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March 28, 2009
Analysis and Curriculum: Some Things Just Come First
Responding to additions to the Texas State Board of Education science standards, PZ Myers at Pharyngula says the following.
There are other obvious problems with those additions. High school students are expect to study all sides of scientific evidence? Really? I've been in the high schools. Texas students must be truly brilliant if they can master the whole of the scientific literature in a semester-long grade school level introductory course to biology.
The reason these changes are potentially so damning is that they are motivated by a desire to introduce pseudo-science into high school biology classes and pseudo-scientists can and will take advantage of them. But they are also laughable. A couple of simple substitutions in one of the approved additions will illustrate the reason that they are laughable. Try your own substitution with any of them. Here's my attempt.
analyze and evaluatescientificlinguistic explanations concerning the complexity ofthe cellHebrew vocabulary.
Would this make any since at all in a first year Hebrew class? If you're not sure, take a look at my post from yesterday and tell me how many first year Hebrew students could even understand it, much less analyze and evaluate it. A teacher might, in passing, explain the complexity of the origin of certain Hebrew words, but he or she certainly wouldn't (and couldn't) expect students to be able to "analyze and evaluate" those explanations. The very thought is crazy. I think knowing Ugaritic and Akkadian is important to understanding Hebrew. But one can get an extremely good grasp of the language without either of them 
. People did understand Biblical Hebrew pretty darn well before 1929 and even before 1857. First year Hebrew students sure don't need to know either of them but under my revised "standard" they certainly would. While my analogy is not perfect, no analogy ever is, the background knowledge required to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell" is of the same order of difficulty as that required to analyze and evaluate explanations of the origins of Hebrew vocabulary.
Please read all of PZ' post as well as Jerry Coyne's post at Why Evolution is True and Gordy Slack's Salon piece. I'm sure there will be a lot more on this.
Posted by Duane Smith at March 28, 2009 9:36 AM | Read more on Current Events |
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