Posted on 04/01/2006 11:05:01 PM PST by balch3
AgapePress) - A southern California school district has voted to allow teachers to present scientific criticisms of evolution in biology class. Under a new policy adopted by the Lancaster School District, "discussions that question the theory of evolution may be appropriate as long as they do not stray from current criteria of scientific fact, hypothesis, and theory."
The school district officials' vote came after a citizens group called Integrity in Academics organized support for the policy change. Attorney Larry Caldwell, president of the group Quality Science Education for All, also backed the new guidelines. Such policies are not frequently found in public schools, Caldwell notes. "This is significant because, in too many school districts around the country, we find that any criticism of Darwinism is suppressed," he says.
Education activists have been advocating revisions in the Lancaster, California, school district with respect to the teaching of evolution for some time now. Besides the changes in the school's science education policy, the district is also looking to adopt new science textbooks: the current texts do not even mention the so-called Cambrian explosion -- a period in the fossil record marked by a geologically sudden appearance of complex multi-cellular macroscopic organisms.
This omission, despite the fact that California's science framework specifically says that the Cambrian explosion should be presented in seventh-grade science, is significant to those who claim much of the evidence and many of the weaknesses of Darwin's evolutionary theory are not adequately addressed in public school science classrooms.
Caldwell is pleased with the Lancaster schools' new guidelines allowing for the scientific questioning of Darwin's theory and the discussion of its flaws in science classrooms. He says getting a school system to adopt a science policy like the one this district has now embraced can be a difficult and daunting task.
"One of the things I was so impressed with in this district," the quality education advocate notes, "is that the assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum, Dr. Howard Sundberg, was the one who actually crafted the policy that was passed. Before he went to the board for the vote, he was able to get the science teachers in the district on board with the policy as well. And that, in my experience, is very rare."
Caldwell, who tried unsuccessfully to get a similar policy passed in Roseville, California, is urging other school systems to follow Lancaster's lead. The Lancaster School District will be adopting new biology textbooks next year.
Why, because Science is being held to its own standards? Without that, Science is mere religion.
Absent other forces, gravity always wins.
More evidence that evolution is losing ground to real science. so much for the Dover trial putting an end to the introduction of ID in the classroom. the dover decision, as I ahve said on numerous occasions, has absolutely no ontrolling authority over any other case.
you, also, seem to have missed the following defining clause: "discussions that question the theory of evolution may be appropriate as long as they do not stray from current criteria of scientific fact, hypothesis, and theory."
ID doesn't come close to meeting those standards.
if evolution meets those standards, dicussing id would not be a problem.
*sigh*
the theory of evolution (specifically, the combination of theories including common descent and speciation due to random mutation and selective mechanisms) quite thoroughly meets the scientific definition of a theory.
Dittos and AMEN Brother
[schizophrenic whining] placemarker
YOU have enough nerve to call ME a whiner?
Now that's rich
you demand freedom to complain about conditional/limiting clauses in scientific theories, and about the provisional nature of science as a whole...
and you also demand freedom to complain about the exact opposite.
yes: you are whining.
Oh but I forgot when yall have nothing to say that's what you
you do call names.
According to the fossiel record
I am not whinnig.
project much?
what is a "fossiel record"?
and what, pray tell, is "according to" such a thing?
go worship. may it do you well.
project much?
Is that "project or project"?
project - as in "throw forth"
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