I have to respond to this story. about the Intelligent Design debate at the Dover School disctirct in Pennsylania.
The school board is not requiring teachers to teach creationism. Their new policy is requiring teachers to read a statement about intelligent design and sending them to read Of Pandas and People if they had further questions. The statement urges students to have an open mind, and to view the biological question of evolution from different angles? What's wrong with that? Last time I heard having an open mind was important. The greatest scientists of all time, Newton Galileo, and Einstein all thought outside the box. Under the view you have of how kids be taught, these youngsters will not have all their questions answered, and in fact would be scolded for asking questions that science cannot answer.
I am by no means a religious zealot. I am a Deist, and do not believe in a God of the Bible. I do, however, believe that through education, learning, and reason which includes personal contemplation we can become better people. Some peole say Brian Rehm was a great teacher. I say he is a horrible teacher who should have been fired. Lucky for his students he quit. He is so blinded by his own beliefs that any philosophy other than his is regarded as WRONG. He doesn't even want his students to be aware that there may be other approaches to why we are here.
And that is not encouraging students to think and learn. That is producing mind numb robots simply regurgitating a teacher.
As a fellow Deist, and a follower of Intelligent Design... No. Just no.
Of Pandas and People or whatever book or document will be forced on these children is wrong on the simple grounds that ID is pseudoscience. It cannot be documented correctly through either scientific method or a scientific journal (VERY important).
Keep an open mind? Fine. Where is my Odin class? How about alchemy? Please. There are plenty of cold hard facts to teach in school. IE will never be one of them. Hell, that's where half the fun of it comes from.
Posted by: Daniel Thorton at October 2, 2005 01:44 AMYou make very good points, but I see no reason to forbid someone from saying that during a science class that there may be explantions outside the realm of known science and that you can go to these books seeking an explanation on those viewpoints.
Posted by: Tom at October 3, 2005 04:04 PMRemember ID (GOD) was the box 40 years ago when I was in grade school. So thinking outside the box is not moving forward, it is moving backward into the dark black box that allowed my third grade teacher to tell our class that the world would soon end in a ball of fire because we didn't believe. ID is a clever descuise for religion. Remember the dark ages, they were the 1950's
Posted by: John at October 9, 2005 09:34 AMHow about a law requiring preaches to declare before sermons that everything in the Bible/Torah/Koran is myth, not fact, and that Christianity/Judaism/Islam are full of gaps and therefore should not be taken seriously? Oh, wait, that's interefering in the seperation of church and state, nothing at all like teaching creationism in schools.
Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at October 13, 2005 08:48 AM
