Evolution VS ID. As a practical matter, what difference does it make?

[RTFirefly]

@Weirddave

No, actually I’m equating your statement that schools should not be allowed to teach whatever they want in addition to the curriculum required for accreditation as thought control.

That’s not addition; it’s cancellation.

If you say, “mathematics says the quadratic formula obtains all the roots of a quadratic equation” and then you say “the quadratic formula has been mathematically proven false,” you have just untaught the very thing you taught.

I would certainly deny accreditation to any school that played such games and called it education.

Your apparent position is that once they made the initial statement, you would regard that as sufficient and regard their contradictory followup as irrelevant to their legitimacy as teachers. 'Nuff said.

@Weirddave

@RTFirefly

And I would have assumed that schools - unlike parents - needing to meet certain standards to be accredited would be a pretty obvious distinction.

Good thing nobody has suggested that they don’t have to.

I’m not sure that makes sense syntactically, let alone in any more advanced way.

@Weirddave

@RTFirefly

If I’m a parent, I can tell my kids that the Lord God says the Earth is burrito-shaped; I can even tell my kids that that’s been scientifically proven.

I would expect accreditation standards to allow private schools to do the former but not the latter.

And that’s because you think that you have the right to tell other parents how to raise their kids and that those same parents do not have the right to spend their money to educate their kids the way they see fit. It’s sad really.

Welcome to America. We ain’t Libertaria. You can’t send your kids to a private school that teaches them nothing but how to beat off all day. Sorry about that.

Yeah, that is in fact assuming the right to tell other people how to raise their kids, and it is the right thing to do. Effectively denying one’s kid an education is child abuse, and in this country one does not have that right. Thank God for big government!

[RTFirefly]

OK, to sum up:
Weirddave, you apparently believe that requiring schools to abide by minimum curricular standards is assuming “the right to tell other parents how to raise their kid” and estabblishing the principle that “parents do not have the right to spend their money to educate their kids the way they see fit.” You would be right on both counts. In this country, most people do in fact believe there are and should be minimum standards for the education of every child that every school must abide by, regardless of the parents’ beliefs.

For reasons inexplicable to me, you think this is a bad thing. I will not attempt further to persuade you otherwise.

In addition, in assuming for the sake of argument that private schools may be required to meet minimum curricular standards, you seem to say they should be able to teach a particular fact or concept in one breath, satisfying the curricular requirement, then teach its scientific - not its religious, but its scientific - falsity in the next, with the satisfaction of the curricular requirement unaffected by the reversal.

Obviously, this would not only undermine the teaching of the required curriculum, but would also undermine the teaching of basic concepts of logic and clear thinking. There is no more basic contradiction than A and Not-A. I personally would deny accreditation to a school that taught that both were scientific truths, just on that basis, no matter what concept A was.

You think all that would be hunky-dory. Again, I will not further attempt to persuade you otherwise; this is a fundamental difference of opinion.

Further, you say that to deny private schools the ‘right’ to directly un-teach the things they have been required to teach would be thought control. I’d personally call it taking educational standards seriously as opposed to treating them like some sort of bullshit game. At its heart, what you are saying is that the public’s having any non-negotiable requirements for private school curricula is thought control.

One can take that point of view, but it’s kinda ridiculous IMHO, and I can’t see the point in trying to talk you out of it.