same level as empirical fact (e.g., genetic diversity can result in speciation).
I say that box is flawed, because it is based on the false assumption that the material world is all there is. Can I prove God exists? No, not empirically anyway. But I can make a rational argument that there is more to this world than what can be seen, heard, felt, or touched. For example, my thoughts are non-material. Although I am representing them on this web page in written form and they can be printed off onto paper, they are not the same as the medium they are printed on and they are not dependent on the medium for their existence. In other words, my thoughts are more than just a combination of the ink and paper on which they are conveyed. They exist, yet they are not comprised of any material thing.
Another example is love. Is love just a mix of chemicals in our brain, devoid of any transcendent meaning? If your mind is in the box, you must answer “yes” to that question in order to be consistent. But I know, and hopefully you know it too in your heart, that love is more than that.
Which brings me back to God, because the Bible says that God is love. He is certainly not observable, repeatable, testable so as to be proven by the scientific method. But He exists and He has given us all the clues we need to recognize His existence. Some people reject those clues (preferring to live inside the box). Others of us, through no great gift of intellect or insight, allow those clues to lead us to their logical conclusion and we humbly stand amazed at what a marvelous and infinitely wise Creator we have.
I’m sorry for the long post. I commend http://www.answersingenesis.org to you as a site which explains a biblical perspective on science far better than I can. I wish you success on your journey to find the truth.
#103 Azathoth
Eyespots – an interesting point. The eye is irreducibly complex, not so much the sturcture, just consider the Chemical dance involved in converting light to an electrical impulse the brain perceives. Now make the Darwinist/Materialist explnation of this that doesn’t include statements like Might Have, Could Have, Should Have, Would Have, We Believe, etc. that Public_School_Dad so adroitly pointed out in post #114 are statements of faith, not science.
Taken from: http://www.harunyahya.com/refuted13.php
The Chemistry of Sight
In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe stresses that the structure of the living cell and all other biochemical systems were unknown “black boxes” for Darwin and his contemporaries. Darwin assumed that these black boxes possessed very simple structures and could have come about by chance. Now, however, modern biochemistry has opened up these black boxes and revealed the irreducibly complex structure of life. Behe states that Darwin’s comments on the emergence of the eye seemed convincing because of the primitive level of nineteenth-century science:
Darwin persuaded much of the world that a modern eye evolved gradually from a simpler structure, but he did not even try to explain where his starting point-the relatively simple light-sensitive spot-came from. On the contrary, Darwin dismissed the question of the eye’s ultimate origin… He had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond nineteenth-century science. How the eye works-that is, what happens when a photon of light first hits the retina-simply could not be answered at that time.353
So, how does this system, which Darwin glossed over as a simple structure, actually work? How do the cells in the eye’s retinal layer perceive the light rays that fall on them?
The answer to that question is rather complicated. When photons hit the cells of the retina they activate a chain action, rather like a domino effect. The first of these domino pieces is a molecule called “11-cis-retinal” that is sensitive to photons. When struck by a photon, this molecule changes shape, which in turn changes the shape of a protein called “rhodopsin” to which it is tightly bound. Rhodopsin then takes a form that enables it to stick to another resident protein in the cell called “transducin.”
Prior to reacting with rhodopsin, transducin is bound to another molecule called GDP. When it connects with rhodopsin, transducin releases the GDP molecule and is linked to a new molecule called GTP. That is why the new complex consisting of the two proteins (rhodopsin and transducin) and a smaller molecule (GTP) is called “GTP-transducin-rhodopsin.”
But the process has only just begun. The new GTP-transducin-rhodopsin complex can now very quickly bind to another protein resident in the cell called “phosphodiesterase.” This enables the phosphodiesterase protein to cut yet another molecule resident in the cell, called cGMP. Since this process takes place in the millions of proteins in the cell, the cGMP concentration is suddenly decreased.
How does all this help with sight? The last element of this chain reaction supplies the answer. The fall in the cGMP amount affects the ion channels in the cell. The so-called ion channel is a structure composed of proteins that regulate the number of sodium ions within the cell. Under normal conditions, the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell while another molecule disposes of the excess ions to maintain a balance. When the number of cGMP molecules falls, so does the number of sodium ions. This leads to an imbalance of charge across the membrane, which stimulates the nerve cells connected to these cells, forming what we refer to as an “electrical impulse.” Nerves carry the impulses to the brain and “seeing” happens there.354
In brief, a single photon hits a single cell, and through a series of chain reactions the cell produces an electrical impulse. This stimulus is modulated by the energy of the photon-that is, the brightness of the light. Another fascinating fact is that all of the processes described so far happen in no more than one thousandth of a second. As soon as this chain reaction is completed, other specialized proteins within the cells convert elements such as 11-cis-retinal, rhodopsin and transducin back to their original states. The eye is under a constant shower of photons, and the chain reactions within the eye’s sensitive cells enable it to perceive each one of these.
The process of sight is actually a great deal more complicated than the outline presented here would indicate. However, even this brief overview is sufficient to demonstrate the extraordinary nature of the system. There is such a complicated, finely calculated design inside the eye that it is nonsensical to claim that this system could have come about by chance. The system possesses a totally irreducibly complex structure. If even one of the many molecular parts that enter into a chain reaction with each other were missing, or did not possess a suitable structure, then the system would not function at all.
It is clear that this system deals a heavy blow to Darwin’s explanation of life by “chance.” Michael Behe makes this comment on the chemistry of the eye and the theory of evolution:
Now that the black box of vision has been opened, it is no longer enough for an evolutionary explanation of that power to consider only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the nineteenth century (and as popularizers of evolution continue to do today). Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric.355
The irreducibly complex structure of the eye not only definitively disproves the Darwinist theory, but also shows that life was created with a superior design.
Now that the black box of vision has been opened, it is no longer enough for an evolutionary explanation of that power to consider only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the nineteenth century (and as popularizers of evolution continue to do today). Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric.
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But this is contrary to the evolutionary dogma. The first characteristic of real science is the ability to separate scientific facts from dogmas and the ability to follow the evidence wherever it leads. That ‘s why it is not science, but a dogmatic evolutionary religion.
We home-school. Wednesday our 14 year old daughter wanted to know why she had to complete the “challenge questions” in her geometry curriculum. After all, that material was never on the test, and tended to deal with matters tangential or even unrelated to the topic at hand. We explained to her that because the questions developed her advanced reasoning skills, she must do them in order to enjoy the education appropriate for a free citizen.
It isn’t enough for a free citizen to have memorized facts and mastered basic skills. A free citizen should be able to employ logic and reason critically. A free citizen should understand their government, and be able to express himself clearly. Parents who want to keep this nation and their progeny free insist their children be presented with contrasting theories and trained to reason.
We took our children out of the local public schools because they were being indoctrinated rather than educated. What little education they were given was worse than mediocre. The skills they were being trained in were rudimentary, and the standards were way, way, way too low. Their confused teachers were products of indoctrination themselves, and could not comprehend why their tactics were an anathema to us. Brainwashed themselves, they could not see how repulsive it was to have future American citizens taught to believe rather than to think.
Show some evidence when you label people “neo-marxists”. I quit reading your opinion right there. The guidelines say that we shouldn’t amke ad hominim attacks but that is what you just did right there.
Don’t like evolution? Then don’t get vaccinations. Viruses mutate, that means evolve. Logically if you get a flu vaccination you must believe in evolution because without it there wouldn’t be any flu vaccines. They simply cannot be developed without a firm understanding of evolution. One of the many reasons that biology as we know it has Darwinism as its’ base.
I find it amazing that people don’t believe in Darwin’s theories yet they are perfectly willing to practice “Social Darwinism” in our society. It’s sort of like the forced childbirth movement, make them have the babies but by God don’t give them welfare or food stamps to help support that baby.
Stupid is as stupid does…
I’m shocked to see Pajamas Media giving space to someone who thinks “separation of church and state” is a “foundational principle of the United States.” For me – a lawyer who has been studying constitutional history for over 30 years and practicing constitutional law for most of that time – the credibility of this essay was eviscerated at that line.
There is nothing about “separation of church and state” in the First Amendment, and virtually every serious constitutional historian (even most on the left) agrees that the concept was fabricated by the Supreme Court in the 20th century. As Justice Thomas has correctly pointed out in a couple of concurring opinions, the establishment clause was drafted and adopted to ensure that no federal law could interfere with the State’s rights to choose whether they would or would not support state religions. It states in plain words that Congress shall make no law that addresses the subject of established religion. (The word “respecting” is a preposition synonymous with “about,” “concerning” or “on the subject of.” It has no other meaning even in a 21st century dictionary.) There is very little dispute about the original intent of the establishment clause, or how it was literally interpreted for 150 years after it was adopted. About half the states had “official” religions for decades after the Constitution was adopted. So, for anyone to claim that “separation of church and state” is a “foundational principle of the United States” shows appalling ignorance on that subject.
You’ve lost all credibility with me when you claim it’s constitutional for the feds to spend money to support a state religion.
Allow me to put to rest Darwinism in one word (yes, that is a bold curt statement): Butterflies!
Ummm.. yeah, so the author thinks that the US education system was “free from indoctrination” in the 1950s? LOL!
Here is the deal. ALL education is a form of “indoctrination”, its inescapable! No one, NO ONE, can teach children anything without there being some case of one person passing on their world view to another person, its IMPOSSIBLE!
The only time that people don’t complain about “indoctrination” is when everyone believes the same b.s.! Islamic schools in Saudi Arabia aren’t considered indoctrination by Saudi parents, but if they tried to teach here what they teach there we would call it indoctrination.
If they tried to teach in Saudi Arabia the same curriculum that they taught here in “the 1950s”, they would call it indoctrination!
Have you ever actually looked at the curriculum of 1950s schools? I doubt you have. I have, not every school, and not every region of the country, but I’ll done some study on the matter, and I can tell that there was plenty of indoctrination then, just as now.
The big difference was that back in the 1950s, most parents well less involved in their kids education than today actually, more people felt that they couldn’t speak up against things they didn’t like being taught in school, more people believed much of the propaganda that was being taught to kids at the time, the dominant white culture of the time had no interest in correcting many of the misrepresentations being taught at the time. (for example, the issue of slavery was virtually nonexistent in public school curriculum, and wasn’t even taught at all in many southern schools)
Stop getting your ideas about the 1950s from watching Leave it to Beaver and do a little research!
I have three children, ages 9, 13 & 18 in the Jefferson County, Colorado, School system. To say that my wife and I are involved in our children’s education is an understatement. Have you heard the term, “Helicopter Parents?”
Thank God, we live in Colorado. Are we the only state left with common sense? Nothing you wrote about (right or left) dominates our school system. My children are encouraged to be critical thinkers and much of their educational material is gathered from sources other than text books. They can read and write well. They are at least a year ahead of where I was in the seventies as far as math and science go.
I have always been ambivalent about the tug of war in the U.S. between national standards and local control but lately I have come to appreciate that we (the parents in Jefferson County) control our school system. Not the Federal government, not the Texas State Board of Education, not the religious right or the amorphous conglomeration of neo-Marxists, teacher’s unions and radical academics the author refers to.
The irony here, one the author clearly doesn’t understand, is that this is not an intellectual struggle. This battle, like most, is won in the trenches. Students, teachers and parents are in the trenches and we understand what is at stake even if you don’t.
Awesome article Zombie..
I have to say you are dead on.
Hopefully at some point good sense will reign, but I am not holding my breath.
Witness the folks trying to “prove” there is no such thing as evolution in this forum.
Don’t expect these kinds of debates to go away any time soon. How we tell the story of our history and what parts of our history we consider important to teach our children is completely wrapped up in our politics, our sense of self, our aspirations for our kids and our country. This is good; this is appropriate. If there’s a big ideological divide in our schools, it’s because there’s currently one in our society. It’s crazy to say we should all “just get along” in the name of education.
But: we also desperately need to develop critical thinking, and this kind of debate gives us that opportunity. Slant your curriculum to one side or the other of the culture wars, but if you are teaching history, teach the difference between a primary and a secondary source, teach that it might be interesting to know that our textbooks might think different parts of history are more or less important. Is it more important to teach about who were the founding Fathers and how they thought during Colonial America, or what life was like if you were a junior high school student in the late 1700s. Is it important to understand their economy? Their values? Their science? Currently, historians study all these things; you can’t do them all in a junior high school textbook, how about including students in the debate on what is most important. Ask the students: how do you evaluate a history book? Does the person have a point of view? How would you check their facts? What is fact, what is opinion, and where would you go if you wanted to read someone who was covering the same historical time period but had a different point of view? What are your college professors going to believe? What do you think junior high school students study in England? In Ghana? In China? Don’t teach history in a vaccum, regardless of your point of view, and we will have smart, thoughtful American citizens ready to face the challenges of the 21st century.
Or put another way: we have all these reality TV shows now, that take us backstage and show us how things are really done. Let’s not shelter our children from the fact that there’s a debate going on about curriculum. And, whomever “wins” or “loses” the culture wars, will not win nationwide. So also teach what it is that the other guys are going to be learning, and why, and how to evaluate sources, references, contexts, etc. Maybe this will bring history really alive for our kids and get them more involved– after all, there’s nothing like a good fight to interest adolescents!!
I am outraged but very impressed. Until very recently I had been a far left progressive on just about every issue one could think of and so I still experience somewhat of a knee-jerk emotional response to the characterization of teachers’ unions as “Marxist”. That being said, I have to say that you’ve done an excellent job of pointing out the contradictions and irrationalities inherent to both of these ideological agendas. I have to say that I would probably vote for a conservative like you in an election. I would much rather have people who disagree with me in office who are able to approach issues critically from multiple perspectives than officials who just happen to agree with me despite having oatmeal for brains.
That being said, it is not Marxist to teach Nash equilibrium models and game theory approaches to economics over the demonstrably flawed theories of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman on the right and Karl Marx on the left. Thriving ecosystems in nature balance competition with symbiosis and cooperation within stabilizing systems of checks and balances. If it is true (and it is) that economies operate according to the same patterns and principals as ecologies then it would only make sense to blend strategies of capitalism and socialism within a carefully articulated rule of law and regulation. Cooperation IS a competetive adaptation.
There are parts of society which thrive best through open competition such as technology, entertainment, and religion just as other parts of society such as primary education, the legal justice system, and first responders like fire departments can only function properly as well regulated public institutions. We don’t need ideology. We need rationality and reasoned debate. Thanks for doing your part with this article.
#119 affableman
You said: “Don’t like evolution? Then don’t get vaccinations. Viruses mutate, that means evolve. Logically if you get a flu vaccination you must believe in evolution because without it there wouldn’t be any flu vaccines. They simply cannot be developed without a firm understanding of evolution. One of the many reasons that biology as we know it has Darwinism as its’ base.”
You’ve only been told half the story, my friend. When viruses mutate, they usually_lose_information rather than gaining it. While this loss of information may have the positive effect of rendering the virus immune to a particular attack, it results in a less genetically diverse organism. (See my earlier post at #114 for similar comments about the genetic limitation of dog breeding.) For a fuller explanation of the science behind mutations and why they actually are evidence against evolution, see http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/wow/are-mutations-the-engine
#124 blackarrow
You said: “Hopefully at some point good sense will reign, but I am not holding my breath.
Witness the folks trying to “prove” there is no such thing as evolution in this forum.”
I agree that good sense should reign. But one of the requirements of good sense is to actually understand the arguments you are trying to refute. I read back through the comments (particularly mine at 82 and 114) to see if anyone was trying to “prove” there is no such thing as evolution. What I see from multiple posters is an attempt to point out the existence of unprovable faith in both the evolutionary world view and the creationist world view. Therefore, because evolution requires faith that the mechanisms which cause genetic change among dogs (which doesn’t require faith because science_can_prove it) can also change a squirrel to a bat (which_does_require faith because science cannot prove it), it is empirically impossible to disprove evolution.
I respectfully state that for you to assume that only creationists are exercising faith is to show you do not understand the points I and others are making. If you would like to make the point why your belief in evolution (i.e., life emerged from inanimate matter) does not require faith, I welcome the discussion, although I would prefer that you read posts 82 and 114 before weighing in.
Zombie, You really helped to make these issues more clear for me. Thank you. I am a conservative who believes in evolution (or the scientific method at least). I have had to teach the subject to my children outside of school where it is barely touched upon. And yet I deal with all the PC garbage the teachers dish out. Once my daughter got a little certificate for taking care of the classroom plants for the week. She handed it to me with a sneer, saying “I didn’t even do anything.” Kids aren’t stupid. They know when they deserve recognition and when they don’t. But they can be brainwashed into the false “everybody’s wonderful” philosophy.
Great satire — a communist conspiracy to take over America! Woo-hee!! The only thing missing is the Black Helicopters. :p
I loved the way the author, Zombie, kept saying what liberals believe — as tho he knows. All I can say, Thank Goodness I’m not a Liberal — I’d been worried that my libertarian belief that government should stay out of the doctor’s office and thusly abortion should be legal might get me called ‘the L-word.’
It was clever to include criticism — apt criticism, I add — of the Texas School Board, criticism which of course lead the reader to think the author was going to be fair and balanced.
And painting President Barack Obama as the head of the conspiracy was brilliant — using a 30-year-old “quote” without attribution — bravo! Our President is really a Muslim from Kenya, you know.
I criticize the author for not explicitly identifying his piece as satire. I shudder to think how many peeps took it seriously. You know, some peeps see a conspiracy everywhere.
The recommendations at the end in Part V were good — tho I think Part V should have been a separate essay to avoid the silliness of I-IV.
I would like to point out that home-schooling or private schools are already an option, Indeed, I went to a private school 30 years ago as my parents did not want me to go to school with black kids — a bogus reason, I know. But they scrimped, saved and sacrificed to pay the tuition but at least were honest about it — that is why I say the push for neighborhood schools today is dishonest: Those parents want segregated schools but are unwilling to pay for it.
My private school had one valedictorian, and ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’ were not bad words. Same today. No communism.
As for textbooks, I agree — there is no need for textbooks in todays info age. My U.S. History book ran out with LBJ in ’64, and the course itself ran out with WWII; my nephew’s book ran out with Reagan in ’82, and his course ran out with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The point being that there are other evils — ‘papers, TV, ‘nets — out there worse than textbooks.
As for ‘union-busting,’ my state has a ‘right-to-work’ law, non-union workers can be hired thusly ‘breaking’ unions — everybody should be so enlightened.
Anywho, gotta go. It’s time for our weekly meeting of us conspirators in the basement of the White House. I’ll tell Zombie “Hello” for you.
P.S.: If you didn’t “get it,” Zombie was making fun of you.
Yawn.
Maybe a 3.5 on the Troll Scale.
I offer praise, and you call me a name — Troll. So much for intelligent debate.
We should not have any statewide boards selecting textbooks, period. For an inside view of how such boards “work”, read Richard Feynman’s chapter about his experiences – back in the 60s. Public Choice Economics makes it obvious that politicization of schools naturally tends toward outcomes which are not the outcomes most desired by the parents and children, but by special interests with political power.