Utterly Meaningless

If they can force graduation standards on the schools I’m sure they could come up with a way to “encourage” the schools to voluntary adopt some science standards. Although I don’t want to see it come to be, watching the fundies fight it could be quality entertainment!

More Golden Rule of School. You want your kids living and learning in true freedom, then treat Everybody’s Kids that way. . .otherwise it’s ashes, ashes, we all fall down (the London Bridge Lesson.)

It’s not the kids making these choices, though, about what they are free to learn. It’s local yahoos imposing religious thinking on science class.

Not that Laden has the answer but being free to learn misinformation and have public schools (us) pay for it, isn’t really much in the way of freedom.

Nance

Remember that bible-based curric from a private school that the college wouldn’t accept as a science credit?

Do colleges do the same thing if you go to Yahoo Valley High and are (on or off the record) taught bible-based science as part of your science public school science class?

Nance

Not that Laden has the answer but being free to learn misinformation and have public schools (us) pay for it, isn’t really much in the way of freedom.

True. But imagine how bad this proposal could be. Would you really have wanted Farris/Dobson setting science standards for the whole country for the last 8 years?

It might have been good for homeschooling, as at least half the country still has working brain cells. But I believe it would have been very bad for the nation.

No, I wouldn’t have wanted that. But I had been thinking of a sane administration. How foolish of me. 🙂

But it’s still a decision left up to the whims and religious beliefs of locals as opposed to federal-level pols.

Nance

Yeah, but if the local wackos want to teach YEC in the schools, any one of us here could run for the School Board and have a reasonable chance of winning. Not so at the federal level.

I think this is one of those problems best solved locally.

I’m all for local control of public schooling. BUT — constitutional protections are federal. So I guess if this is religious intrusion (fraud?) into the science curriculum of a captive nation of kids, then the feds do have a sort of civil rights role in preventing it?

Nice theory. Truth as a civil right. That would leave a lot of parents open to being sued by their kids. And what would happen to Santa and the Easter Bunny? 🙂

Seriously, though, the right to an education is not recognized as a federal civil right. I don’t think you’re going to be able to argue your way any higher that statewide science standards. And we already have those.

I was thinking more of the establishment clause. 🙂

Not the right to an education as much as the right not to have government establishing religious curriculum as truth.

Doesn’t it amuse you when people assume that the federal government will make a success out of anything? Harry Browne used to ask, “What’s your favorite government program?” I’ve asked people this. They may say the military, libraries, food inspections, or roads (rarely anything else). But honestly… we accept a pretty low standard for those things. If we set out to run them like things we really wanted to do, instead of good ideas imposed from above, how much more successful, how much less wasteful, how much less politicized and slack would they be?

I dunno — it’s very appealing, this notion that if only WE have more say, and incredibly complex human systems are organizationally “”to our direct control, we can do anything better with less waste and more innovation. But I don’t see that it’s true in practice. Read Dorner’s Logic of Failure. Take the House of Representatives, elected by smaller cohorts of us so they’ll be more directly representative of our local concerns. Or take the way we cling to the illusion that locally electing bozo crony school superintendents and creationist school board members is “more successful” and “much less wasteful” and “less politicized” . . .

I don’t think all our massive systems failing to change for the new millennium is just about locale or size. Or that we could do any better by returning to a balkanized collection of local fiefdoms.