I heard this idea getting kicked around somewhere, can’t remember where, but what if all of the, say, Ivy League schools, or all the really good tech schools like MIT, made it a condition for admission that you have a decent science education that does not include intelligent design? For example, if the good citizens of Dover had not taken their chances with divine retribution and voted out the crazies on the school board, and the ruling in that case had been appealed to the Supreme Court, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the Roberts court overthrowing the decision of the district court and allowing intelligent design.
Say that happens in Kansas, and they get what they want and evolution is gone or watered down or presented as “just a theory” or whatever. And then the Ivy League schools say that since admission to their schools requires a basic grounding in science, nobody from Kansas need apply (unless they went to a Catholic or other private school where evolution is taught.) And then if MIT and CalTech and a bunch of others followed suit, would that be enough to get the Kansas crazies to change their tune?
Is there any reason why a private college could not do this? What about a public school, like a Big 10 school?
Quite the opposite. It is possible to teach yourself. My daughter’s AP history book (and teacher) were terrible, but she good a good history of the US, read it, and did fine on the AP test. A kid who taught himself evolution, even in a school district which taught ID, would be a kid I’d want at MIT.
If I were doing interviews I might indeed ask about this. But it’s wrong to condemn kids for the stupidities of the board of education in certain years.
Remember that in Dover both the teachers and parents revolted, so it is not clear that kids ever got miseducated. In fact, some might be more aware of the correctness of evolution than kids in my district, where it is not an issue, and where ID would never be taught.
Even if that worked, it sounds like a lot kids would fucked out of an Ivy League degree just for the bad luck of being schooled in Kansas, which is no choice of their own, before Kansas made any changes.
Why exclude students who were taught ID? If you’re going to go that way, shouldn’t you just be excluding those who had no education in evolution? It’s possible to have learned about both; I don’t know what someone who has been taught both theories should be punished.
For the record, I don’t think ID should be part of a secular school curriculum; and evolution certainly should. But it doesn’t make sense to discriminate someone who’s learned ID if they are also sufficiently educated in evolution.
In fact, it’s probably better for them to know ID – in order to be able to more skillfully refute it.
My motivation would not be to fuck good, smart kids out of an Ivy League education, or to hold them responsible for the bullshit decisions of some crazy fundies. I agree that those would be Bad Things.
I don’t think that the colleges would ever have to exclude a single student. I think they could announce that in four years, their admissions standards would change, and the outcry in Kansas would be so great that the school officials would either change their minds or get voted out very quickly. That would be my hope anyway. My intention in proposing this was not to exclude any kids from good colleges, only to get Kansans to teach good science.
I don’t know what science classes everyone here took in High School, but I’ve always found this issue to be extremely scrutinized when it’s only a very small part of most High School curriculum I’m familiar with.
IME it’s a small part of most High Schoolers basic science education. An enormous amount of focus is given to basic facts about cells, cellular reproduction and et cetera, and also human anatomy. But evolution is usually only a small part of a single unit or so, going further into it isn’t something I hear of very often in standard high school science classes.
I’m primarily familiar with high school programs which are geared towards preparing students for general admissions into a college. Just speaking locally I know that it requires two semesters minimum of science courses (which usually includes a sophomore general science course which covers in brief a wide range of topics and a course focusing exclusively on chemistry the year after.) While some students opt to take more advanced courses like anatomy, second-year chemistry, AP chem, physics, AP physics and et cetera, I’ve never heard of any of that being required for admissions into a university.
This is from the University of Virginia’s admissions page (UVA is considered one of the top-tier public universities in the country):
That seems pretty reasonable to me. It’s asinine to punish students for where they grew up or who was on the school board which they were too young to even vote for or against. Some students here in America grow up in impoverished school districts with run-down schools that can barely teach people to read. The students from those schools who actually qualify to get into the good schools shouldn’t be particularly discriminated against because of circumstances out of their control.
This desire to “slap creationists in the face” is misdirected and aims at hurting children who are completely powerless in this situation at an attempt to apply pressure to lunatics who probably think right-thinking kids shouldn’t want to go to universities/colleges that teach immoral ideas like evolution in the first place.
What percentage of students who believe that evolution is wrong are going to pursue an education in the sciences?
Try that “Evolution is only a theory” crap in a good science course and the teacher will inform you that “Yes, it is a theory. Creationism, on the other hand is not.”
Belief in the inerrant truth of religious authority is the right of any citizen. The consequences of such credulity are also the right of any citizen. If you do understand the principles of hypothesis, evidence, predictive falsifiability, and repeatable experimentation, you can study the sciences. If you don’t, you can study theology, or art, or any of a hundred other fields of study not related to the sciences.
But many people who go to MIT take engineering. I only had one biology course, and I didn’t even need to take that.
However, a kid who has enough brains to have a hope of getting into MIT or into that trade school in Pasadena and who believes in ID is either incredibly incurious, reading only church material, or so inflexible that he or she rejects mountains of evidence due to a pre-existing bias. Neither are qualities I’d want to see in an engineer.
Still, let’s judge the kids individually, not the state or even the school district.
That’s a major reason why American science education isn’t very good. You might as well teach engineering and barely mention electricity or metal because it offends people.
It isn’t mentioned much not because it offends people, but because the science teachers have too much other material to cover, most of it much more important to getting a well-rounded science education.
In our district, the sophomores get Biology, the juniors get Chemistry, and the seniors get either AP Physics, AP Biology, Marine Biology, Anatomy & Physiology or decide to be a Liberal Arts major and not take a science class. Evolution is maybe one unit in a sophomore class.
When I took Biology 101 there were several students who were doing very well in the class until we hit evolution. Suddenly these students who had previously made an A or B on their tests suddenly made a C or an F on the exams that tested their knowledge of the theory of evolution. Some of them said things like “it doesn’t make sense to me” or “this is false” but the reality is most of them simply decided they didn’t want to learn the material.
So let’s say they do go into their Biology 101 class and start condradicting the theory of evolution? Let 'em. Evolution is only a tiny part of the college curriculum.
When you put it that way, you make it sound like you’re penalizing them for knowing about something (i.e. the theory(ies) of Intelligent Design), not for not understanding something (i.e. the theory(ies) of Evolution). Do you really want to exclude students who have been exposed to Forbidden Knowledge?
No, I clarified my OP by saying that I do not want to exclude any students. It really never entered my mind that any students would have to be excluded, because the scenario in my head was that as soon as enough top schools announced the change in admission policy, the school board in Kansas would either change their tune or be swiftly shown the door by the voters, and replaced by more moderate people.
That is the scenario I wanted to discuss, but everyone is getting really hung up on the exclusion of good students born in an unlucky state. Oh well, I should have been more clear in my OP. Live and learn.
I was just trying to be clear on what the threat was. If I say, “Give me all your money or I’ll break your kneecaps,” I don’t really expect to break any kneecaps; I expect that you’ll give me your money so I won’t have to.
I don’t ever remember the subject of evolution and/or pseudoscientific creationism being raised in science class in all my years in the public education system. And I took advanced biology. Biology was all about cells, cells, cells, cells, cells, cells, cells, and more cells.
It’s just not a big enough deal to make it part of admissions.
I have an undergraduate degree from Caltech, and I never took a course in biology in my life. It wasn’t even an issue in the admissions process, from what I remember. My other science and math grades must have made my case.
Not that I’m an ID believer, by any means, of course.
and who believes in ID is either incredibly incurious, reading only church material, or so inflexible that he or she rejects mountains of evidence due to a pre-existing bias. Neither are qualities I’d want to see in an engineer.