Haven’t read through every response to the thread (probably a mistake), but I’ll briefly echo what another poster said upthread…if this happened in America, I’d be outraged. That it happened in Canada…well, its their problem to deal with. If the good folks in Quebec think its a good idea, then more power too them. Personally I think they have put themselves on a slippery slope…and one I don’t they (or many in this thread) even see.
Yeah, I think that schools should teach Evolution too. Yeah, I think that Creationism (ID, whatever) is stupid too. But I think its a VERY bad idea for the government to mandate this for private schools. It sets a bad precidence. I wonder if people in this thread who think its such a good idea would sing the same tune if the gubberment decided someday to forbid private schools from teaching something that THEY think is important. You see, whenever the government gets the power to do something you like, that means that, sometime down the road, ANOTHER government, one that perhaps doesn’t see eye to eye with you, could potentially have that same power to do something you DON’T like so much.
Not necessarily. It depends partly on the constitutionality of what the government is trying to do.
E.g., a state government can forbid the teaching of Creationism as science in public schools, but that doesn’t mean that “sometime down the road” the same government could then require the teaching of Creationism as science in public schools. One of those positions is constitutional, and the other is not.
If schools wish to be accredited by a governmental accrediting body—and apparently in Quebec, according to severus, attendance at an accredited school is mandatory up to the age of 16—then they have to teach to the standards that the accrediting body sets.
We don’t have similar mandatory universal accreditation standards in US education, so the situation isn’t really comparable.
In public schools, yes. In private schools, no. A parent’s right to choose what the child learns in a private school is no different from their right to choose what they teach him at home.
I think a parent should be able to define that.
Of course not. What I’m saying is that people generally only remember stuff from high school if they have a particular interest in it, which I think doesn’t apply to evolution for most people.
I will when I get a chance, but if they are not influencing what is being taught in the PUBLIC schools, then I can’t get too excited about it.
Good question. Unfortunately, I think most of what people are taught in school is utterly wasted.
Well, you said:
Please explain how what I said grossly misrepresents this statement?
That is exactly how I feel about this. Do I have my own opinions about the wisdom of teaching creationism instead of evolution? Of course. I don’t get the insistence on creationism at all. But…I just don’t think it’s the place of the government to decide.
Why not? Your position is that the parents should decide what a child learns. Even if they only influence what’s being taught in private schools, they are still influencing what children other than their own are being taught.
With the assumption that parents choose private schools with the knowledge of what the curriculum is. If they don’t like it, they don’t need to send their kids there. The beauty of private schooling, IMO.
Of course you do, Yank. Do read post #44 (my second post in the thread). According to Loopydude, anyway, it’s a nice summary of one particular cultural difference between Quebec and the US that’s in play here. (Thanks Loopydude!) You might also want to read post #34, my first in this thread, where I explain that the law wasn’t actually changed here, only enforced.
Also, I note that what most people have picked on (including the National Post journalist whose article is linked in the OP) is the fact that this decision by the ministry of Education means that children will have to be taught the theory of evolution. I want to take the time to note that many of these unrecognized schools in Quebec did not only not teach evolution, in some cases they didn’t teach a large part of what many would consider essential knowledge. That cult in Joliette is extremely closed to the outside world; I don’t know what they teach their kids in school but I’m quite sure it isn’t the official curriculum minus evolution. Whether knowing evolution is necessary to understand biology and to be a well-rounded citizen is an interesting topic for debate, but this particular situation goes further than that.
Hmm. Could you not say then that if evolution (or any other subject) was made compulsory in all schools, that parents can still choose whether or not to send their kids to those schools?
No, because not every parent is equipped to educate their children at home. Why should a parent’s ONLY option be to teach the child at home? Isn’t the point of private schools to give people a choice in education?
I thought the point of private schools was to give people who can afford it a better level of teaching than public schools, but that may just be my UK-centric bias.
That wouldn’t be their only option, anyway - they’d be able to send their kids to a public school. And if you mean (as I believe you do) that they shouldn’t have only one option of schooling the way they want it, that’s exactly what the current system provides - only particular private schools will teach the child in the way they want. Since, as you say, most parents aren’t equipped to home-school their kids, they actually have only one option now.
I am a Quebec taxpayer, and I say bravo! I was overjoyed when the school systems went secular, and I say, if someone wants to pay to start a private religious school, they still have to follow the SCIENCE cirriculum set by the province.
Look, if a religious group wanted to teach children that 2+2=5 because there is a passage in their holy book that says that, would we allow them to change math teaching to tell kids that?
Or to take a more concrete example, would we allow a Muslim school to teach in Science class that shooting stars are drts that Allah shoots at demons, because it says that in the Koran?
Or to teach that the Sun goes around the Earth because there are passages in the Bible that say so?
Let’s just make one thing perfectly clear. The BIG BIGBIG lie of ID/Creationists is their attempt to make us believe that Evolution and their absurd, religious-based nonsense are somehow competing theories, running neck-and-neck, each backed by equally impressive numbers of scientists armed with equally impressive evidence, each equally deserving of respect and both worthy of being taught in schools as reasonable alternatives.
The simple fact is that about 99.99% of biologists, zoologists and scientists in general agree with the basic FACT of evolution.
Evolution is THE accepted scientific theory to explain speciation among living things. That, by the way is ALL it does. It has not a bloody word to say about whether the universe was created, always existed or whatever. When will the Fundies understand this?
That is certainly true in a lot of cases, but it’s just another reason to want choice in schools. Here, a lot of people send kids to religiously-based schools, not just for a better education, but also to get religious and values education, and also sometimes for better discipline.
Well, everyone HAS the option to home-school…some may not desire that option for whatever reason. And their other option is private vs. public.
We do have religious schools here too (I almost went to a Catholic sixth form) but in general if you say “private schools” to a person from the UK it brings up the image of posh rich kids. So yeah, there are different reasons for wanting to send kids to a private school.
Right. So, to be fair, if private schools were forced to a certain form of education, parents would still have another choice. It would just mean undesirable choices both way, unless they want to home-school their kids anyway.
I guess it all boils down to me thinking that the right to teach kids in whatever way parents wish is a lesser right than the one to make sure kids have a minimum standard of education, and to not strongly affect their life by forcing them to take remedial classes if they want to go into any kind of career in science.
No, that was just the only time in High School I dealt with biology. Every student was required to take the Grade 10 “general” science course. Then you had to have two more science credits to graduate. My other two credits came from Chemistry and Physics courses I took in 11th grade, and I took a fourth science credit in the form of Chem 2 senior year. I could have taken a focused biology course, or anatomy 1 or 2 I believe, if I had been interested. I was personally more interested in Chemistry and Physics. Also, I’m not one of the “students these days” I graduated before you did ;).
I never argued understanding evolution wasn’t part of being a well-educated person but just because you read about “antibiotic-resistant bacteria” or “mutant viruses” doesn’t mean you are “dealing” with evolution. You aren’t dealing with either of those unless you are in the medical or biological field, you’re just reading about them in a news article or science journal. That doesn’t mean it’s something your practically applying in your day-to-day life.
Someday Jimmy and Johnny are going to be given the opportunity to vote. As in, they’re going to choose the people who decide how to fund government research, and what research to fund, and whom to appoint to government research agencies, and what science-related policies to pursue.
And that’s why I want Jimmy and Johnny to at least be somewhat informed about the basics of science. These days, basic scientific knowledge is a necessary pre-requisite to informed political discussion. “Having a subsection of children who don’t understand a specific area of biology” leads to an ill-informed electorate; that’s the societal interest.
Well, only to a degree, as was mentioned by Revenant upthread. There’s no particular guarantee that any random private school curriculum will satisfy the parents, either.
In any and all cases? Really? If a parent believes that girls don’t need to know how to read, that’s okay?
That may be true, but I think that the better the foundation, the easier it will be to grasp related concepts in the future, regardless of how well they remember the specifics of what they were taught. It’s a lot easier to refamiliarize yourself with something you knew once, than to have to learn it de novo.
It’s really worth looking at the link; if nothing else, it’s an example of how proud ignorance can affect many others.
That may be so, but at the very least there’s the hope that every so often, someone’s inspired by what they learned to study deeper and make some kind of contribution to the field. Remove the “wasted” material and that hope fades.
It’s a conditional statement, not a recommendation. You’ll note that nowhere have I stated a preferred course of action, only explained one of the conditions under which creationists’ control of school curricula wouldn’t bother me. I could just as easily say “If a cometary impact was going to vaporize the Earth in two years’ time, I wouldn’t care what they taught each other either”; that doesn’t mean I’m advocating Oort-induced apocalypse. Clear?
According to Loopydude, anyway, it’s a nice summary of one particular cultural difference between Quebec and the US that’s in play here. (Thanks Loopydude!) You might also want to read post