The new standards remove current requirements that students be taught the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. Instead, teachers will be required to have students scrutinize "all sides" of the theories.So starting in 2011, Texas teachers must now openly question evolution's worth, viability, and accuracy and give equal time to the "scientific" evidence that God just made the planet 10,000 years ago and put fossils there to test us. You stay classy, Lone Brain Cell State!The new standards will determine what will be included in science textbooks in Texas. Because of its size, Texas could influence what publishers print in books used in other states. Friday's adoption comes after many months of debate over drafts for the standards, which were last revised in 1998.
On the one hand, the standards encourage questions about certain evolutionary concepts, satisfying those who are critical of the theory. But those supportive of evolution were partly mollified because calls to teach "insufficiencies" or "weaknesses" of the theory were rejected.
The Discovery Institute, which encourages teaching that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer, called the vote "a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution."
I can't be too hard on Texas however. Northern Kentucky has the Creation Museum, and it's about 25 minutes from my friggin' apartment.
[UPDATE]Christopher Hitchens in Newsweek:
The Texas anti-Darwin stalwarts also might want to beware of what they wish for. The last times that evangelical Protestantism won cultural/ political victories—by banning the sale of alcohol, prohibiting the teaching of evolution and restricting immigration from Catholic countries—the triumphs all turned out to be Pyrrhic. There are some successes that are simply not survivable. If by any combination of luck and coincidence any religious coalition ever did succeed in criminalizing abortion, say, or mandating school prayer, it would swiftly become the victim of a backlash that would make it rue the day. This will apply with redoubled force to any initiative that asks the United States to trade its hard-won scientific preeminence against its private and unofficial pieties. This country is so constituted that no one group, and certainly no one confessional group, is able to dictate its own standards to the others. There are days when I almost wish the fundamentalists could get their own way, just so that they would find out what would happen to them.I can sort of see that (see Jeff Amestoy's California's Prop 8 argument) but it seems altogether weird to me.
Still, having to codify this stuff into law means the laws can then be challenged.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment