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."
Or men; either.
They are NOT trying to 'protect childrens lives'; but to control us further.
If they were TRULY concerned about 'dead children' - ABORTION would be gone from this country!
"The ol' "God is bad for killing 'innocent' babies" tangent."
Tangent!?
You don't think that any God who would kill innocent babies, commit genocide, etc is bad?
<< If they were TRULY concerned about 'dead children' - ABORTION would be gone from this country! >>
Ahhhh, the old "they are bad for killing innocent babies" tangent.
Just noticed something that got past me before, Elsie. Why did you put the word 'innocent' in quotation marks?
The better question is "where does 'freedom' end, and child abuse begin"?
And this is only one example.
No, not as a 'science' book, a fact book. Science is sometimes right, but also often wrong, and is constantly changing. The Bible is always right, and will never change. The difference between the two seems to evade your limited cognition.
I don't know about talking, but I'll vouch for typing; most of them are dweepers, and hang out here on the evo threads spouting nonsense, and calling it science, while they taunt the creationists :o)
Nothing like someone else deciding for me what's best for my kids and having the ACLU to back them up in having it forced on us through the judiciary
You are SO right. There IS nothing like it.
Nicely stated (#290.) That's one thing that gets me. The evolutionists' standard insult on these threads is that ID is not "science". OK, I'm willing to accept that. But what is science? Here they'll provide the most up-to-date definition of science, top of the charts, hippest, with it, dude. 100 years ago that definiton was different, 500 years ago it would contradict how they preach it today, in September, it may be adjusted again. That's fine, that is how human matters work, but see it, acknowledge it, step back and get some perspective on it. This is the best we humans can do with it today, as it was the best 100, 500 years ago. The Bible, as you said, never changes. Everything else passes...
mega-dittoes
You still haven't answered my detailed post on the global flood on another thread.
The evidence for a global flood simply is not there. The global flood is belief, trying to overrule science.
That the bible cannot change shows that it is not a science book. Science has learned a lot, and changed significantly, in the past several thousand years. The bible is religion, and, as you point out, has not changed.
Science progresses.
Would you like to have the medicines of 500 years ago? The chemistry? The electonics? (Whoops, there was no electronics 500 years ago!)
If you like the distant past that much, let me know. I'll teach you how to chip a nice arrowhead. Whoops, a spearhead. Arrowheads were more recent.
"Creationism is connected only to a 2000-year-old text written at a time when almost all humans believed in superstitions."
Huh? You might want to get your facts straight before making assertions like this.
Gal 3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
The concept of women being equal in value to men is Biblical, it did not originate with Darwin. If people get the idea that Eve is inferior to man because of her being a secondary creation, that is the misunderstanding of men, not what Scripture teaches.
Darwin did not foresee that his idea would contribute to equal political status for women, ...
What is there to back this up?
The ACLU just found a bunch of useful idiots in the evos in their drive to get religion of any kind removed from education. To some of the evos it MIGHT be a matter of *keeping science pure* but to the ACLU, who is behind them, it sure isn't. I don't have a doubt, either, that the ACLU gives a rip about *keeping science pure*; just so long as it suits their purposes. When they are done with that, they'll turn on the evos next.
For all the comparisons between creationists and the Taliban that keep getting presented here, the only difference I see between the Taliban and ACLU is the method to their madness. Their ends are the same; destruction of western civilzation and Christianity.
I think the current battle is ID is being falsely promoted into the schools as science, when it is actually creation lite.
Who is it that is trying to force their ideology on the kids?
What is intelligent design?It's the missing link between creationism and religious instruction masquerading as biology.
Bruce Bower, Science News, vol. 168 (Nos 26 & 27), 2006, p. 414:
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