Well, we’re talking about private universities here, but they’re not terribly selective either.I can see where some (like mine) might choose to reject Kansas applicants (we must get one or two per decade) just to make a point.
The discussion seems to be headed toward some weird “everyone is equal no matter what sort of false hoodoo they were taught”.
Not so. Science is science. ID is not science. If the kansas students are taking up time “learning” ID, then that time has to be taken away from something else - real science.
So, when they get to college, they are expected to know some bare minimum of it. Letting them into college, and so keeping someone else out, just because they “learned” ID is not what should happen. If they then feel they are being punished, well so what. ID is not science. To treat it as science during college admissions is ridiculous. Once again, ID is not science. It is junk. Most religions don’t recognize it either. Why should one small group’s false dogma be required teaching in schools? So, if Kansas wants ID, then they should be willing to prove their true faith in it and just pay the price. ID or real education. Simple.
This is my thinking on the matter. It’s not as if there is a formalized ID curriculum that can actually be taught to anyone. And I seriously doubt that the average Kansasian high school teacher will know any more about what the allegedly scholarly aspects of ID are than does the average Joe in any state. In short, there is nothing to teach about ID, other than, perhaps, assigning students to read Darwin’s Black Box, or the ramblings of Dembski or some such.
At best, ID becomes a footnote mention, that, yeah, some people think this, and the class continues as a typical HS biology class. At worst, evolution in general gets an equal glossing-over, in which case the student may or may not suffer, depending on the admissions requirements of whatever college they are applying to. But I don’t think it should be taken as a given that all Kansas high school students will necessarily be inadequately trained in science, any more than it is a given that students from any other state will be likewise left wanting.
Probably the larger problem which has not been mentioned is that they changed the definition of science.
“In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.”
http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/11/08/evolution.debate.ap/
While I don’t think the kids should be punished, I do think the Universities should do something to influence the situation. Maybe the result would be that the science class is required to teach these two things:
- “This is the accepted definition of science everywhere but in your school, and it will be on the test”
- “This is the Kansas definition of science”
That is part of it, yes.
It is not punishment if the colleges keep their entrance requirements. These are the same requirements they will have had all along. There is no reason why they should be forced to change these requirements, just to cater to a small and vocal minority. There is no reason to have to add any “this is Kansas science” either. On way to stop the spread of this ID, and other more pernicious things, is to NOT give in to them.
My point was that pressure from the Universities could at least force Kansas to inform their pupils that the definition of science they are learning is not the commonly accepted definition, and to make sure that they do indeed learn the proper definition.
My point was not to alter the University entrance requirements.
Same here. I would hate to see colleges start dignifying ID as some sort of science training or accept it as such. I want to see what would happen if someone from a non-ID religion sued the Kansas school system for making them have to learn something their own church calls false.
Any HS class which teaches ID is not teaching science and there is no reason in the world that colleges should accredit such classes. It’s not just that they’re teaching a bit of non-science in a science class, it’s that they’re completely misrepresenting what science is supposed to be.
ID should no more be accredited as science than Pig Latin should be accredited as Latin.
If ID is on your curriculum then you aren’t being taught dick about science. If you haven’t been taught proper science then why should you get special dispensation for college admissions?
Evolution is still fundamental to an understanding of biology, by the way. That was soundly established in the other thread. Nothing “dubious” about it.
That’s exactly the point. School is supposed to stop ignorance - not allow or spread it. If I were a student in Kansas, I would get some advocate group to help me sue- my bishops and pope say evolution is OK, and I would go after them for imposing their religious dogma on me.
Emphasis added
No, it wasn’t. Evolution is fundametal to Biology if you’re a Biologist, but not if you’re a High School student.
I’m with Darwin’s Finch on this one. As much as I detest ID, high school biology doesn’t spend much time on evolution anyway. Besides, ID is being taught alongside evolution, not instead of it. It’s a nit in terms of college entrance criteria. I might be persuaded that some action was needed if students were being taught that evolution is an evil product of atheism, and should be avoided at all costs to one’s immortal soul.
What do you think of it being taught to non-Baptist non-ID people? I’m sure there are Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians etc in Kansas. Why should these people have to learn something their own religion rejects? Why should this one small ID group get this sort of preference? Could this not be government giving preference to one “religion”? Once again it is not science. It doesn’t even have enough meat to be a philosophy. It should not be taught alongside evolution, it should not be taught as an “alternative view”. It is just warmed over creationism. If “they” insist, “they” can teach it in their little backwoods churches and revival meetin’s. It would go well with faith healers, medicine shows and snake handlers.
I think it’s stupid. But I don’t think it’s something colleges need to worry about wrt admissions, at least at this point.
I think John Mace is right. Colleges make biologists, they don’t accept them.
I appreciate how appealing it would be if colleges could act as a big lever to change this flawed decision, but personally, as someone who does a lot of admissions work, I don’t think it’s realistic. Nor does it reflect the way college admissions works.
Also, just a note on language…Colleges don’t “accredit” high school courses. Colleges don’t review textbooks or sit in on teaching. They do judge school “quality” by things like the number of AP courses offered, the number of NM finalists, the proportion of students who go on to 4-year schools and so on.
If possible, they also draw some conclusions about prior students who have matriculated from that high school. And they also have standardized tests. In the midwest, in fact, the ACT is more common than the SAT, and it has a scientific reasoning section. Most Kansans applying to colleges will submit the ACT to colleges with the SciRe score for all to evaluate. Which gives me an idea… more on that later.
Recall also that most colleges will require students to have multiple years of high school science. Even if you believe that the mere mention of ID poisons all the class content in Biology, chances are any college-aspiring student will be exposed to science in other courses that don’t deal with life sciences.
I can see where some colleges might express concern over a student’s admissability/preparation for a specific major. But generally, I think it would highly unlikely that they’d judge a student completely unacceptable just because one of their three or four required science units included ID, particularly when the student had little control over it. As they do with all students (not just hapless Kansans!) they will ask, did the student seek challenge? Did he take the most rigorous curriculum he could, given what the school had to offer?
As for my idea…it would be interesting to see the effect on statewide scores on science tests like the ACT SciRe section, or AP biology. Compare the scores of today’s students to those who attended high school prior to the change. How much are they differente? You may also have some students who took the ACT as sophomores and juniors and then retake it after being exposed to ID. You’ve got a maturation effect problem, but it might tell us something about whether or not students’ science abilities are as harmed as some fear.
Incidentally, if you’re looking for a body to make Kansans pay for their folly along these lines, the accrediting agencies would be the better party. I think someone made this point earlier. Then I could see colleges saying “Whoa, we’re looking more closely at your students because they school isn’t accredited.”
Who accredits High Schools?
It’s ridiculous to say “any High School class that teaches ID shouldn’t be accredited as a science course.” Do any of you here have any actual experience with public schools in general, or what a lot of High School classes actually look like?
I’ve seen High School science classes in which the teacher will take up 5 minutes telling a humorous anectdote completely unrelated to the course matter, then spend 20 minutes with back and forth discussion on it with the students. Basically “shooting the breeze” with the students.
Is that something that should be done in a class room? No, but I also know for a fact it happens in High Schools, High Schools that regularly send students to universities all around the country.
I’ve seen math teacher’s give out bonus quizzes during holiday’s that have no questions relating to mathematics, but stuff like “Name santa’s reindeer.” Now I’m sure that sounds like elementary school stuff, but no, I’ve seen it in high schools.
Do I necessarily think any of this is the fall of Western society? No. It’s not a great secret that in a huge number of schools a lot of bullshit time-wasting where nothing is being taught goes on.
In this particular case we have no idea how this is going to be implemented. And if we’re going to start taking away accreditation over a 5 minute aside about ID then we have to monitor every class room in the country and take away accreditation for whatever classes have teachers that sometimes stray off topic and start talking about things at random, because in effect 5 minutes on ID doesn’t take away from a student’s education anymore than 5 minutes of listening to some story the teacher is telling you about the way he dealt with one problem student he had in is fourth period math class fifteen years ago.
More than likely Kansas is still going to primarily be using nationally accepted textbooks in their science classes so I think most universities wouldn’t have any interest in rejecting the science courses outright.
Another good point is the fact that biology is actually of little importance in high school curriculum from what I can tell. The local high school near here does not require students to take any biology to graduate. You’re required to take 2 semesters of science. The first semester is the universally required Grade 10 “general science” class. Which does have a unit on biology but is basically just an overview of multiple scientific fields, combined with doing stuff like dissections, examining things under microscopes, and etc. The other course most often taken is Chemistry which is standard for the 11 grade curriculum. Although physics classes are offered as is an anatomy class. No “biology” class is actually offered at all.
Natural selection and Darwin are hit upon but they don’t amount to more than 2-3 questions on that unit’s test.
I think it’s a complete fabrication that evolution is taught “in depth” in most U.S. schools. I don’t think it’s because of religious conservatism, but rather the fact that the courses offered in High School are all highly general courses. High school is there to provide the basics, and rarely is it there to provide in-depth comprehension of a subject.
Anyways it’s doubtful that any university would just carte blanche reject Kansans because of their states school system. And most U.S. universities don’t even specify what science classes you have to take.
I do think the ACT would be a better test to root out science ignorance though, as it has a science section. Of course maybe the SAT does now too, it was long ago that I took the SAT and I only recently found out that the maximum score is no longer a 1600.
For universities to actually ban an entire State most of them would have to fundamentally alter their application criteria. I’ve just looked at several Ivy league websites as well as several top public colleges and none of them were very specific in what high school courses you had to take. They basically just said you need to have graduated college and need to have taken the SAT or ACT, to send them those results+ all the application crap (recommendations, letters, extra curriculars and et al.) and they’ll review your application.
This issue seems really simple to me, if the highschool includes ID as party of a biology course, I would EXPECT the university/college to reject that as a science class. Such that if the Kansas student was applying for a BSc, was required to take two highschool science classes, and took Biology and Chemistry, that student should be rejected. They have failed to meet the admissions requirement. Now, if they took biology, chemistry, and physics, they can be admitted, since they met the requirements.
Likewise, if the admission requirement also included math, and the Kansas students were taught that Pi = 3, I would expect the college to reject that as a math credit. Pi is not 3, no matter what the Bible tells us.
Also, if a highschool geology course taught that the Earth was 6000 years old, that would no longer count as a geology course.
Colleges/universities have neither the time nor the desire to individually test each and ever applicant to their school, do you have any idea the number of applications schools receive? They have to trust that the highschool did its job and taught them sufficiently.
As a bad analogy, both the US and Canada have a process to certify medical doctors, that includes verifying that they went to an ACCREDITED medical school. Would you be offended if the medical licencing board rejected med school grads that were taught blood-letting…
There is a bigger issue at hand here that everyone seems to be skirting around. As an outsider, reading about the Kansas school board including ID in biology class, I lose all respect for the education system in Kansas. Try not to become inflamed and fire away at the Canadian education system, this is an important point that keeps getting glossed over.
When talking about university admission boards, reputation is significant. And I feel REALLY bad for the students in Kansas that are being treated like pawns.
If you don’t believe me, consider in post 16 magellan01 said, “…potentially keep some Kansas science whix-kid [sic] out of MIT…” Right there he/she/it showed a bias towards MIT, alluding to it as a place a whix-kid from Kansas would aspire to. Why? Is it that MIT has a reputation as the top science and engineering university in the world? Such that graduates from MIT are seen more favourably than students from a lesser-known college. Does that seem fair? Legal? In Canada, students here aspire to go to MIT because of its reputation for producing highly qualified grads. Likewise, Canadian employeers seek to hire those grads. Reputation is important.
The Kansas Department of Education, or who ever else are approving the highschool curriculum, is ruining the reputation of every student they are responsible for. They can make the choice of increasing standards, making tests harder, the school day longer, encouraging volunteer work, or otherwise challenging their students. All things that would improve their reputation, and make Kansas State known for producing the best and brightest highschool students. Students that MIT would seek out and admit preferentially. Instead, they sully their program by including religion in a science course. Which to SCIENTISTS seems really, really stupid. Kansas state students may go on to be great priests, or philosophers, or guides for BC Tours (not affiliated with the province of British Columbia or its tourism board). But I think its up to the school boards and departments of education to ensure their students are as well prepared as they can possibly be, or else accept the consequences of their choices.
Okay, let’s say ID is not science and does not belong in the classroom. Well, neither do practical jokes, fighting, passing notes and daydreaming. And as of right now we do not know if ID will take up five minutes of one class or five full days, so all of those other forbidden things might take more time away from science as ID. Let’s ban all kids from college that demonstrate counter-rational thought, starting with the nerdy kid who sits in science class thinking that the head cheerleader might go out with him.
Some of the arguments presented here in opposition to ID profess pragmatism, but argue ideology, complete with the accompanying emotion that skews rationality. Chill out. At least wait till we have more facts. Sheeze. If you’re going to argue for rational thought, it helps your cause to argue with “facts” supporting you. Until then, you simply have an opinion, and you want people to adopt a belief you have. And isn’t that just the type of thing you’re so afraid of?