And he’s so getting spanked for this. He suggests that perhaps Texas isn’t doomed after all, because a significant majority of the Texas Board of Education has come out saying that they don’t want to remove evolution from the curriculum, and they don’t want to include Intelligent Design.
Unfortunately, what he’s missing is the fact that this is precisely the new strategy the Discovery Institute wants them to follow. They don’t want a repeat of the Dover trial, so they want schools to avoid pushing the button that will trigger one … in the next round of the creation wars, expect the tainted terms of creationism and ID to be carefully avoided, and “evolution” of a sort to be embraced. Their prior efforts were aimed at trying to take away the public schools’ delicious hot lunch program of slightly cheapened evolutionary biology, replacing it with tasteless bowls of hot air. Their new approach is to continue the hot lunch program, but to add shredded cow pie and syrup of ipecac to all of the food so the kids will not only avoid eating it, but will develop an aversion.
The Texas Board of Education is down with this program.
Expect them to start recommending the addition of the DI’s godawful new textbook, Explore Evolution, to the Texas curriculum any time now. McLeroy will stand up there all wide-eyed and innocent, protesting that he just wants to be fair and teach the strengths and weaknesses (the new code phrase) of evolution, all as his excuse to teach bad science to the kids.
You don’t have to take my word for it: Aaron Golas and Ed Darrell are saying the same thing.
Texas is doomed after all. Unless, of course, Texas citizens rise up and scream bloody murder at their board members and make it clear that they will evict supporters of bad biology at the next election.
And yet those of us who want to homeshool the children in our families because the schools are ridden with superstition and anti-intellectualism (forgive me if that was redundant)… we’re the weirdos according to the frequenters of this blog, and the government schools are the holy temples of secular knowledge, eh?
s/b “homeschool,” of course. I haven’t been the same since I gave up my morning coffee to preserve my remaining kidney. Arrgh.
Speedwell, you’re a weirdo.
Quoth the pot.
Sorry, but the majority of homeschooled kids are victims of their parents religious wankery. There may be a growing number of sane homeschoolers, but you are still in the minority.
What weaknesses of evolution? Are there known phenomena that evolutionary theory actually can’t address, as opposed to phenomena that we just don’t understand yet?
I’m not aware of any, but I’m not a biologist. PZ?
Prof Myers is a little behind the curve on this one. Dr. Plait has shifted his position in response to the spanking.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/08/27/texas-not-not-doomed/
Ugh… this is going to be even worse than the “Teach the Controversy” thing. They just keep thinking of new, more effective ways to brainwash children. Texas: still DOOMED.
He beat you to it, PZ! Self-correcting systems are a wonderful thing.
So is there some reason I’m not aware of why scienceblogs doesn’t simply append formatting termination tags to the end of every post? Seems like it would save a lot of hassle. :D
Speedwell, homeschooling for non religious reasons can be very rewarding to you and your children. My homeschooled daughter is a university junior, at a state university, on full scholarship. Homeschooling can be done and done well, but it is expensive.
Unfortunately PZ has trouble with closing tags.. =)
Grab that there renegade bold tag and wrassle it down boy.
Texas children are lost. A sad battle on this topic erupted in comments to an article about this on the San Angelo Standard Times website. Read it and weep: http://tinyurl.com/2hv3st
“…, and the government schools are the holy temples of secular knowledge, eh?”
Posted by: speedwell
Let me give you a hint – accusing others of religiously based lies fraud and bad faith is something that we’ve seen before. Oddly, the people using that technique seem to be mostly examples of Freudian projection.
Caledonian: Research by the guys at Pandas Thumb and antievolution.org has shown that the arguments in Exploring Evolution are the exact same stuff that creationists have been saying for years. There isn’t anything new in the book. They just stopped directly mentioning ID.
People, people, people. You just don’t understand. It’s no fun and kind of boring to say “Phil Plait was right!” It’s much more fun to trip the guy wandering around with his head in the clouds.
I’m an example of Freudian projection, now?
[blushes madly]
Does you wife know you feel that way?
“your”. I’m really batting 1000 today on typos. Sorry ’bout that. :)
Sorry, but the majority of homeschooled kids are victims of their parents religious wankery. There may be a growing number of sane homeschoolers, but you are still in the minority.
Decreasingly so, thankfully. My wife and I homeschool our four kids in Oklahoma City. We’ve managed to find a secular homeschooling organization or two in this area, which has been a Godsend (pun intended). Mind you, this is among a sea of homeschooling clubs where the leaders make you sign a “statement of faith” prior to joining. Ugh.
Those sneaky ID bastards.
I live in Texas and I have two kids in high school. I’m going to keep a close eye on this. I just hope I can get them through the system of obfuscation they call Texas public education with their reason still intact.
What’s missing from all this is that the same time Texas voted to
avoid incurring the wrath of the Supreme CourtNOT teach ID in the classroom, the state was passing the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination ActI blogged about it yesterday here.
So let me understand this … Phil posts an entry stating an opinion, then comes to a different conclusion after doing more research, changes his opinion and posts a new correction that is about 20 hours old and you still put him down for it?
*rolls eyes* if this is how scientists treat each other the battle is lost.
Oh, please. Phil and I are pals. This is our version of giving each other noogies.
I want to see you giving Phil a noogie on youtube.
PZ: “People, people, people. You just don’t understand. It’s no fun and kind of boring to say “Phil Plait was right!” It’s much more fun to trip the guy wandering around with his head in the clouds.”
AND, if deep down you know he’s right but you still want to “frame” him as being wrong, you can simply turn the title into a question: “Phil Plait, is he WRONG?”
religious folks are unfortunately more motivated to put up with the sacrifices necessary to homeschool. We are currently trying to figure out how to homeschool our grandchildren to give them a solid education here in KS. With a single Mom and two working grandparents its hard to work out the logistics. But we don’t figure we are going to hell if we don’t get it done.
Oh, PZ, you biologists — as usual — are a day late. Well, 22 hours in this case, as was pointed out. Your circadian rhythms must be off; you should stick with sidereal time.
As a recent Texas public school grad, I’d have to say that I evolution got fairly good treatment. It wasn’t explained with any particular enthusiasm, but we didn’t have any “alternative theories” offered to us other than a brief mention that “alternate theories exist”. Ours may have been an exception to the rule; we were a magnet school in a fairly liberal town. I would have to say that the greatest reason the kids didn’t learn evolution is that they come in predisposed by their parents and peers to dismiss it. I came in wanting to know more, but I was alone in that sentiment. Even if some people did find evolution credible, they wouldn’t speak up in front of the highly vocal disbelieving majority. I wanted to learn in more detail, and my teacher simply recommended I read some Richard Dawkins rather than waste any more class time on a unit that most students were resistant to and few truly understood or were interested in.
Here in Texas my son was amazed in his high school freshman Pre-AP Bio class when one girl insisted that human females have one more rib than males. She was shocked that it isn’t so, (and ergo that the Bible is “wrong”) and I am hopeful that she began questioning her sources when she was openly snickered and laughed at. I feel sorry for her, but she should be angry that her parents and other adults in her life set her up for that unpleasant learning experience.
Fortunately, the local university sends in bio profs to the high schools to explain carefully how evolution is documented and why intelligent design is not considered science. This action may not change minds immediately, but I am hopeful it opens some minds enough to begin asking questions.
My son will soon be out of the system, but I have nieces and nephews just beginning, so I will fight for them and others. Hey, I’m getting older and I want doctors, not witch doctors taking care of me in my old age.
If secular homeschoolers took but a fraction of the effort they put into screaming ‘we’re not fundies’ to anyone within range, and intstead channeled it into working to improve public schools, we’d be much better off as a country.
I suspect Phil might enjoy being spanked. Perhaps a more fitting punishment would be forcing him to listen to Bible readings for several hours…
stogoe– We are secular homeschoolers and I can assure you we have never screamed “we’re not fundies” once. It’s not something I’ve heard from the dozens of other secular families in our support group either. I don’t subscribe to the notion that our Industrialist-created, compulsory, archaic school system just needs to be “improved”. I’d like to see the entire thing scrapped and redone. So you can imagine, I don’t feel the need to direct any of my energies to a failed system.
You’re lucky. Here in Ohio I’ve seen precisely the same thing happen in a sophomore college class.
Sweet, gay Moses! It’s a scientist fight!
http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/08/the_bailey_case.php
I have bad news. Texas legislation changed the pledge of the state flag to say “one state under God.” I’ve refused to say the pledges for some time now, and this just strengthens my conviction.
Stogoe (#29).
I used to say the same thing. I cringe at the thought of how arrogant I sounded. When my oldest entered kindergarten I worked in her class several times a week. There was very little opportunity to do any “improvement” whatsoever and it was not in any way encouraged. Teachers are more than a little offended when some parent puts down the stapler and voices an idea (gasp!). Turns out that curriculum is pretty well set in stone and all that needs doing is keeping the kids in a sitting position long enough to receive it. Soon I was as bored as the kids and lost all interest in doing anything, positive or otherwise in the school system. I didn’t do well in the PTO thing either. I guess there is a place in grown up land where the weird social stuff that you learn in school can be used. It was free day care as far as I could tell and my kid was unlearning stuff that she knew from simply being alive before she started school. Please understand that I realize that there are great school systems out there and kids that do well in them. We were not in one of those systems.
Working to “improve” our school was miserable and defeated the whole purpose I had of giving my specific child a good education. I was not willing to sacrifice her while I beat my head against that wall. I wanted to spend time with my kid, not fighting endless battles. I have a lot of respect for those that are willing and able to do that but it just wasn’t for me. Homeschooling was great for us. It was a lot of work but I wouldn’t say it was any more expensive than sending a kid to school. We had the internet and the library and we did some lessons and tutors and even some classes at a private school. Now the oldest kid is starting her second year of running start and doing very well. She is quite comfortable in that environment.
Not all homeschoolers are fundy nuts. There is value in diversity.
BTW, evolution was never even brought up in any of my public high school classes (I took earth science, biology and chemistry) except once as an object of ridicule by the earth science teacher. I graduated in 81.
you mean, apart from the fact that sB seems to be written in PHP…?
(seriously, it should be a straightforward addition to the post-and-comment-parsing system that should already be there, to prevent other random bad input from causing havoc. run a suitably instrumented XML/HTML parser over the text, keep a stack of as-yet-unclosed opening tags seen, when you reach the end, pop the stack empty and create closing tags as appropriate. will also catch tags closed out of sequence and might even correct some of them.
should. but sB seems to be written in PHP, which certainly wouldn’t be my first choice for any system as large as it must be…)