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Creationism In Texas Public Schools
An anonymous reader writes "Slate reports on new anti-science education coming out of Texas. The state has a charter school system called Responsive Education Solutions, which is publicly funded. Unfortunately, 'it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.' The biology workbook used in these schools actually reads, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." It also brings up social Darwinism as if it's an aspect of evolutionary theory and introduces doubt that the Earth is billions of years old. The article continues, 'To get around court rulings, Responsive Ed and other creationists resort to rhetoric about teaching "all sides" of "competing theories" and claiming that this approach promotes "critical thinking." In response to a question about whether Responsive Ed teaches creationism, its vice president of academic affairs, Rosalinda Gonzalez, told me that the curriculum "teaches evolution, noting, but not exploring, the existence of competing theories."' Other so-called education texts being used by the Responsive Ed program teach Western superiority and how feminism forced women to 'turn to the state as a surrogate husband.'"
Shouldn't the opening of the Biology workbook alone be enough to get this squashed?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm fine with that. Teach that the vast overwhelming majority of the world's scientists support the theory of evolution by natural selection, a handful of people support intelligent design, and millions more support unintelligent design, the theory that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. (Disclaimer: I am an ordained Pastafarian Minister)
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
These schools are also in Arkansas and Indiana.
Other so-called education texts being used by the Responsive Ed program teach Western superiority and how feminism forced women to 'turn to the state as a surrogate husband."
It brings up a whole new connotation when they say "fuck the state"!
It also brings up social Darwinism as if it's an aspect of evolutionary theory
Actually, Social Darwinism is the one kind of Darwinism your typical Creationist is happy to believe whole-heartedly in. If you start believing the poor might not necessarily deserve to be poor, a whole lot of modern Republican politics suddenly starts to look very unchristian.
Because the laws of economics suggest more productive members of society increase supply for goods a little more than they increase demand for them, and thus benefit everyone?
Why look at trillion dollar deficits that are destroying the economy, widespread graft and corruption in our political elites, or ongoing job losses in America when when can talk about the Westborough Baptist Church or a Hispanic stranger shooting a black stranger or a creationist school somewhere in Texas?
Let's manufacture distractions to keep you from looking at the real issues...
Tornado touches down and vaporizes the Responsive Ed corporate headquaters. No hands were lost, but several people were struck by flying Stop signs.
Maybe it's because we fire 10% of our engineers in a year, but claim there's a shortage. There's multiple things going on here in the U.S. but mostly we haven't come to terms with being a post-industrial society.
kinda scary unless you want to create a lot of drones
Here's the problem. We think we're dumb too, and can't do anything about it.
The understanding that Genesis is a metaphorical, and not literal, goes as far back as the 4th century (even further, possibly, that is just what am aware of explicitly from my early church history studies). Protestantism is very recent compared to that, and this protestant misinterpretation of scripture as being literal is more recent still.
A bunch of relatively uneducated Christians cooked up this weird and grossly simplistic way of reading scripture, and it has become wildly popular, and gives the entire religion a bad name. :(
It's not a question of whether the science can withstand it, it's a question of whether the students will be properly educated. The science of combustion would survive a course that was split 50/50 between modern chemistry and phlogiston theory, but I don't think the children's usefulness as future scientists would escape the process intact.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Right, but the concern is for the people who enjoy science and have some intent of being useful members of society and are going to be denied the opportunity to learn in order to protect some peoples' biases from information they disagree with.
I wonder how hard it would be to get them to teach about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Hell, I would enroll in that class!
It's not a "theories on how the universe and life began class", though, it's a "biology" class. If you want to teach kids ontology, then by all means advocate the creation of a class for that purpose, but don't try to craft one out of the existing and important lessons on the science of living things.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Troll. Creationism isn't falsifiable. Bam, done.
Creationism is not a scientific theory, and thus is also not a competing scientific theory. If you really think that 'science' cannot "withstand alternative theories", then you really don't know anything about science at all.
This story is not about textbook selection, but textbook selection is the primary viral decay effect that Texas has on national education, and it is very important.
The problem with Texas textbook selection is that Texas buys its textbooks 4.8m at a time (which is a huge chunk of the textbook market). Publishers cannot afford to lose Texas as a customer, so you get "the walmart effect" - Texas censors national textbooks by approving the one they like, everyone else can pick from the one texas drove the price down on, or they can pay twice as much for a "marginally more correct" textbook. In this way, Texas can dictate the behavior of national (and even international, to an extent) textbooks, because Texas is giant, organized, and horribly corrupted by the religious reich err, right.
The issue with pubically funded charter schools teaching bullshit mysticism instead of educating children is that charter schools are a convenient back door for this anti-science, conservative consortium to exert its corrupting influence on the texas education system. They are normalizing, perpetuating, and setting legal precident for further fucking over the entire United States education system.
Please care about this. This is important. Our future depends on the nation collectively saying "WTF, Texas"
This is why America is in decline.
Because drooling morons and Luddites are being allowed to teach their nut-job theories on the same footing as actual science.
America continues on the decline to voluntary ignorance, and this is little better than the Taliban -- a bunch of religious fundamentalists who can't accept reality as it exists, but wish to impose their beliefs on it and define it as true.
Fuck you, fuck your god, fuck your stupid notions about how the world works, and fuck your creationism.
That these people hold political office and somehow function in the real world astounds me.
Because this level of stupidity should have caused you to be killed before surviving to adulthood.
Fucking morons. The rest of the country suffers because you guys are fucking idiots.
Publicly funded charter schools, as is says right there in the damn summary. Public funding for any religious instruction is illegal, and for extremely good reasons. Every culture in history that went down that path ended up collectively insane and wildly dangerous.
I think you're underestimating how much funding is being channeled away from public schools to fund charter schools, with the "dumping money on public schools doesn't solve problems, dumping money on charter schools does." initiative.
It's actually the one thing that makes me leery of the Gates foundation, who normally does good work.
Additionally, are they teaching ALL religions' creation theories or just their own little Christian one? I mean, if they gave equal time to Muslim stories of creation, and mentioned people by their Arabic names, then sure, it wouldn't bother me nearly as much and might actually hold up to the "all competing *beliefs*", *not* "theories". Oh, I'm sorry, they'd never teach anything about those "Ay-rabs" or ... (That's the single most effective way to quash this - give them what they want but require they give equal time to beliefs that they don't believe in. It'll bring out their true colors faster than putting a brand new red shirt in a load of white laundry...)
A lecture on natural law would have been out of place and unhelpful to the faithful for the following 5,000 years; the message was simply "I, God, made you and this world."
The fact that this short message was stretched out to a seven-day process in no way makes it literal. The specifics of creation were not the point, and would have been lost on those folks; so it was omitted. Those same young earth creationists must believe that the God of Abraham has a bit of Loki the Norse Trickster god in him, given that there is so much physical evidence contradicting a 6,000 year old earth. Either that, or they must believe that there's a massive satanic conspiracy to invent evidence for an earth billions of years old, an equally preposterous claim.
Religion gives us the 'Why' of life; science is the 'How.' They cannot serve each other's purposes.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
There are many theories on how the universe and life began.
This article is about evolution. Evolutionary theory is silent on how life first began. Read up a little before you weigh in with such a huge misconception. Here, take a look at this; it includes a cartoon to clarify the point.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/misconceps/IAorigintheory.shtml
They can do that with their own private money then, and not receive money from the state for such things. That's the single biggest problem with this being a violation of the 1st amendment.
Charter Schools are typically funded via public money. So while they are not public in that they can pick and choose who they let in, they are public in the sense that they are publicly funded.
To me this is a clear violation of the seperation of church and state. If these were private schools it would be completely different, but charter schools are not private schools.
Scientific Theory: Something that describes the current state of the world in a way that makes testable predictions about the future. Useful in furthering our knowledge. Should be taught in science classes.
Colloquial "Theory": Any explanation that potentially describes the current state of the world. Not testable. Makes no predictions about the future. Potentially useful in exploring moral or ethical quandaries. Should be taught in philosophy classes.
Please learn the difference. Teach creationism if you want, I don't give a rat's ass. But don't teach it in a science classroom. It is not science. It never will be science.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Err, do you have any specific objections or are you just waving your hands at the article and going "douuuuuuubt iiiiiiiiiiiit"?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Because you have to live in country where someone who believes Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs will have the same say in the running of the country as you?
It's a good question, though. I never thought about the reason plutocracy has made common cause with religious fundamentalism before, but it's apparent that's because science is more difficult to co-opt than public opinion. A world where science is demoted to "just another opinion" looks like level playing field, but it's not, because it forces science to debate on religions terms, namely emotional appeal rather than evidence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Probably because it's not easy legally to fire an H1B before their visa time is up.
Opens the company to more lawsuits, and requires them to pay for the trip home.
http://www.murthy.com/2012/11/01/bona-fide-termination-requirement-for-h1b-employee/
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
That style of argumentation is called denialism.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm not aware of any scientific (falsifiable) explanation for how species came to be the way they are other than evolution. Also, the book states as fact that God created the world. It's obviously introducing religion into a science textbook, which is completely different from describing competing alternative scientific hypotheses.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
"Yeah, just get both parents to get new jobs in the same place, sell a house, buy a house, get children into a new school system, and go through the physical hassle of moving, just so some po-dunct theocrat can have their way, ignoring the law of the land"
Do you know how stupid what you're proposing sounds?
How does Texas prepare students for Med School? Do they finally start teaching science when a student is in college or do they have to leave the state completely?
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household, and while it took a while to shake off the emotional baggage associated with such an upbringing, I am now a productive member of society and opponent of creationism being taught on the tax payer's dollar. While one's beliefs are likely to be influenced by their parents', each individual still has the ability to form their own belief system, and I chose science and reason.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
I remember during one of the Bush 2 nationally televised debates; All of the Republican hopefuls were on stage and the question was asked “do you believe in evolution” – not a single one on stage raised their hand. It’s a sad state when the leader of the free world can’t have a foundation in science or critical thinking as a prerequisite to the job. There is not one single example in the history of mankind of a successful theocracy. The evidence tends to point to the exact opposite – the increase of religion leads to the downfall of any given society.
Amen, well maybe not. I grew up in the same sort of household and was likely the bane of my middle school teacher's existence as I was basically a proxy for my parent's beliefs in my argument against evolution. It wasn't until college that I finally opened up enough to be fully deprogrammed. I paid my penance by teaching evolutionary anthropology in Texas, but even among the undergrads there I suspect that I wasn't able to convert as many as I could.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
“If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
– St. Augustine of Hippo, 5th Century AD (considered by some Protestants to be one of the theological fathers of the Reformation)
(from http://truecreation.info/)
Funding or otherwise supporting a religion is understood to fall under the establishment clause. So when you fund something, or let it use your property, or otherwise enable it you are establishing it. The issues with this particular school is that it is publicly funded. There are many, many private, religious schools out there that teach all kinds of viewpoints including creationism that comply with one or more religious traditions. These are not in question, it is only the ones being funded by the government that are being looked at askance. If you choose to go against any number of supreme court decisions and take a very narrow view of the meaning of the word establishment to be a strict synonym with found or start it would allow the government to effectively promote a state religion by sending it unlimited funds. BTW, when you are reading about similar issues you will see the 'establishment clause' referenced. This is what they are talking about, saying that whatever the government is doing is supporting, funding, or otherwise establishing a religion in violation of the constitution.
I'd like to point out a few things that might give some of y'all hope this year...
* Open election November 2014. Perry is stepping down. State Sen. Wendy Davis (D), is running and has a lot of momentum behind her on this! Yes, she's riding her 15 minutes, but that doesn't mean it won't work!
* Texas Board of Education Commisioner is appointed by the Governor. The present Commisioner was former head of the Texas Railroad Comission ( what does that tell you???)
* The Democratic party has grown considerably in last 2 decades, and with an open election on the plate, they are getting very good funding for this run.
The Republicans in Texas have really done such a number on minorities and women that there is a very strong chance a Democrat, Davis, will win. If that happens, Texas Board of Ed. Commisioner is out! And THAT, is what gives me hope when it comes to the absurdity of creationism even being mentioned with science or in schools.
What you have to understand though, is that the Dem's and Repub's are the same party as what's in the rest of the US, but they really aren't. Texas is it's own battle ground of a country. The parties are connected, but in a very different way. So much is in play in Texas, that D/R(TX) really does not equal D/R(any other state). They're similar, but far from the same.
Of course it's falsifiable. If we saw new species being created that were genetically quite unlike anything else we've every seen, that would falsify the idea that new species gradually evolve. But whenever we observe the changes between generations of organisms, we find that there are a relative handful of mutations which appear to be random, as the theory of evolution predicts.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You are being childish, vapant, and cowardly. Texas is one of the most successful of states part of 'Real America', with minimal threats to freedom coming from the state, inexpensive land, lots of economic opportunity in the technology and defense industries, a rugged individualist culture, many things to love, but your infinitely wise suggestion is to pick up and leave because of one downside instead of working to change it?
I don't even know why you wasted post-space with that crap.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I said that creationism in texas public schools is the will of the people, and if you truly believe in the philosophy of "representative" government, then you will accept that government is working exactly as planned.
So if I came in and started pushing schools to teach the Pastafarian creation myth, and I managed to get enough people backing me such that we represented the majority of the nation, you would be completely ok with that? Because it seems to me that that would be a gross violation of everyone elses First Amendment rights. But that is exactly what is happening here, just with a different creation myth.
Opposing the violation of certain fundamental rights is not "I gladly accept the will of the people, as long as I'm on the winning team".
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Because when these people graduate, they become our peers in society. They become the people on your jury, they become the people that vote in our elections, and they become the people who end up brainwashing the rest of society.
who do this shit!
It's important to note that right now in US politics one party is completely and totally against the concept of scientific inquiry putting Newspeak-like religious rhetoric above all else.
There is no 'but the Democrats...' counterpoint on this...it's ALWAYS REPUBLICANS. It doesn't make the Democrat/Liberals better in some long-term philosophical way at all, but it forces a choice in a real-world context that alot of /.'ers can't mentally make.
I can't stress how important it is when placing blame to see past false dichotomies & historicity filled narratives to understand what these people who run our country *actually do*...and when you look it that way, the GOP are the enemy of society.
As someone pointed out below, the Texas system has a check/balance against this, but AGAIN, the person in that decision node is a REPUBLICAN and they do not operate as individual decision makers weighing options.
The GOP is a cadre of ignorance, working in rabid lockstep to kiss up to whatever money interest is telling them to on any particular day...this time its the religious conservatives anti-science people.
It's ok to just blame one party when they are truly at fault. Decide they are at fault and vote appropriately. The US system has been corrupted but the prinicples of it are sound if we **use** our democracy to it's full power.
Thank you Dave Raggett
What kind of government have you given us?
A republic, sir, if you can keep it.
This is not a mob rule democracy. We have a Constitution for a reason. Minorities do have value in this country, and we should all fight to keep it so, because we are all in one way or another a minority, whether by race, creed, or just in our simple individuality.
A wrong thing believed by most is not made right by its popularity.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
There's a historical analogy to all this going on: Until the rennaissance, the middle east was vastly more advanced than the West (it had medicine, mathematics and so on that just weren't known in the west until scholars studied there). Arabic was the language of trade, commerce and learning during the centuries of its pre-eminence as a cultural and scholarly center.
People would come from all areas of the 'civilised world' (this didn't really include Europe at this point, apart from maybe Italy) to study.
The problems arose with the ascendancy of a faction (Asharite) which was distinctly anti-rationalist. It gained increasing popularity over the Mutazilite faction (which had led the Islamic world to scientific ascendancy over centuries, epousing the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, and following in those traditions).
As the power of the Asharites grew, scientific advancement in the middle east stagnated, and eventually it became a crime to copy philosophical texts, as they were an abhorrence in the eyes of God. These sins would eventually be punishable by executions, and the candle of scientific advancement was effectively snuffed out.
Compare this to today. From England grew a large empire (comparable effectively with the Islamic Caliphate) crossing many countries, and being quite the center of learning. People came from all over to study in England. This Empire has been largely disbanded, but the strings of learning have still carried on beyond it.
Over the last hundred years or so, the power and center of effective empire has shifted to America as the rationalist factions invested in learning, keeping church and state separate (as the founders would probably have been painfully aware of the problems of allowing them to merge), and ensuring minds could be kept open, and difficult questions asked.
However, there's now a growing push towards anti-rationalism. It hides itself within the main power structure, and has permeated the political strata to a huge extent (I believe the parts of the national pledge that mention god were only included in the 50s or 60s, never having been present before then), and seems to be getting ever more powerful. Parts of the population (and I've met them on travels) consider it taboo to "Trust science" as it's all God's Will. Exactly analogous to the Asharite faction of a thousand years ago.
We know what happens if that faction gains ascendancy. Scientific tradition fails, as being an intellectual makes you a threat to the religious theocrats, and they're very good at getting rid of threats, and making it 'acceptable', even desirable that these people are removed.
Arabic ceased to be the language of trade and learning once the Asharites gained ascendancy and the Islamic world was in their grip. They were overtaken by the West, which had learned from their teaching earlier, and took on the torch passed to them by the Greeks even earlier.
Nowadays, China is investing massively in education, and particularly science; their technological base has caught up with the Western World at a furious pace. This, quite possibly, is a saving grace; it means that there are definitely alternatives to keep learning alive, just in case the anti-rationalists that are gaining traction in America manage to topple it from within. It would likely mean that the language of trade and learning becomes Chinese, but hey, the world can survive that quite easily.
I guess we see if history does indeed repeat itself, or whether humanity, as a species, has got any brighter since the last time this rise and fall happened.
I never understood why California didn't exercise as much, if not more, power?
Native Texan here, 42 years old, I can say this is 100% accurate and I am thoroughly disgusted with my state. They are not trying to remove the separation of church and state, they have obliterated it altogether. You may have to live here to understand how bad the far right-wing fundies have wormed their way in to every aspect of social life here in TX, but you won't have to live here for long to get it. Pushing the religious ideologies, through the use of law, is alive and well in TX. In 2010, lobbyists spent 43 million dollars on Ideological/single issues, and that is just what is accounted for. When I visit my dentist, they have a certain hygienist that thinks she is being coy, and without fail, pings me about my beliefs... best answer is no answer. Fortunately, you can spot a fundie pretty easy... they usually have anti-abortion and gospel radio bumper stickers, right beside a Jesus fish or two. Not only are these people on the board of education slowly deleting history, they are proud and smiling about it. They believe it is a real accomplishment that they have made for the citizens of Texas, and they absolutely understand the impact it has on the rest of the nations textbook purchases. I tried to find the picture that was snapped as they voted on a certain science textbook a few years ago, it was almost unanimous, and you could see the shit-eating grins on their faces. Just disgusting, and the ignorance runs rampant. Folks, their is a reason TX ranks 50th in a couple of key areas. Number of minimum wage jobs and number of citizens without health insurance.
>realize that very close to half of the country is not in lock-step with social liberalism.
Yes, we have a ton of ignorant social conservatives in poorer, less educated parts of the country, and they do stupid things like claiming that feminism has caused greater dependence on public welfare, while glossing over the alternative of women staying with terrible men who dominate and abuse them.
I don't think we should ever let these stupid, superstitious people take the lead again. Awful, constantly lying, religious authoritarians are finally being marginalized after a terrible history of letting them get their way.
If they want to teach creationism in science class, there should also be a requirement to teach 'alternative' religions in their churches. Just imagine how rabid they'd get if we required their Sunday schools to include Islam and Hinduism... would be totally worth it since it would reveal these people for what they are - violent, bigoted assholes.