I've always known that Texas has been leading the country in regards to public school textbook regulation and printing, why, I absolutely do not know. I just watched a PBS documentary called The Revisionists, and although I've heard the totally bonkers things Young Earth Creationists say in the past (see Sarah Palin), it's shocking that these people are allowed to be in charge of what children throughout the entire nation will be learning in school. We can only hope that their teachers are intelligent enough to teach actual science, history, and the rest rather than tell students what some Christian, Creationist, dentist from Texas believes they should be teaching.
Don McLeroy, although seeming to be a very kind and gentle soul, has absolutely no concept of reality. In a speech at a Tea Party rally, he said in reference to professors and colleges,"…these so-called experts have taken over our national government. Well I disagree with those experts. Somebody's gotta stand up to experts." Sigh. They are called experts because they have spent decades, tens of thousands of dollars, and devoted their lives to knowing as much as there is to know about a subject. How can you disagree with the experts when you haven't done the same? How can you disagree when you haven't allocated even an iota of your education to the narrow fields of study scientific experts have? That certainly doesn't keep Mr. McLeroy from claiming to be an expert himself however. The film included him talking to a group of children about Noah's Ark, "It is an absolute fact that there was plenty of room to fit two of each critter on the ark." Absolute fact? No person on the planet can say that even if they were an expert in Biblical Studies, which McLeroy is not. Could he name every creature on the earth in whatever year the flood supposedly happened? Does the bible name them all? No and no, because no person alive now nor any person who has ever been alive could do so.
In the same speech for a Tea Party rally mentioned above, McLeroy talks about how the US is the world's "last best hope." Hope for what, is unclear to me but he and the other conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education gave the very distinct and purposeful impression that their proposed agendas for the textbooks will be the thing to somehow redeem the US and the rest of the world. That their regulations will promote what they deem as intelligence. But if a person looks at where the US stands in relation to the rest of the word regarding intelligence (fourth, under Canada, Israel, and Japan) considering our abundance of resources and our extravagant and outrageous use of them (US population is 5% of the world but we consume 25% of the world's resources), we are quite behind intellectually. With everything we've had for so long, we should be leading in every field, but because of people like Don McLeroy our children aren't even allowed to accept evolution as a documented and scientific fact. (Of course technically it's a theory, but things exist such as the fossil record, homologies, and specific examples like the finches on the Gallapagos whose beaks evolved in different ways to be able to consume different foods, which leave no shadow of doubt.) Not only are they not allowed to accept that, but also are forced to "learn" from books which were written under guidelines implemented by a politicized board of persons who pray at each of their meetings. What place does God have in education and why are elected officials allowed to irrefutably include church in state? What place do people who exhibit obvious smugness, arrogance, and inflation when their biased and unfounded regulations pass, have in determining what our kids should learn? How can these people determine what should be included or excluded when they don't understand the basic fundamentals of the concepts themselves? Especially people who, considering their extremist beliefs, say things like,"The amount of power I have, at times, boggles my mind." What boggles my mind is why the rest of the states in the country are allowing their students to use the books regulated by these people? Because it's just easier? That's the part that really makes no sense to me. Why have states, especially those which are supposed to be the most intelligent in the country such as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, allowed for a state such as Texas (ranked 25th in intelligence) to manage their children's learning?
The Texas State Board of Education, which McLeroy is a member of, has consistently voted down any proposal to remove the phrase "strengths and weaknesses," from science text books' coverage of evolution. It was mentioned that this phrase, specifically, confuses teachers because they are forced to invent "strengths and weaknesses" within a scientific theory which isn't how science works. Teachers are trained to teach science not convolute their lessons to include terminology which is unrelated. When it was proposed that this terminology be removed, the board challenged those who requested its removal to prove that evolution existed and explain the origins of life on earth. Of course they know that no one can answer this question!
Toward the end of the documentary they spoke to an Anthropologist who had been consulted throughout. He eloquently put it this way,"The evolutionary science in which I participate never asks the question of the origin of life mainly because we simply don't know. Trying to give the answer is like trying to write a fairy tale." Such as the Bible perhaps?
No comments:
Post a Comment