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August 10, 2005

Kansas Board of Education Tentatively Approves Science "Standard"

Kansas has taken one further step to join Minnesota, Ohio and New Mexico in confusing their children about biology. This just off the press from Reuters :

After months of debate over science and religion, the Kansas Board of Education has tentatively approved new state science standards that weaken the role evolution plays in teaching about the origin of life.

John West, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, calls the decision "a great development ... for the academic freedom of students." It's also an attempt to backdoor creationism into the classroom, false protests to the contrary not withstanding. The real message is, "Let's teach ignorance as if it were knowledge."

The article itself is quite bad. It seems to offer up the Intelligent Design creationist slogans

with nearly no rebuttal. The first of these slogans is a misunderstanding of academic freedom. Is it academic freedom to teach known falsehoods? Of course not. The second is bad pedagogy at the lower levels of instruction. Students need a core knowledge before they can grasp the significant of "various viewpoints. In addition, applied to biology the idea is selective. Why not teach flat earth "theory" as a critique of contemporarily geography? Spending time discussing various non-scientific viewpoints is a waste of valuable science classroom time at any level. The last point is demonstrablely false. One paragraph stands out for special comment.

Intelligent design proposes that some features of the natural world are best explained as products of a considered intent as opposed to a process of natural selection.

Just one time I would like to read a single example of a "feature of the natural world" that is "best explained" as a product "of considered intent that has not already been debunked a dozen time. This article throws out the above statement without a single example or piece of evidence. Then, of course, there isn't any.

Posted by Duane Smith at August 10, 2005 1:30 PM | Read more on Evolution |

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