Given that many Kansans have doubts about evolution or think that it conflicts with their religious beliefs, it’s not too surprising that 72 percent of those surveyed last week said they favor State Board of Education candidates who support teaching alternative theories. But this support may miss the point.
The issue that has been before the state board — and has caused so much ridicule of our state — is not whether teachers can discuss other theories or use the controversy as a teaching tool. Rather, the state board’s job was to set official science standards for the entire state. When setting such standards — whether in science or other subjects — the board needs to base them on what the experts in those fields recommend. And mainstream science experts are nearly unanimous in their support of evolution.
That doesn’t mean teachers can’t discuss other theories — provided they aren’t promoting religion. But the state shouldn’t put into its official standards theories that the scientific community overwhelmingly rejects.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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52 Comments
The problem with this issue is that there is a central committee setting standards. Regardless of what you want your children to learn you have to live with the edicts of that government body. Depending on who got elected in the last popular vote determines the proverbial standards. Any kind of scientific reasoning or educational considerations come in second to politics and personal agendas.
School choice would prevent this to a great degree. If a particular school taught science that you disagreed with you could simply not attend that school.
Very true, the argument for I.D. the shallow attempt to conceal creationism belongs in the lab and not the class room. It is a disservice to the children to cloud an issue that their ability to function in the world depends on. Separation of church and state actually goes beyond a established religion which the amendment attends to. But to a different between what is the generally excepted answer and that which is came to through faith. “Give unto Cesar that which is Cesar’s and give unto God that which is God’s”.That speak to more then the face on a coin and that is the mistakes that is being made.
If a particular school taught science that you disagreed with you could simply not attend that school.
Let’s extend this to other subjects, too.
Don’t believe the Holocaust ever happened? Start up an Aryan Nations school.
Don’t think women’s suffrage is valid? Send your sons to the local madras – but not your daughters. Keep them home to learn to be servants to their future husbands.
Think that dinosaurs are just ‘metaphysical speculations,’ as stated by the KSDE Director of Communications? (http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/living/education/14680486.htm) Send your kids to a school that avoids any mention of fossils.
See how ridiculous this is? It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with the science, it’s a matter of teaching what’s valid. If science was a matter of opinion, the force of gravity would decrease with a person’s age so that falls wouldn’t be quite so damaging to hipbones. The sun could rise later in the morning to please teenages who wish to sleep in.
‘School choice’ is just a not-so-disguised means to funnel your tax money to promoting untruths. Like that women should be servile to men, or that the Holocaust never happened, or that dinosaurs never existed.
K-12 education is an indoctrination machine. Wouldn’t it be great if all schools were places in which all students loved the experience? Where the parents of first-day kindergartners could say, “You’re going to love this”?
Most kids don’t really like school, and very, very few find it to be a totally cool place to be.
Half of all new teachers find it a totally uncool place to be, which is why they abandon it.
How about if we listen to kids and young teachers, and respond to their views?
If you want your kids to be exposed to “alternate theories to evolution”, then send them to parochial schools. Tax money shouldn’t be spent teaching kids religious dogma.
Parochial schools are indoctrination centers.
Tired of It,
An interesting read, however you should try to cover one last point. The problems you point out all exist within the government school system. Examples abound as to some of the less than sound practices of the current system, the evolution/ID controversy here in Kansas is just one. The difference with the government school is that they can force your child to participate. Unless you are rich, then you have choice. The government schools can be changed, but that process is slow and difficult. By the time you could effect any real change in curriculum your child has already had the proverbial false-teachings.
With school choice, you could move out of a school and prevent the false education.
What you are advocating is to use the government to force other people’s children into certain schools so that the education you want them to have is implemented.
The brilliance of the ID/alternative theory plan was that they were able through repitition convice people that evolution may be a “flawed theory”. When in fact it accounts for the data given better than anything else and has for the past 150 years.
But convincing enough Kansasans’ that the theory may be flawed – led to the reasonable alternative of “let’s teach other explanations”. The Discovery Institute – who was behind the ID and Swift Boat campaigns is adept at propaganda – scientists (usually) are not.
What is frightening is how successful the war on enlightenment has been recently.
How many hours a day, for how many days a year, for how many years did you spend looking at the back of somebody else’s head when you were growing up? What kind of process(ing) was this?
How many parents out there make their kids ask for permission to go to the bathroom, or “You cannot go outside the house, without my permission?”
PM,Last I knew, parents in all 50 states have the option of home- schooling their children.
The survey shows just how uneducated the average person in Kansas really is. I would bet most of the 72% never took a biology course, or studied evolution in any way. National Geographic had an excellent article on evolution speeling out the reasons for the ignorance of the average adult concerning the evolution/ID issue.
What we are seeing in Kansas is really sad: our children will be stuck in the middle ages while the rest of the world is curing disease and feeding the poor. What next, the earth is the center of the universe? Or maybe flat?
What would I like to see? I’d like to see an open system like we have at WSU: take as many or as few courses as you want. Allow home-educated kids to take lab science and language courses at public schools–without co-requiring them to follow a state-approved home curriculum. Don’t discriminate against them as part-time attendees, just like part-time WSU students aren’t discriminated against by their instructors or full-time fellow classmates.
Take advantage of the example that most home-&-public combo students would set as self-directed, serious students.
Too radical a proposal? Okay, then how about letting honors students go to the library, do research and essay assignments, take accelerated distance-learning online courses, and shine? For example, consider an 8th grader who is ready for geometry. Her middle school doesn’t offer it. Stanford’s EPGY program is doing cooperative education with public schools that lack resources to challenge gifted children.
The 21st century is not the 19th century. THINK DIFFERENT.
heartlander,I agree the public schools need to be more flexible and offer more to their students. BTW, my heading to 9th grade son took geometry his 8th grade year. I am concerned that he will be repeating some of his excellent math schooling in high school – which would not be a good idea.
There is choice options available with the public schools; one has to be proactive, advocate for your kid, and sometimes work with, or around, a frustrating bureaucracy.
DD,
Homeschooling is permitted in one form or another in the US. However it is not an option for single parents. Homeschooling is sometimes very heavily regulated with the intention of stamping it out.
At any rate, having the option of homeschooling is not the same as school choice.
DD, see about connecting with the EPGY program. Another really interesting one is Johns Hopkins, which I think is cool because they have video lectures given by this really energetic prof. With this, your son can replay lecture parts as needed.
They offer some scholarship money. Beyond that, if the district would support a larger movement, I bet they might be able to get some grant money from the Gates Foundation. If someone wants apply a small part of the $75 mil funding Wichita should get with the lobbying effort in Topeka, this would be great to.
And good luck to your son! Sounds like he’s going to be ready for calculus in 11th grade.
Go to this link and click on the video.
http://www.jhu.edu/cty/math/courses/algebra2.html
(If you do this and your son takes calculus in 10th grade, I’M NOT RESPONSIBLE! ;) )
ProudMan–
If you change schools from East to Andover and they’re all under the same gov’t edict, how does that improve anything?
So what you mean by “school choice” is tax money channelled to religious (sometimes crackpot religious) schools that teach religion as scientific fact and scientific fact as “beliefs.”
No thank you.
“There is choice options available with the public schools;” –
Sounded like someone educated in public schools, huh?
On the school choice option, I mention homeschooling, because it is an option in every state. People in the homeschooling movement fought in the courts to have it so. Not too long ago in some states it was not an option.
I also contend that because one’s kid goes to public schools that does not mean that the kid and parent have to be victims to the whims of a district. There are always options and transversing those can be frustrating, but they are doable.
To my thinking – because the range of choices is not perfect is not the same as having no choices.
I would be opposed to my tax dollars supporting religious education. Churches have gotten along fine for many years without my tax money.
heartlander,My kid is planning on taking calculus (there will be a couple of levels of that where he’s going). He wants to start computer science classes at WSU before he graduates from High School. He has been in love with computers ever since he first sat down with a Windows ‘95 system (which testifies to what a hopeless case he is). The only thing that is able to compete with computers for his attention, are these girls who are starting to call our house — funny how that works.
Nerds Rule! ;)
Hehe, yup, first they call him. And he ignores them. Then he calls them, and they ignore him.
It’s God’s little joke with hormone timing . . .
“Allow home-educated kids to take lab science and language courses at public schools–without co-requiring them to follow a state-approved home curriculum.”
There’s an ‘almost’ to this. My daughter e-schooled through Wichita for a few years, and when she moved up to high school, she had the option to take electives at any Wichita high school for credit.
She has a friend whose sister e-schooled and was allowed (encouraged, too, I think) to take lab classes through regular school.
Many parents who homeschool have coops, where they swap their kids to teach different things. I have a friend who homeschooled her kids for several years during their elementary years.
But DD is right. It’s terribly difficult for single parents to homeschool. It sucks up time like a sponge. A smart sponge, but a sponge nonetheless.
TrueBlue,
I never said to put all schools under the same government edict. That follows along with your belief of using the government to ensure everything adheres to your version of fair.
I would just assume get the government money out of the education system. However that is not a popular position and most people will not try to comprehend it. The best compromise I would be willing to make is a type of voucher system, but that is only because socialists and compassionate conservatives alike will not discuss it otherwise.
So, PM, we should let each school decide what it considers true and factual? Because there’s no consensus on it?
As far as “my version of fair,” I really don’t know what you’re talking about.
I am interested in using what works. And if you look at the most successful public school systems–Japan, Korea, Germany, England–they have a SINGLE national curriculum. In high school, they have job training tracks and academic tracks.
We insist on “local control” and as a result we have a politicized, patchwork system. The results speak for themselves.
I see heartlander is spewing his RW rhetoric on this thread now.
As usual, he goes from the topic of the thread to public school bashing. The topic I believe is something about evolution and the general ignorance of the people polled about this issue.
Wasn’t there an issue back in April about some local teacher attacked by a State BOE member for taking a stance against the anti-evolution people? What ever came of that?
Apophis -KSBOE member, Connie Morris, became upset with a Wichita teacher who had a poster of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in his classroom. Connie was insisting that the teacher take the poster down. The school and district administration did not require the teacher to do anything with the poster. I think the end of the story was that Connie slinked back to St Francis, KS.
My dear Apophis,
The Pilgrim schools in early colonia Massachusetts were indoctrination centers–they made no bones about instilling WAYS OF THINKING, that the colony’s leaders chose. Fundamentalist schools are indoctrination centers.
Any system that sequesters impressionable minds for seven hours a day, giving each child less than 8 square feet of personal space, imposing movement-rules that no sane parent would impose at home, imposing strangers on children as daytime parent-surrogates, adults who can only occasionally develop close individual adult/individual child communication and support bonds, which if they occur, are artificially broken after 9 months, that keeps children sorted by age, that enforces a mass-instructional program that leaves struggling students confused while impeding the progress of quick-learners, is an indoctrination system.
In home education, if kids want to play piano after lunch, or draw and paint, or take their home-made model sailboats to the pond, or work in the garden in spring, or play Monopoly or Scrabble, or throw a Frisbee, they can do these things. They learn that they have ownership of most of their time. They learn that work does not have to be an ancient drudgery, it can be wonderfully enjoyable use of one’s time.
With home education children learn, through experience that there are natural ending time-points in study, such as “I’ve read six chapters of this book today. That’s enough.” “I’ve been writing this report for three hours. I’ll come back to it tomorrow.” “Okay, I’ve gotten through this difficult math section. I understand the content. My brain needs a rest.” The human brain doesn’t work in artificially-imposed 50-minute periods. For most humans, the brain doesn’t work as well for an hour of two after lunch as it does in the morning. That’s why many European countries take post-midday-meal time off. It’s why American executives take “power naps” that ordinary workers don’t get to do, or play golf.
BTW, the issue of postprandrial “letdown” has been extensively researched. Do the schools tell kids, “Science has shown that your brains need rest time after lunch?” Why don’t they?
Trueblue,”So what you mean by “school choice” is tax money channelled to religious (sometimes crackpot religious) schools that teach religion as scientific fact and scientific fact as “beliefs.”"
And Kansas public schools teach science fact? What planet are you residing on?
heartlander……..to your first post, what is that teacher doing now? Is he/she still teaching real science or has the establishment shut him/her down?
As for your European/American schools tome……..who cares, it’s apples and oranges. Maybe the European Ed. system makes sense, but it isn’t going to happen here.
There are many parent-teachers who do creative education. As long as they are paying taxes to educate other people’s children, they can demonstrate educational enhancement, and their children aren’t getting into mischief that affects their neighbors, the authorities have more pressing matters than hassling them.
I didn’t say anything about European / American schools per se. Businesses shut down. People take time off after the mid-day meal.
When public education was invented (Germany) and proposed throughout Europe and European colonies and former colonies, a lot of naysayers said it couldn’t work, and with good reasons. But it was developed, nevertheless. When people like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen proposed ordinary people eventually having personal computers that would be more powerful than 1970’s mainframes, a lot of people thought it inconceivable, which was why Hewlett Packard turned down the Steves’ offer of their Apple (I) to HP to develop and market. It is also why Gates and Allen became billionaires. Gates recently recounted, “I decided to drop out of college, because I didn’t want to miss an opportunity. In retrospect, I could have stayed and graduated, then worked on our ideas because nobody was doing anything. I could have done what I did three years later, actually.”
Useful change often occurs through individual visions, sacrifice, perseverence, the ability to communicate effectively with smart and open-minded risk-takers / early adopters, and luck.
Kansas has many naysayers and those who look back for guidance all the time, rather than looking forward. What we really have is a strongly anti-experimental dominant culture. Stick with what you already know, do things the way you have done for years, rather than learn something new, and do something very different from your experience. But not all Kansans are this way, as these blogs prove.
So, one may appreciate the resistance to teaching evolution here. Evolution means change. A lot of Kansans don’t want to change.
BTW, in 1870 you could buy apples in Kansas but not oranges. Thirty years later you could get oranges in some Kansas cities. A hundred years later oranges were sold in grocery stores throughout the state. It really depends on people deciding what they want.
BTW heartlander, your little anecdote about apples and oranges was just plain stupid………….go figure.
My dear Apophis,
What would be your ideal vision of a platform or platforms for enabling today’s children to be happy and productive adults? Your vision is clearly limited to a school format, so let’s work from there.
What would be your ideal teacher-student ratio in elementary school?
Would you prefer to see 4th-6th grades have math and science specialists come in three or more days per week, or would you see no value in giving kids math-and-science-expert instruction, or in giving teachers a 2 hour break to do grading, lesson-planning, set up conferences, fill out administrative forms, etc.
How would you feel about focusing on fundamental academic skills half the day, and electives half the day?
How would you feel about adding Saturday morning classes and having 200-240 class days per year?
How would you feel about paying substitute teachers a per diem rate that is equivalent to full-time teachers’ salary and benefits value, to encourage them to prepare well for class, and integrate seamlessly when full-time teachers are absent?
How large do you think elementary schools should be?
Do you think schools should give up Title I funding if a large percentage of their teachers say, “We don’t want NCLB’?
There are oranges out there. There are grapes, pineapples, melons, Kiwi fruit, and a lot more. But if you and enough people decide “apples are good enough here,” then that’s what you will get. But don’t be envious of other people who choose to get oranges, just because you turned them down, or decided they were impossible.
You have a computer, a revolutionary communication device. You can listen to radio stations in New York and California. You can communicate with people in China, as one of my children does, instantaneously. You may have a cell phone and talk 6 hours to somebody in Texas without facing a $300 telephone bill (which in today’s dollars LD would have cost you 40 years ago) . You may have flown from here to Florida in four hours at a cost of less than 1-2 days salary. Your parents could not have dreamed any of these things at your age.
If you say certain things CAN’T be done, that only means YOU can’t do them. Just because I can’t envision building a new air taxi industry myself, or designing a fuel-cell-based car industry doesn’t mean it can’t be done, nor would I pontificate its impossibility for others to do. It’s okay to say, “I can’t do it.” So let others do it, and watch what happens.
do you need to have your meds adjusted heartlander?
You keep straying from the central theme of the thread.
You sound like a broken, RWingnut, record.
do you need to have your meds adjusted heartlander?
You keep straying from the central theme of the thread.
You sound like a broken, RWingnut, record.
There is a difference between being well rounded and going any direction you choose. The problem with education today is that it has become too broad in it scope. In the attempt to allow children to explore what they might be good at. It has become so narrow in scope as to be limited in focus. Given a choice of course we all would rather focus on what we like. But life is not about focusing on what we like it is about knowing how to do many things.
There is basic knowledge that is needed and that is what school should be teaching until the student is well rounded. The search for knowledge is a life long process, the problem is when you start out limiting a student to one area or another you limit them for life. You can never know everything in just one life time, so you need to know as much as you can. Once that basic knowledge has been reached then is the time to specialize. It becomes relevant, a brain surgeon need not know how to change a tire nor a mechanic know how to splice nerve ends. But both should have a basic knowledge of both fields, in that we are failing.
If you look at the state of medical knowledge a century ago, when public education was extensive, but not universal, it was primitive. A baby born then had a 49-year-average life expectency. Today it’s 78 years. If enough people had said, “It is impossible to significantly increase life expectency,” thinking of the medical knowledge of the time, without having a conviction that modern science could work wonders, so that modern science wasn’t applied to medicine (really a continuous infusion of ever-advancing science), then life expectancy would be 49 today. It wasn’t that ALL DOCTORS agreed to bring science to medicine and public health a century ago, it was that SOME “Think Different” courageous people did, initially very small numbers of them, and eventually they convinced large numbers of other people.
When the Wright brothers flew for the first time, most people thought they were cranks. It took 6 years after Kittyhawk to wake the world up in a flight demonstration in Paris. Fifteen years after Paris Midwestern businessmen were using Wichita-built planes to conduct business. Ten years after that well-heeled passengers were flying across the continent. Thirty years later they were flying to Europe. Twenty years after that middle-class Americans, including blue-collar workers were flying around America and overseas. (I have a cousin who’s a carpenter. He’s been to Europe three times.) Do you think a 1920’s schoolteacher could have dreamed of flying from here to Chicago, much less London?
A century ago Florida swampland promoters were dismissed as dreamers and fraud artists. Today Florida is the third most populous state. Texas had no hope of ever growing much. Neither did Arizona. A single invention, air conditioning, completely changed their futures.
TrueBlue,
When I talk about ‘your version of fair’ I am saying that you favor big government control of education with the aim at a particular outcome. So the government edicts you refer to would be something I think you would be in favor of, not me.
I find it very interesting for you to advocate federal control of education (the single national curriculum). Did you miss the No Child Left Behind Act? It was a big step towards achieving the systems of Germany, etc. However, just as with ‘local government control’ the national government control results in a politicized system. Just because the patchwork is now homogeneous does not make it right, much less somehow magically avoid the problems you have outlined.
My dear Apophis, you’re problem is your thinking is totally rigid and authoritarian. The editors are more open-minded than you are. They come up with ideas for threads. They don’t care if people change subjects. I’m not the only one who does this–by a long shot.
Mr. Brownlee has stated that science standards should be based on what science experts recommend. If enough Kansans reject the RW Board members’ candidacies next election, the scientists’ recommendations will be implemented. It’s up to the voters to decide. Every young person who first studies living things wonders at their designs. Biologists and physicians think in terms of designs. Pharmaceutical and biotech industry chemists and molecular biologists think in terms of designs. Engineers and physicists think in terms of designs. Does that make them “RWingnuts”?
With respect to this thread, what do you think about science? You have to think about science in order to think about science education.
We have to be a little careful about overreliance on experts. This is actually a point I conveyed in a previous thread. Had transportation experts of the Wright Brothers time, railroad and automobile industrialists, dictated transportation’s development, we would not have modern aviation. The railroads didn’t want competition. Henry Ford did get into aviation for a short period, and made a small contribution to its advancement, but dropped out.
When Louis Pasteur took up the germ theory (he didn’t invent it, but championed it), the medical profession denounced him for a decade.
Science takes society in unpredictable directions. Sometimes scientists think they understand something, and that all significant discoveries have been made, and then learn they are wrong. Physicists thought this in the late 19th century. But relativity and quantum mechanics made them 20th century physicists that the material universe was very different from what they and their predecessors thought. Nobel Laureate Robert McLaughlin calls science a wilderness. If you think you have a sure understanding of something, you’re probably wrong.
Schools are authoritarian institutions. The vast majority don’t understand science. You can tell every teacher to throw out ID and teach only evolution, or both or whatever, and they still don’t understand science. That’s why American schools don’t produce enough scientists, mathematicians, physicians and engineers for our nation’s needs. They have no difficulty producing more lawyers than the entire planet needs, but science eludes them.
“When I talk about ‘your version of fair’ I am saying that you favor big government control of education with the aim at a particular outcome.”
The only outcome I favor is that American kids get a world class education.
What I oppose are the “other outcomes” that our right-wing politicians are forcing down our throats, such as “abstinence only” sex ed (proven to not work), “no child left behind” (which improves test scores by scooting bad students out of school) etc. etc.
If a national curriculum works, and it does in every country that uses it, then we should use it here. In fact, what makes the Int’l Baccalaureate program so successful is not that it’s run at East High, but that it’s run the same all over the world.
Home schooling has certain advantages. If you are, say, a racist, you would be able to instill racism in your children without being contradicted or having your child exposed to children of another color, where he/she might come to his/her own conclusions before you finished your indoctrination. It would also insure that your children could be no less ignorant of science or math or history than you are, and would give you the opportunity to sqelch any attempt by the little devils to think for themselves!
TrueBlue,
Restating that you would force the proper education does not make the National System somehow better.
I trust the individual to handle their affairs and I will not support using force to make sure they make the choices I would make.
Okay, ProudMan, that’s the difference between you and me–I want what has been proven to be effective through actual experience and you want what makes you ideologically happy.
That’s pretty much the difference between liberals and conservatives, now that I think about it.
Can we have anti-gravity candidates too?After all,-it’s just a theory!
What Jeb says has some limited-circumstance plausibility. It never happened in our family. When one of my sons was taking a university calculus course, a 28 year old African American reentry student–a mother of two who wanted to go to med school–was impressed with his classroom knowledge. She approached this gangly blond teenager and asked if he could tutor her. He called me for advisement, which was, “If it won’t interfere with your studies, Go For It.” So he did, and loved it, and she learned calculus, and her dream is coming true.
My sister married a Latino whose grandparents were apparently never citizens. He’s a good husband and father, and we have always gotten along great, including taking fishing trips together and enjoying holiday get-togethers at their house in California.
One of my children was engaged to a Vietnamese, whose parents broke it off because THEY were racist.
I lived with a Fijian-Melanesian extended family many years ago. I thought they were descended from Africans, but anthropologists have found them to be from Asia. That was an all-time experience.
One of my most memorable experiences was working as a visitor at the Texas Medical Center in Houston. They gave me a parking pass a mile from the center. I rode the shuttle bus. I was the only white person on it. What is indelibly etched in my mind was the exuberant, gregarious joy expressed by the riders among their own kind. But in the white-dominant hospital, they shut up and became “invisible”. (I had my sons read Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”.)
Families farm in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, where most kids in most rural schools don’t have a single African-American classmate, and Mexicans were non-existent until a decade ago. Public education doesn’t teach them interracial relationships. In many universities and colleges, school-educated blacks and whites tend to largely self-segregate.
Or consider Wichita in the 70’s, when the OCR found Wichita schools to be unlawfully segregated. USD 259 took belated steps to integrate by developing a forced-busing plan–and triggered a massive middle-class white flight to parochial schools, even among non-Catholics.
Today, black students in USD 259 are disproportionately bused to achieve integration. This robs them of a lot of time that could be used for productive purposes, like studying, which is the opposite of what you want to do if you really want to improve their futures.
Government-institutional “solutions” often don’t work very well, do they?
Our nation’s history of slavery still reverberates strongly. This has nothing to do with home-schooling.
Sorry, I meant “Jed”.
Also we had close friends who were Filipino when I was growing up as she was a coworker with a Filipina. Her husband took me fishing and we had many terrific meals at their house. It is sad that Kansans have been so sequestered, they don’t understand that multicultural communities WORK in other places. Maybe they will in Kansas some day.
“she” being my mother.
TrueBlue,
Every time you talk about children getting a ‘proper education’ you are doing what makes you ideologically happy. That is why liberals and conservatives have more in common with totalitarians than with libertarians.
The desire to force things upon others is how we are differnt.