Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In late July in Frankfort, Kentucky, supporters and critics of the Next Generation Science Standards clashed during a hearing over proposed changes that could be made to the science curriculum of the state’s public schools. The new science standards were developed with input from officials in Kentucky and twenty-five other states with the hope of making science curricula “more uniform across the country.”
Those who spoke in support of the new education standards said they are “vital if Kentucky is to keep pace with other states and allow students to prepare for college and careers.” Supporters feel the new standards “will help beat back scientific ignorance.” Critics—on the other hand—claimed that the new standards were “fascistic” and “atheistic” and promoted thinking that could lead to “genocide” and “murder.”
According to the Courier-Journal, nearly two dozen parents, teachers, scientists, and advocacy groups commented during the Kentucky Department of Education hearing on the Next Generation Science Standards—which are a broad set of guidelines that were developed in order to revise K-12 science content that would meet the requirements of a 2009 law, which called for educational improvement.
Blaine Ferrell, a representative from the Kentucky Academy of Sciences, said, “Students in the commonwealth both need and deserve 21st-century science education grounded in inquiry, rich in content and internationally benchmarked.” Dave Robinson, who is a biology professor at Bellarmine University, said that neighboring states had been more successful in recruiting biotechnology companies. He added that Kentucky “could get left behind in industrial development if students fail to learn the latest scientific concepts.”
But the majority of comments reportedly came from opponents of adopting the new science standards. The critics “questioned the validity of evolution and climate change and railed against the standards as a threat to religious liberty, at times drawing comparisons to Soviet-style communism.”
Mike Wynn (Courier-Journal):
Matt Singleton, a Baptist minister in Louisville who runs an Internet talk-radio program, called teachings on evolution a lie that has led to drug abuse, suicide and other social afflictions.
“Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky Constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,” Singleton said. “Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state.”
Another critic of the new standards claimed that they would “marginalize students with religious beliefs.” She said they could lead to the ridicule and physiological harm of such students in the classroom and that they could also “create difficulties for students with learning disabilities. The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them.” She added, “We are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.”
An environmental geologist who spoke in support of adopting the New Generation Science Standards said that he was “offended by comments suggesting that evolution leads to immorality and ‘death camps,’ calling it a horrible misrepresentation of scientists. He said that he—unlike many of the critics who had commented at the hearing—had actually read the standards. “Everything is actually based on evidence — arguments from evidence are actually given priority in the Next Generation Science Standards.”
According to Kevin Brown, Kentucky’s associate education commissioner and general counsel, comments made at the standards hearing “will be reviewed by department staff and summarized into a statement of consideration with formal responses. Board members will then consider the comments and responses in August and decide whether to make changes or advance the standards to legislative committees for approval.”
Robert Bevins, the president of Kentuckians for Science Education, said he expects that the board will send the standards forward without changes. Let’s hope that Bevins is right.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
School science is hotly debated in Kentucky: New standards are called ‘atheistic,’ ‘fascist’ by some (Courier-Journal)
Next Generation Science Standards In Kentucky Draw Hostility From Religious Groups (Huffington Post)
Kentucky: Next Generation Science Standards (Kentucky Department of Education)
Next Generation Science Standards for Kentucky (National Center for Science Education)
Kentucky’s new science standards draw heated debate (The Spectrum)
Will A Denier Scrub Curriculum That Teaches Climate Science To Kentucky Schoolchildren? (ThinkProgress)
Sen. Mike Wilson | Science standards include troubling assumptions (Courier-Journal)
Science Standards Draw Fire From Ed. Leader in Kentucky Senate (Education Week)
Next Generation Science Standards In Kentucky Draw Hostility From Religious Groups (Cafe Mom)
David,
I went through the spam filter this morning and freed several wrongly trapped posts from there. You had nothing there. Your posts were probably eaten by the WordPress Vortex of Doom ™.
Moderator – I had a post yesterday that never posted and still has not, and another one just now that is stuck in WordPress. Please help get them out and posted.
Correction “claim to teach biology” should read “claim to have taught biology” (to “high school biology teachers”)
davidm,
“You are begging the question here. Many interpret the empirical evidence to be very strong evidence of a Creator. Whenever someone says “total lack of evidence” it is clear to me that they follow an educational system based upon popular dogma rather than careful analysis. At the very least, you have very little respect for anyone who might interpret the data differently.’
Who are the “many” that you speak of? Can you produce that empirical evidence that proves there is a Creator?
That’s not what you claimed when you were arguing for the existence of the both non-existent and nonsensical “subjective proof”, David.
There is no empirical evidence for the existence of God. Merely the psychology of humans to try to find patterns and ascribe meaning where there is none. It’s called Apophenia. Apophenia is writ large over your demonstrably superficial understanding of science, statistics and (yes) even law.
Elaine M “When creationists need to update their “science,” they reach for a thesaurus.” one wonders what next gen creationism will be:
Clever architecture or architecturism
Smart construction or constructionism
perhaps…:D
“Creation Science 101” by Roy Zimmerman
Ahhhh. I see. Mea maxima culpa, Elaine.
And my sincere apologies to any perverts I may have inadvertently offended, both standard and non-standard.
Gene,
An ordinary pervert would be a standard deviant.
😉
“I view it as poorly thought out wishful thinking by those wanting to shoehorn the data to fit in with a literal interpretation of an Iron age view of how the world worked.”
Bingo.
____________________
OS,
You mean a standard deviation isn’t an ordinary pervert? I thought for sure that was the conclusion of Dr. Sigma Freud. 😉
Creation-Science and Intelligent Design: Different Names for Religious Theory
By Robert T. Pennock
February 10, 2009
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/02/10/creation-science-and-intelligent-design-different-names-for-religious-theory
(Robert T. Pennock is professor of philosophy, computer science, and EEBB at Michigan State University and author of the books Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism and Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological and Scientific Perspectives.)
Excerpt:
When creationists need to update their “science,” they reach for a thesaurus.
Creationism in the 1970s and early 1980s rode into town under the name of “Creation-science,” a term coined by Henry Morris. It claimed to be free of religious commitments and to be based entirely upon science. Arkansas and Louisiana passed legislation to have students compare creation-science and evolution, but both laws were struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. Disguising a religious view as science doesn’t make it one. Following the Supreme Court decision in 1987, creationists regrouped and rebranded their views as “Intelligent Design (ID) Theory.”
ID claimed to be free of religious commitments and to be based entirely upon science and to have nothing to do with creationism. Its advocates promoted their new textbook, Of Pandas and People, that would let students compare “Design Theory” and “Darwinism.” They eagerly awaited a chance to try again in court. I critiqued Pandas in my book Tower of Babel back in 1999, and noted how it appeared to simply substitute the term “designer” or “master intellect” for “Creator,” but that the basic ideas were essentially the same. Little did I realize at the time just how literally true this was.
When ID got its own day in court in 2005 in the historic Kitzmiller case, the plaintiffs subpoenaed drafts of the book and discovered how the key terms had been switched after the 1987 Supreme Court decision against Creation-science. In draft, Pandas had been titled Creation Biology, and the concepts were familiar as well. For instance, in the published book ID was explained in this way:
Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact—fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc. [Pandas 99-100]
But in the pre-1987 drafts, the prior creationist terminology had been used:
Creation means that various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent Creator with their distinctive features already intact—fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc. (Pandas draft pp 2-14, 2-15)
This kind of search-and-replace substitution was found throughout the book. Expert witness Barbara Forrest even unearthed a linguistic transitional form showing how the ID authors had slipped when doing a hasty cut-and-paste in the manuscripts. In trying to replace the term “creationists” at one point, they failed to select the whole word before pasting in the new term “design proponent,” resulting in the hybrid “cdesign proponentists.”
One finds this kind of terminological disguise at all levels in the history of creationist writings. The purportedly big new idea in ID—what one ID leader, Michael Behe, called “irreducible complexity” and what another called “specified complexity”—was previously made under the name of “functional complexity” by Henry Morris. And in both cases the substance of the argument—that no natural process like evolution could explain such a feature and so it must have been created … er … designed—was the same. Scientists have shown these arguments to be unsound—as Texans put it, “that dog don’t hunt”—but creationists just resurrect them with a new name. (The TalkOrigins.org archive is a handy place to find rebuttals to these endlessly repeated arguments.) With massive amounts of evidence, it was easy in the Kitzmiller case for Judge Jones to conclude in his ruling that ID is just “creationism relabeled.”
Since their humiliating defeat in Dover, creationists studiously avoid using the term Intelligent Design in their lobbying. Now the word from the Discovery Institute (the lead ID advocacy organization) to their political supporters in legislatures and boards of education is to call their proposals “academic freedom” bills. One now hears the revised Discovery Institute slogans and talking points: Teachers should have the right to “teach the controversy” so that students can “analyze and evaluate” the evidence themselves about the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution
Stateside Texas:
Creationists May Be Helping To Choose Biology Textbooks In Texas
Huffington Post
By Rebecca Klein
Posted: 08/06/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/creationists-textbooks-texas_n_3689154.html
Excerpt:
It seems as though creationists could have a sizable influence in the decision over what biology textbooks students in Texas will use in the coming years.
The Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit civil liberties group, posted on its website last week that it had discovered that six people chosen to review biology textbooks for the state had ties to creationism. Of the 28 invited to review textbooks, around a dozen went to Austin recently to make final textbook recommendations, the Texas Freedom Network wrote.
The Texas Freedom Network charged in a subsequent blog post that of that group of about 12, which approves the biology books used for at least the next eight years, four people had creationist backgrounds — a sizable proportion of the review team.
According to the Texas Freedom Network, some of the textbook panelists with a history of creationist beliefs include Raymond Bohlin, who is a research fellow at an institute that promotes intelligent design, and Walter Bradley, a retired professor who co-wrote a book about creationism. Bohlin and Bradley did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Texas A&M chemistry professor Daniel Romo –- who is listed as a “Darwin Skeptic” on the Creation Science Hall of Fame website — confirmed to The Huffington Post via email that he is a member of the panel, although he did not attend the final review in Austin. Romo, who said he served on a previous panel regarding science textbooks, noted that he got involved with the textbook review after being “initially invited to submit an application by someone who partnered with Liberty Legal Institute.” The Liberty Legal Institute is a right-wing, nonprofit organization with the mission of “[restoring] religious liberty across America — in our schools, for our churches and throughout the public arena,” according to its website.
According to the Texas Education Agency, the Lone Star State is one of 22 states with formal procedures for textbook adoption. The process requires publishing companies to submit sample textbooks to the Texas Education Agency, textbook review panels and regional education service centers. The textbook review panels consider submissions and make recommendations to the state’s commissioner of education about which books to adopt.
The Texas State Board of Education solicits nominations for textbook review panelists before it selects a final group, according to the Texas Education Agency website.
Josh Rosenau, the programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education, charged that creationists have disproportionate representation on the Texas panel because of board member influence.
DavidM2575 One last word because I missed it out by mistake:
RE: “then it is testable and it should rightly be considered scientifically testable. I am always amused how so many scientists will never admit to a creationist model being scientifically testable until AFTER it has been agreed upon that it has been falsified”
The creationist model proposes certain ideas which are testable, such as the Grand Canyon was formed very quickly as the result of a deluge from the Noah flood. Such ideas are clearly testable and have been demonstrably shown to be false.
I don’t think any scientist has ever said the creationist model is not scientifically testable; although I suspect some may feel they’re banging their head against a wall having shown a creationist hypothesis to be false only to have the same hypothesis come back.
What isn’t scientifically testable is the existence of god. The existence of god as defined in any religious text is as separate from the creationist model as evolution theory is from explaining how life started in the first place, I’m sure you’re familiar with abiogenesis. There may be a tenuous link but they’re totally separate questions requiring separate hypothesis.
Even if creationism were shown to be true and it begged the question who or what created it that may only point to the existence of an entity capable of doing so, although pantheism may suggest the universe created itself intentionally. Such an entity is however quite unlikely to be like any god proposed by the various religious texts mainly because they’re all far too human with human failings such as jealousy, rage and egomania.
What scientists may say is the creationist model isn’t a theory because it fails to predict anything, at the most it is a useless theory. I view it as poorly thought out wishful thinking by those wanting to shoehorn the data to fit in with a literal interpretation of an Iron age view of how the world worked.
Everyone knows the dinosaurs are extinct because Jesus shot ’em all for us
Speaking of Kentucky, Box Turtle Mitch made the mistake of using a shot of James Pence in one of his ads. Does anyone seriously think the Hillbilly would take that sitting down?
LK, don’t hold your breath. I am still waiting for a certain someone to explain if he even knows what a standard deviation is, and what it is used for.
David: “…then it is testable and it should rightly be considered scientifically testable. I am always amused how so many scientists will never admit to a creationist model being scientifically testable until AFTER it has been agreed upon that it has been falsified”
***
What is the testable proof or testable proofs that dinos and humans co-existed? That humanity was a specific creation, a creature (and mate) deliberately created? I’m interested. Just educate me on those two things as they can be resolved by science. I assume that scientifically testable and provable statements must also come from the creationists. I’m not a scientist, a lawyer, I don’t do maths and I’m sliding into senility. Convince me, give it a shot. reduce it to the basic scientific proof. I’m interested.
DavidM: did you ever stop to think the blank stares you got from the teachers you were training were the expressions of people wondering how they could get their money back.
As far as evolution promoting atheism, apparently you haven’t considered that science can actually promote respect for the awesome ability of the divine.
You demonstrate your hubris to presume to know god’s method. You think small.
RTC wrote: “As far as evolution promoting atheism, apparently you haven’t considered that science can actually promote respect for the awesome ability of the divine.”
Actually, that is my perspective as well. I see an incredible genius in designing a genetic system like we have and an evolutionary process that maintains itself from all kinds of mutations and mistakes of an entropic system. The problem is that science does not allow any kind of sentiment like this to be expressed when it comes time to publish. We can talk about the facts, but it must always be interpreted through an atheistic paradigm and never interpreted from the perspective of a designer who set it all in motion.
Elaine:
Here’s some more happy news. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/creationists-textbooks-texas_n_3689154.html
Elaine:
Neither did the Jesuits. Modern creationism is an invention of religious fundamentalism, which in turn represents a dumbing down of theology.