When Intelig. Design-infused teaching leads to costly lawsuits filed by

[henslee]

pissed parents, will Bush and cohorts ease up?

[ladjf]

1. ID cannot be taught as a subject because the total body of

information on the subject of ID can be discoursed completely in less than 20 minutes. There could be no textbooks, no testable theories, nothing. ID is merely a theological assumption based in a hunch.

[henslee]

2. Maybe not taught. but a subject could be consistently laced with reminders

and references. And I don't doubt that it already is.

[punpirate]

3. Au contraire...

... I have seen science textbooks for home schooling which have elements of creationism laced throughout them. You won't see but a chapter or two right now on the debate of the "scientific" merits of ID in high school texts, but in the lower grades, such will be spread throughout the texts as "compare and contrast" sections and topics for discussion.

I should stress that this is not a new push. There was a fellow named Kelly Seagrave who, in 1980, sued the state of California to have creationism included in the curriculum. Why? He was a Christian textbook publisher who had a complete line of texts ready for introduction.

Cheers.

[ladjf]

4. What elements? All they can do is repeat their mantra that

intelligent design happened. Student will respond naturally as they realize that every sentence about ID has no real meaning and it's presence is there for political not scientific reasons.

[punpirate]

5. Tell you what...

... you teach school for a while, do textbook reviews, etc., and get back to me.

Believe me--every element of a science text has been covered in these previous texts I mentioned from the Biblical point of view.

Young students don't automatically challenge this stuff. They learn it and repeat it--that is precisely why there are so many people who believe this shit in the first place. A 2001 Gallup poll asked--"Would you say that you believe more the theory of evolution or the theory of creationism to explain the origin of human beings, or are you unsure"--the respective results were 28 percent, 48 percent, and 14 percent, with 10 percent saying they didn't know.

That's the result of religious indoctrination, to some degree, to inadequate science education, to some degree, but that poll was taken in an environment in which intelligent design wasn't being taught in the public schools at all.

The very important point, which I think you are missing here, is that for young children, the information being in their textbooks legitimizes it for them. That's the principal source for their school knowledge. Yes, as they grow older and gain more knowledge, they might challenge it on their own. But the attempt to include intelligent design (which is equivalent to saying postmodern creationism) in the curriculum is to legitimize it as a branch of science worthy of being taught as such, even though it is not science.

You can argue that the student will recognize the political nature of it instinctively. The polling data of adults--without this being taught in the school at this time--suggests otherwise.

Cheers.

[ladjf]

6. I been a teacher for 35 yrs, elementary, jr high, high school

and University. Ed.D.

The point I'm trying to get across is that ID is so weak that I don't think it will have any serious impact on the school children.
Elementary students are studying evolution in any serious way. For the most part, serious consideration about how species evolved, aren't taken up unit college and even then unless the major is science it isn't covered in depth.

Further, there is nothing more self-evident than the process of Evolution. It is happening every second of every day to everything that exists. It doesn't make any difference if some of the rw students walk around chanting ID, ID because is is a hollow thought.

Nothing could be more stupid than to force public schools to chant
superstitions dogma such as ID. But, on balance, I think many are too worried about the negative fallout. The human race can only afford to be stupid to a degree. When it goes beyond that, it jeopardizes survival. I'm saying that if people are intent upon living their lives according to baseless superstition (1) there's nothing you can do about it and (2) in the end they will perish. That's the way Evolution works. The human brain will have been too flawed to survive.

We are on the same side basically. We don't want our children misled
by superstitious garbage.