Posted on 05/22/2006 8:14:10 AM PDT by RightWingAtheist
A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit.
Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class.
Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes.
"I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions.
"They laugh and they call me 'ape,' but I don't mind. If I stopped, they would lose out."
April, who is leaving the town when his contract runs out at the end of the school year, said the principal first told teachers last fall not to talk about evolution.
Debate over the teaching of evolution in Salluit - a village of 1,150 located along the northern coast of Quebec, between Ungava and Hudson bays - is pitting an increasingly religious Inuit population against a Quebec education system that's becoming more and more secular.
Although April, 32, won't be punished, his reprimand has outraged Quebec's scientific community.
"What he's doing is right and it's best for the kids," said Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. "Science should not be de-emphasized for non-science."
Over the years, controversy over the teaching of evolution has erupted in Pennsylvania, along with U.S. states in the so-called Bible Belt. In November, the Kansas State Board of Education approved science standards that cast doubt on evolution.
But with heightened religious fervour among the Inuit and Cree in northern communities, some observers suggest Canada might have its own Bible North.
Molly Tayara, a member of the Salluit school's volunteer education committee, said she'd tell her four school-age children to walk out of a lesson on Darwin.
"The minister (of education) may have come from apes, but we're Inuit and we've always been human," she told The Gazette in a phone interview.
"Most of us rely on God's word. ... God made Adam and Eve and they weren't animals."
Legally, Inuit schools in Quebec's north must teach evolution, as it's part of the provincial curriculum. After April's story came out this week in the magazine Quebec Science, Education Department officials immediately called the school to ensure the curriculum was followed.
Topics like reproduction and diversity of species are part of Science and Technology, a course for Grades 7 and 8. Darwin's work, based on the premise that humans and other animals have evolved over time, is further covered in Grade 11 biology - an elective course.
"We want the curriculum to be applied. We're just saying the theory of evolution could be taught more delicately to students," said Gaston Pelletier, director of educational services for the Kativik School Board, which serves northern Quebec's 14 Inuit communities. "We have to respect their view."
Even money says the prior name was three letters followed by four numbers. JMO, though ;)
Not getting much butt-in-chair time these days. Demolishing even a falling-apart stone wall is hard work, but that's nothing to putting it back together. Now that's done, but somehow I've got tons of leftover parts to haul away.
Disappointing, I know. I would have expected better of the eskimos.
She admitted it on this very thread. Since she talked about my ignoring her links in her previous incarnation, I wonder if it was mlc....
They're called "Hissssspanics."
You have said that about every link I have ever posted so I am not surprised at your remarks about this one.I just went back over every post you have made here.
Since this is the very first crevo thread you have been on with this name, are you a retread?
Généralement, je ne me réjouis pas du malheur des autres, mais, en ce cas-là... ;^D
Too much work. There must be something you could make out of all that rubble.
"Nobody knows the rubbles I've seen?"
As they say at DU, freudenschade.
I didn't know mcl-etc. got banned!
It's a loaves and fishes, Fibber McGee's closet, Marx Brother's stateroom scene miracle how much dirt and rock comes out of a little volume of hillside when you knock the wall down.
I'll either look like young Arnie S. or a Buchenwald inmate by this time next week.
Well, now you can "get your own dirt!"
</creationist humor mode>
A sneak-back troll, and I missed it? Damn!
Seashells in West Virginia? It's evidence of the Flood!
(Got any dynamite?)
See post 47 :-)
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