There is a good question--how to recruit elementary and high school teachers capable of teaching philosophy and evolution. There are things that could be done--like paying good teachers in proportion to the actual value they contribute to society--but when you compare the median income of elementary teachers and lawyers you realize we have a long way to go to achieve this.
In the end, I conclude that it just isn't possible to have a truly pluralist elementary educational system in which different philosophical positions are contrasted. The kids are not yet able to deal with fundamentally conflicting assumptions about what is true. The real solution is going to have to be to break up the public school monopoly and allow different elementary schools to teach within different philosophical systems. In high school, a pluralist system seems conceivable. Ironically, it is at the college level that a pluralist environmnet is most educationally benefical, and this is the one setting in which the American systems encourages choice between institutions with differing ideologies.
Actually the language of a wall separating church and state goes back to Jefferson and probably before, although it is not in the constitution (it is "establishment of religion" there)--however I do agree that fundamentally it is a bad distinction. How are we ever to decide which beliefs should be allowed to influence state decisions? What if someone imposed separation of environmentalism and state? In the end we have to come up with a pluralism that let's all beliefs participate in the operations of the state equally.
The real reason this debate becomes so vitriolic is that the main interesting questions are philosophical ones. Claiming that intelligent design is parallel to experimental science is clearly wrong-headed--but claiming that science has established the fact that living organisms developed from non-living material is just as wrong headed. We don't have any clear ideas how this might have occurred--it is simply required for a certain philosophical position to be consistent and so it is believed to have happened.
I can not see any way to run a high school science class on evolution without bringing up some of these essentially philosophical and religious questions, hence there is no way these issues can be just a personal and private thing. Most of the reason students are interested in evolution is because of its philosophical implications for the question of who we are and where we came from. So why not discuss intelligent design and contrast it with other philosophical positions about the meaning of life rather than contrast it with evolutionary science.
There is no way to separate a scientific theory from its philosophical underpinnings--that is a major conclusion of the last 50 years of philosophy of science. As long as we scientists continue to proclaim that evolutionary theory can be taught without discussing the various philosophical positions related to it, we leave ourselves wide open to a very reasonable attack by the "fundies"--that this is just imposing the established philosphy or religion--and they will keep responding by trying to impose their own philosophy and religion.
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There is a good question--how to recruit elementary and high school teachers capable of teaching philosophy and evolution. There are things that could be done--like paying good teachers in proportion to the actual value they contribute to society--but when you compare the median income of elementary teachers and lawyers you realize we have a long way to go to achieve this. In the end, I conclude that it just isn't possible to have a truly pluralist elementary educational system in which different philosophical positions are contrasted. The kids are not yet able to deal with fundamentally conflicting assumptions about what is true. The real solution is going to have to be to break up the public school monopoly and allow different elementary schools to teach within different philosophical systems. In high school, a pluralist system seems conceivable. Ironically, it is at the college level that a pluralist environmnet is most educationally benefical, and this is the one setting in which the American systems encourages choice between institutions with differing ideologies.
Actually the language of a wall separating church and state goes back to Jefferson and probably before, although it is not in the constitution (it is "establishment of religion" there)--however I do agree that fundamentally it is a bad distinction. How are we ever to decide which beliefs should be allowed to influence state decisions? What if someone imposed separation of environmentalism and state? In the end we have to come up with a pluralism that let's all beliefs participate in the operations of the state equally.
The real reason this debate becomes so vitriolic is that the main interesting questions are philosophical ones. Claiming that intelligent design is parallel to experimental science is clearly wrong-headed--but claiming that science has established the fact that living organisms developed from non-living material is just as wrong headed. We don't have any clear ideas how this might have occurred--it is simply required for a certain philosophical position to be consistent and so it is believed to have happened. I can not see any way to run a high school science class on evolution without bringing up some of these essentially philosophical and religious questions, hence there is no way these issues can be just a personal and private thing. Most of the reason students are interested in evolution is because of its philosophical implications for the question of who we are and where we came from. So why not discuss intelligent design and contrast it with other philosophical positions about the meaning of life rather than contrast it with evolutionary science. There is no way to separate a scientific theory from its philosophical underpinnings--that is a major conclusion of the last 50 years of philosophy of science. As long as we scientists continue to proclaim that evolutionary theory can be taught without discussing the various philosophical positions related to it, we leave ourselves wide open to a very reasonable attack by the "fundies"--that this is just imposing the established philosphy or religion--and they will keep responding by trying to impose their own philosophy and religion.