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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.
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.
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"
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
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.
Those trillion dollar 'deficits' are also a distraction, to justify austerity. It's the quadrillion dollar derivatives markets that will destroy your economies. Your political elites are merely servant to Wall Street banking elites.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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
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.