Non-science beliefs blind more states
http://www.theadvertiser.com/article/20120129/OPINION/201290324/Non-science-beliefs-blind-more-states?odyssey=nav%7CheadState politics probably will be dominated over the next few months by Gov. Bobby Jindal's plan to make public schools better. Teacher standards are getting tougher, tenure will be harder to get, seniority will count for much less, and Louisiana would be the nation's biggest experiment yet with publicly financed vouchers to pay for private schools.
Argue with the politics if you want, but it's a big solution for a big problem: Louisiana's lagging public school performance. Who's to say it isn't worth a shot?
Sadly, though, the Jindal reforms aren't Louisiana's only legacy to American public education. At the same time changes are being proposed to raise student achievement, other states are taking up measures enacted here that send could send science education back to the Stone Age. Provided, of course, you believe in the Stone Age.
The Louisiana Science Education Act, passed in 2008 and signed by the governor, encourages teachers to critique certain scientific thinking. Among the targets are climate change and evolution. The effect would be to put non-scientific responses to those ideas — like global warming denial and intelligent design — on a par with the real deal.
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We are so blessed!
Once an individual, young or old, grasps the philosophy of science and embraces it, chains of slavery shatter: they become free individual. That terrifying freedom of mind becomes theirs, along with its new and challenging picture of Creator, creator of quarks and galaxies, not bothered by the dancing of gay people in a nightclub somewhere, or any of the rest of the evangelical issues.
Nothing the right can do will change this fact in any meaningful way: This genie is out of the bottle, and will stay that way. Those who care to seek the real truth of this universe we live in will find they can, and they will find in this a truth far more satisfying than anything a political church can offer them. So join me: laugh at these clowns trying to limit science, their failure is transcribed in history as much as it is in the future. People are free to inquire into the nature of the creator as they choose.