Oh, I agree. In fact, I said the same thing up-thread wrt to my own friends.
And I can’t tell you how many of my acquaintences think Quantum Mechanics “proves” some New Age gobbledy-gook.
I don’t think so. In the OP poll, nearly 80% of Texans replied that “God” had a role in evolution to a greater or lesser extent. That is not merely ignorance.
Hell, I sure do! Bout that time, she can go totally elemental! Critical mass and BOOM!
Higher on my list would be better critical thinking skills, so they could tell for themselves what is bullshit and what is not.
The Demon-Haunted World should be required reading in high school.
Yes, but that’s a very difficult thing to teach. Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t try, just that it’s going to be a long haul.
I’ve said this in other threads, but I really wish religious leaders would take a more active role in eradicating pseudo science. There shouldn’t be any Catholics who are creationists, for instance. Sure, there are plenty of fundamentalists out there, but they don’t explain the ridiculously high number of creationists we have in this country.
Not only is this not being taught, it seem to me as if schools are designed to destroy what traces of critical thinking and skepticism they find. Schools are about conformity, discipline and preparing cogs for the big machine. And they’re not even very good about that.
I freely admit I know nothing about educational theory and have no qualifications whatsoever to speculate. But I think it would be fairly easy to actually teach critical thinking skill, with two changes to schools as they are:
- Original sources. Textbooks tell you that Charles Darwin went sailing around the world and looked at animals and based on what he saw he theorized about natural selection and evolution. Someone needs to publish a high-school-level volume of excerpts of Darwin’s writing (and let’s add some Mendel in there, too), with lots of footnotes and maps and pictures and a big friendly glossary in the back. Don’t start out by telling the students “this is what Darwin figured out”, let them discover it along with him. It’s more interesting and doesn’t just tell you what Darwin came up with, but demonstrates how. Textbooks are great for getting students to memorize things for an exam, but terrible for actual learning.
- Science. If I was king of the world with unlimited money, every high school student would take at least three year-long science classes: physics, biology, and chemistry. At least one class a week would be dedicated to lab work, requiring a full lab report. And since in my magical fantasy land, we have motivated teachers who uphold this requirement, by the end of three years, little Jimmy will have learned something about how to predict what might happen based on what he already knows, and what to do when “what really happened” is nothing like “what I thought would happen.”
And no religious leader is ever going to promote science. Science is by definition antithetical to religion, and at least historically, religion’s main purpose has been to control people, and it’s a lot easier to control the stupid ignorant masses than the smart questioning masses.
This academy of sciences was established by the Vatican, which has repeatedly claimed that "…the AIDS plague…will not be resolved by handing out condoms. It is undeniable fact that condoms are effective in reducing the risk of spreading HIV, which is what causes AIDS.
Regardless, religion requires accepting things on faith without any actual proof, which by definition is antithetical to science. In science, if you want to accept X as truth, you need massive amounts of evidence of X, gathered in controlled studies. In religion, at best, you get untestable ideas like the Quaker idea that the light of god is in everyone, or the Buddhist idea of rebirth, which of course are entirely untested. If someone preaches that these should be fundamental tenants of your life, then they’re preaching ideas that directly contradict anything scientific.
I went to three different high schools. The first was a Catholic school, the second a public school, the third a secular private American school overseas. The only one of those schools in which I ever got taught anything about evolution was the Catholic school.
Um…
Uh…
No, I’m not going to say anything about the wording here.
:o
Pfft, that’s nothing. Now take a poll on whether the Earth revolves around the sun or vice versa, if the sun is bigger than the moon or vice versa, whether the Earth rotates or not, etc. Then you’ll become really sad.
Hey, I went to 3 HS’s also.
But is that really fair? One typically only takes one year of Biology in HS, so was it just that you happened to be at the Catholic school that year?
That’s what we in the trade call “moving the goal posts”. I gave you a cite where the Vatican has promoted science, which refutes your earlier claim.
Religion requires you to accept some things on faith. But many, many scientists have been able to maintain faith and many priests have been able to do science. That is a fact. You are trying to make a sweeping statement that they are completely incompatible. They don’t have to be.
BTW, I have no religious beliefs whatsoever.
The Dover case was not decided by SCOTUS. 'Twas decided by a federal district court judge. Jones, I think his name was.
OK. Still, that seemed to be a significant milestone. Not that the creationists won’t try some other tactic, but it’s an uphill struggle.
FWIW, I just now (like, last night) finished reading Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
MAGNIFICENT book. Should be required reading for all students, parents, and voting taxpayers.
I have an interesting take on all this, for three reasons:
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I’m an ex-creationist (raised in a fundie home in east TN; my parents went to William Jennings Bryan Bible College, for cryin’ out loud);
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I’m a librarian; and
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I live in Texas.
All these things tend to make me share Dawkins’ and others’ alarm at creationist ignorance. Now, admittedly, it may be something of a slippery slope to say, “These people are anti-science; next thing you know, they’ll be coming after bio teachers with pitchforks and torches.”
BUT…
Ignorance of science does have very real detrimental effects. For one thing, denial of evolution might very well lead to a backlash against medical science that addresses antibiotic-resistant bacterial evolution. Further, denial of evolution seems to go hand in hand with denial of climate change, and I’m not even gonna START to describe the problems that can arise from that!
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The most important things kids should be taught about evolution – which is kind of confused in popular perception, and even among many highly educated people – is that biological evolution is a non-teleological process, blind and random and not an inevitable “progression” from “lower” to “higher” life-forms.
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I’d start even more basically than that:
Evolution is not a theory about the origin of the unverse.
Evolution is not a theory about the origin of life.
Evolution has nothing to say about the existence or non-existence of God.
Evolution describes what happened after life got started on earth. If God created the universe, and the earth and then zapped the waters to create the first life forms, it would not affect evolutionary theory in the slightest.