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."
Are you a theosophist? Is this what you believe?
Neither creationism or evolution is based on observable fact. Neither is hard science... it crosses into the realm of metaphysics. The truth of human origins has absolutely zero basis on our modern life except to excuse modern policy.
I have?
Wow! There are some backwoods Eskimo's who are just as superstitious and scientifically ignorant as some of the most radical creationist trolls who frequently infest this board. Who could have imagined it?
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?
I agree with any and every creationist (I won't speak for anyone else) when they state that they believe what they believe based on their faith.
I tend to have difficulty when they step into the scientific arena.
But that's just me.
Have a banana.
What specifically would you consider a creationist point of view? You haven't actually said what you believe.
Well fossils and the geological column are actually observed--that is, seen. Talking snakes and world-wide floods have not been observed.
The TOE is intimately connected with huge bodies of knowledge about radiometric dating methods from physics, with chemistry, with astronomy, with biology and genetics. And even with medicine.
Creationism is connected only to a 2000-year-old text written at a time when almost all humans believed in superstitions.
Fair enough. Thank you for being honest.
I don't agree with the creationist point of view because the evidence does not support creationism. Show me peer reviewed credible evidence and I would be very happy (even ecstatic) to evaluate such.
That covers a lot of territory. If you believe in a strict literal interpretation of Genesis you would not be able to accept physics, chemistry biology, geology, anthropology, or any physical science at all.
I appreciate that you are honest about being a Biblical creationist, and you are not using the failed notion of "intelligent design" to pretend.
It's a belief, but it's not a theory.
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