Re: Commentary: Have some faith in the kids

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:00:45 -0500, Jason Spaceman
<notreally@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>From the article:
>--------------------------------------------------------
>By Christine Rosen, CHRISTINE ROSEN is a fellow at the Ethics & Public
>Policy Center in Washington and the author of "My Fundamentalist
>Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood."
>
>AS A CHILD, I attended a fundamentalist Christian school in St.
>Petersburg, Fla. At Keswick Christian School, the Bible was our
>textbook. We pledged allegiance to it every morning, and it was a
>daily subject of study, like math and English; we memorized lengthy
>passages of Scripture and were tested on their meaning.
>
>On the first morning of my fourth-grade science class, I was told to
>open my King James version of the Bible and read from the book of
>Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
>
>It was the early 1980s, and "intelligent design" was not yet in
>fashion; instead, we learned creation science. My teacher taught us
>that God had created the Earth and everything on it in six days,
>resting on the seventh, and we learned that we were all descendants of
>that first living, breathing couple, Adam and Eve. We made
>mathematical calculations based on Genesis that proved that the Earth
>was not billions of years old but a mere 6,000, and I learned that the
>Grand Canyon had been created by the biblical Great Flood.
>
>My science textbook was Christian, and it bolstered these lessons with
>warnings about the lengths to which evolutionists would go to prove
>their theory. We were likely the only schoolchildren in Florida who
>knew the details of the Piltdown Man fiasco, in which human remains
>found in a Sussex quarry early in the 20th century were used, in an
>elaborate hoax, to prove the existence of evolution's "missing link."
>We watched film strips, with titles such as "God of Creation," that
>reminded us that the natural world disproved Darwin's theory of
>evolution. I found books in the school library with titles such as
>"Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!"
>
>Browsing the shelves of our public library, however, I found different
>books ? books that explained Charles Darwin's theory in more detail
>and offered scientific analyses of the age of the Earth that made no
>mention of Genesis or the Great Flood. When I asked my teachers about
>this, they tried to offer guidance. But puzzling through these
>contradictions marked the beginning of my first serious questioning of
>fundamentalism, a questioning that eventually led me away from the
>tenets of fundamentalism and to a secular life.
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Read it at
>http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rosen19jan19,0,265959.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
>or http://tinyurl.com/7tmkt

Maybe some of her Creationist past still rubbed off on her. What is
more important is often not only what is said but what is not said.

How many of her fellow classmates so exposed also became critical
thinkers because of it? How many of them not only remain ignorant of
the truth, unlike her, but also publicly advocate the continued
teaching of the lies they were taught themselves?

It goes back to what I stated earlier here. You don't teach critical
thinking by teaching crap and then just hope somehow that critical
thinking will kick in. Everything taught in school should be taught
truthfully, even if it is about conflicting ideas and philosophies.
It's just that there is no challenge to the TOE as a whole that has
any scientific merit to justify it being taught as science.

The argument that she states here, and she is hardly the first to push
it, seems to be based on post hoc rationalizing, coming up with some
justification after the fact, and in this case in support of something
that would do more harm than good. If you were to take what she said
at face value you can come up with the conclusion that Creationism,
along with all of its demonstratively false lies, should be taught as
science in furtherance of a good education.

One could actually take her testimony to heart and come to the
conclusion that much needs to yet be done in improving the quality of
the teaching of what passes as science in this country and that there
is indeed a need to teach a good honest class on critical thinking
skills...but properly!

.

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