[kidd]

There is a reason for teaching impressionable young people to accept a rigid dogma such as the evolutionary twaddle introduced to students in biology classes in jr.high school. That reason is to get young people used to the idea of being told what to think instead of leading them into learning how to think. That's the difference between education and indoctrination. Indoctrination is telling a student what to think. Education is helping him discover how to think for himself.

Well said. There are other areas, other than biology, where schools are indoctrinating our young:

1) "Racheal Carson is a hero" - Her book "Silent Spring" was very influential in restricting the use of DDT. Schools present her as a hero for the environment. The schools don't teach how all of the claims against DDT usage have been refuted and that malaria, that could have been controlled by DDT, has killed tens of millions.

2) "Humans are causing global warming" - This is drummed into young heads of mush from K through 12. The evidence against this silliness is never presented.

3) "Guns are bad" - No evidence is ever presented at all. No discussion of Constitutional rights ever takes place.

And so on. In the case of Darwinism, I would be happier if biology teachers simply pointed out the huge holes in Darwinism and left it as an "I don't know" and "Darwinism is far from being a complete explanation". Instead it is presented as "this is fact" or "this is what happened", much like when teachers discuss global warming - "this is fact".

[Twodees]

Thanks for the response. Darwin's SWAG (as I insist on calling it) is the purest kind of Hassayampa tale. The people insisting on having it presented as fact to schoolkids get absolutely frantic if its value in an elementary or jr. high curriculum is even questioned.

This makes me suspect that it's a religious idea of the atheists who are desperate to suppress the practice of religion. They are aiming at planting doubts in the minds of children whose religious beliefs are bound to contain origin stories of some sort no matter what religion their families practice. This makes the Darwin SWAG a curriculum item guaranteed to offend everyone but atheists.