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Freedom of Information Requests Turn Up Creationist Materials In Schools
An anonymous reader writes: In 2008, Louisiana passed a law that was designed to let teachers introduce creationism into public classrooms alongside evolution. Zack Kopplin, a student at the time, decided to fight the law by sending Freedom Of Information Act requests to the schools, asking for anything mentioning creationism or the law itself. While most ignore him, he has received documents showing a clear anti-science stance from school officials. "In one, which appears to contain a set of PowerPoint slides, there's a page titled "Creationism (Intelligent Design)" that refers students to the Answers in Genesis website, along with two other sites that are critical of that group's position. In another, a parent's complaint about a teacher who presents evolution as a fact is met by a principal stating that 'I can assure you this will not happen again.'"
No, the actual problem is that the public school system forces government to make decisions about what is true and what is false. Sometimes government gets it right and sometimes government gets it wrong. Eugenics, forced sterilizations, and racism weren't just widely practiced in the US and Europe, they were justified with scientific results and taught as science in public schools. In particular, many public school textbooks in the US were profoundly racist. Although the goal of having an educated public is a good one, public schools and state-mandated curricula are an instrument of political indoctrination for the ruling classes. In 19th century Germany, for example, the state nationalized Catholic schools because it didn't like what they taught.
It is far better not to seek one absolute truth that government should teach through the school system, but to let parents make their own decisions. Parents will also sometimes get it wrong (as in the case of fundamentalist Christians choosing to teach creationism), but a minority teaching their kids stupid things is less harmful than a government, subject to lobbying and political pressures, imposing a curriculum on an entire state or the nation.