Posted on 09/30/2005 6:05:42 PM PDT by neverdem
Atheists and believers inadvertently make the case for separating school and state
In a trial that began this week, a federal judge in Harrisburg has been called upon to decide whether intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory. Once he has settled that controversy, perhaps he can tell us what killed the dinosaurs and whether there are civilizations on other planets.
The courts have to deal with some scientific issues, such as the reliability of DNA evidence and the side effects of arthritis drugs. But the origin of life, a subject that arouses strong emotions and implicates deeply held beliefs, has no obvious relevance to the guilt of murder suspects or the liability of pharmaceutical companies.
It has become a legal issue in Pennsylvania only because the parents of Dover are divided on the question of how public schools should address it. Some say children should be informed about the weaknesses of Darwinian theory, while others object to what they see as religious indoctrination in the guise of science instruction, which they argue amounts to an unconstitutional "establishment of religion."
Meanwhile, Sacramento attorney Michael S. Newdow, who has replaced Madelyn Murray O'Hair as the nation's most reviled atheist, has renewed his challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance. In a straightforward application of 9th Circuit precedent, a federal judge in San Francisco recently ruled that recitation of the pledge in public schools violates the Establishment Clause by imposing "a coercive requirement to affirm God."
Both of these cases are ostensibly about the separation of church and state. But they also highlight the need for the separation of school and state.
When schools are run by the government, the details of ninth-grade biology classes, the propriety of patriotic rituals, and every other educational issue—ranging from how to teach math and reading to the contents of vending machines—becomes a political issue. Even when the arguments don't end up in court, they generate acrimony and resentment that could be avoided if education were entirely a private matter.
I'm not suggesting that parents would be completely satisfied with their children's schools if the government got out of the education business. No doubt they would always find something to complain about. But if they were not compelled to pay for government-run schools, they would be in a better position to choose schools that reflected their values and preferences, and the compromises they made would be voluntary, instead of terms imposed by the winning side of a political battle.
People on both sides of the debate about intelligent design theory—which posits that certain aspects of life on Earth can't be explained by the combination of random mutation and natural selection because they are "irreducibly complex"—implicitly acknowledge the problems created by a coercively funded, one-size-fits-all approach to education.
A senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which promotes intelligent design theory, told The New York Times, "We oppose any effort to require students to learn about intelligent design because we feel that it politicizes what should be a scientific debate." One of the parents who is challenging Dover's decision to inform students about the intelligent design controversy regretted that "there's no way to have a winner here" because "the community has already lost, period, by becoming so divided."
In addition to avoiding the sort of clashes that have torn apart communities such as Dover, the separation of school and state could, paradoxically, foster more rigorous and open discussion of controversial issues in the classroom. I like the idea of incorporating intelligent design into the science curriculum as a way of teaching critical thinking, but I think the treatment should go beyond Dover's lawyer-vetted, four-paragraph statement to include a serious examination of the theory's claims and the rejoinders from its critics.
More generally, I'd like to see a high school curriculum centered around real controversies, not just in science but in history, law, economics, and other fields of study. If enough parents felt the same way, a free market in education would offer that approach as one option among many. In a government-dominated education market, by contrast, we get mass-produced curricula and textbooks that are notoriously dull because they're aimed at preparing students for standardized tests without offending anyone's sensibilities.
As for the Pledge of Allegiance, it strikes me as idolatrous, with or without the mention of God. But I might be willing to live with it if I could find a school where the excitement came from intellectual engagement instead of political combat.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason.
Busy night.
ping
socialism is the problem in all of these 'public school contraversies', its a shame it is always overlooked as this legitimizes it.
i·ro·ny  ( P ) Pronunciation Key (  r -n , r-)n. pl. i·ro·nies
[French ironie, from Old French, from Latin r na, from Greek eirneia, feigned ignorance, from eirn, dissembler, probably from eirein, to say. See wer-5 in Indo-European Roots.] |
"In a government-dominated education market, by contrast, we get mass-produced curricula and textbooks that are notoriously dull because they're aimed at preparing students for standardized tests without offending anyone's sensibilities."
Enter homeschooling. Homeschooling can focus on teaching instead of indoctrinating. That's why homeschoolers as a rule tend to do well in the public arena.
Sullum does not know science from a hole in the ground. Here he mistakeningly calls ID a theory, when in fact it is not. And he also erroneously equates it with other knowledge as being a legtimate aspect of "...the science curriculum..."
Meanwhile, ID and creationism have falsely, but effectively, been labelled as conservative viewpoints by the MSM.
"I'm not suggesting that parents would be completely satisfied with their children's schools if the government got out of the education business. No doubt they would always find something to complain about. But if they were not compelled to pay for government-run schools, they would be in a better position to choose schools that reflected their values and preferences, and the compromises they made would be voluntary, instead of terms imposed by the winning side of a political battle."
Yes now who would pay for evolution if there was no public funding? KEYS to their kingdom, taxation without representation!!!!
Meanwhile, ID and creationism have falsely, but effectively, been labelled as conservative viewpoints by the MSM.
More than just the MSM seem to think that, but I'm kind of neutral on that point.
Oh, no.
Not more of this crevo crap.
I'm not so certain that that's a false label. How many DU threads have you seen extolling the virtues of ID and Creationism?
I'm not so certain that that's a false label. How many DU threads have you seen extolling the virtues of ID and Creationism?
Sorry, I didn't say that. It was someone else. You have a very good point though.
Oops... I'm so used to italicized quotes that I got sloppy. Sorry about that.
I italicize the bigger ones usually or put the quotations. However, when it is a shorter one and I think that my responses can be easily distinguished I leave it out.
If the shoe fits, you have to wear it. The fundies are trying to sneak the bible into science classes, and the republicans are faced with the resulting headaches. Both parties have the same problems with their whacked out fringe: accomidate, repudiate or ignore?
If the shoe fits, you have to wear it. The fundies are trying to sneak the bible into science classes, and the republicans are faced with the resulting headaches. Both parties have the same problems with their whacked out fringe: accomidate, repudiate or ignore?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! I didn't say that!!!!!!! But you too have made some points to consider.
That wasn't the point of the article which I took home. Did you read it? Comments# 3 & 4 are more to the point.
I though iron e was something they put up at the top of certain fraternities.
For the science room, no free speech
By Bill Murchison
Dec 28, 2005
Will the federal courts, and the people who rely on the federal courts to enforce secular ideals, ever get it? The anti-school-prayer decisions of the past 40 years -- not unlike the pro-choice-in-abortion decisions, starting with Roe vs. Wade -- haven't driven pro-school-prayer, anti-choice Americans from the marketplace of ideas and activity.
Neither will U.S. Dist. Judge John Jones' anti-intelligent-design ruling in Dover, Pa., just before Christmas choke off challenges to the public schools' Darwinian monopoly.
Jones' contempt for the "breathtaking inanity" of school-board members who wanted ninth-grade biology students to hear a brief statement regarding Darwinism's "gaps/problems" is unlikely to intimidate the millions who find evolution only partly persuasive -- at best.
Millions? Scores of millions might be more like it. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in evolution unaided by God. A Kansas newspaper poll last summer found 55 percent support for exposing public-school students to critiques of Darwinism.
This accounts for the widespread desire that children be able to factor in some alternatives to the notion that "natural selection" has brought us, humanly speaking, where we are. Well, maybe it has. But what if it hasn't? The science classroom can't take cognizance of such a possibility? Under the Jones ruling, it can't. Jones discerns a plot to establish a religious view of the question, though the religion he worries about exists only in the possibility that God, per Genesis 1, might intrude celestially into the discussion. (Intelligent-designers, for the record, say the power of a Creator God is just one of various possible counter-explanations.)
Not that Darwinism, as Jones acknowledges, is perfect. Still, "the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent scientific propositions."
Ah. We see now: Federal judges are the final word on good science. Who gave them the power to exclude even whispers of divinity from the classroom? Supposedly, the First Amendment to the Constitution: the odd part here being the assumption that the "free speech" amendment shuts down discussion of alternatives to an establishment-approved concept of Truth.
With energy and undisguised contempt for the critics of Darwinism, Jones thrusts out the back door of his courthouse the very possibility that any sustained critique of Darwinism should be admitted to public classrooms.
However, the writ of almighty federal judges runs only so far, as witness their ongoing failure to convince Americans that the Constitution requires almost unobstructed access to abortion. Pro-life voters and activists, who number in the millions, clearly aren't buying it. We're to suppose efforts to smother intelligent design will bear larger, lusher fruit?
The meeting place of faith and reason is proverbially darkish and unstable -- a place to which the discussants bring sometimes violently different assumptions about truth and where to find it. Yet, the recent remarks of the philosopher-theologian Michael Novak make great sense: "I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and religion." A discussion isn't a sermon or an altar call, is it?
Equally to the point, what does secular intolerance achieve in terms of revitalizing public schools, rendering them intellectually catalytic? As many religious folk see it, witch-hunts for Christian influences are an engrained part of present public-school curricula. Is this where they want the kids? Might private schools -- not necessarily religious ones -- offer a better alternative? Might home schooling?
Alienating bright, energized, intellectually alert customers is normally accounted bad business, but that's the direction in which Darwinian dogmatists point. Thanks to them and other such foes of free speech in the science classroom -- federal judges included -- we seem likely to hear less and less about survival of the fittest and more and more about survival of the least curious, the least motivated, the most gullible.
Wow, that was from a while ago. Not sure why you posted to me. It seems more appropriate to some others. Maybe because I was the last one to make a post I suppose.
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