The forces of dumb are winning on every front:
Teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts, but according to a national survey of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, it continues to flourish in the nation’s classrooms.
Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.
That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.
The survey, published in the Jan. 28 issue of Science, found that some avoid intellectual commitment by explaining that they teach evolution only because state examinations require it, and that students do not need to “believe” in it. Others treat evolution as if it applied only on a molecular level, avoiding any discussion of the evolution of species. And a large number claim that students are free to choose evolution or creationism based on their own beliefs.
Can you blame the cautious 60% for not wanting angry mobs coming after them?
Suck It Up!
I am slowly coming around to the idea of home schooling if I should have kids. That or move overseas.
A Farmer
At my rural high school, our Biology teacher taught us about evolution, then said, “Of course, I don’t believe that. I believe the world was created in 6 days, as was written in the Bible.” So all-in-all, he did teach evolution, and didn’t teach us that God created Adam from clay. We would have to go read it ourselves.
daveNYC
How the hell does evolution work on the molecular level (other than DNA being one really big molecule).
valdemar
No, this can’t be true! Creationists and ‘Intelligent Design’ proponents are persecuted in America! It’s a fact – Fox says so.
New Yorker
@Suck It Up!:
Yeah, sometimes I think I’m going to need to emigrate if I want my children to get a decent education. There was just an article in the NY Times about how Germany is facing a shortage of workers….
Alex
Same way it works on every other level. Variation accumulates and non-random propagation results in changes over time.
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum)
I agree, “Go along to get along” is a great lesson for our kids. Bending to the will of mouth breathing morons is a lesson every school age child should be taught. Silence is golden, as it were.
Grover Gardner
My sister-in-law teaches in NC schools and this is exactly the stance she has to take if she doesn’t want an enormous amount of hassle from a lot of the parents.
A Farmer
Also, the physics and chemistry teacher, who retired the year before I started high school, used to spend the first 6 weeks of the year in sophomore chemistry teaching about God and the Bible, prior to getting into molecules and atoms, according to my parents.
eric
i have not looked at the study, but are there geographic breakdowns of the 60%? I can imagine a large number of scenarios that numbers are skewed as you head farther south.
As for home schooling, there is no reason not to do both. I have a 6 year old in Chicago. Whenever she has questions about “stuff” I answer them while supplementing those answers with videos from you tube. I have spent hours bookmarking videos covering the whole of human knowledge (art, athropology, science). So, for example, she asks how did people make the first tool…so, i explain rocks as smashing hammers to crack open food and then show her videos of how people make arrow points using rocks. By pre-screening the videos, I can assure that she gets interesting info in a non-boring manner. (non-boring to me of course).
There is a ton of stuff…i cant wait till she watches potholer54.
eta. further to farther
mistermix
And then we have this:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/new-mexico-science-education/
Might as well quit and cook meth.
Matt
In college I took a health sciences course and the professor would always pepper his lectures with the most irritating, subtle shit like, “Back in caveman times–if you believe that sort of thing–”
Or maybe I misunderstood since all college professors are bleeding heart liberals.
joes527
@A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum):
Oh yeah. Lose your job, lose your car. Lose your house and let your students be taught by a replacement that comes from the 13%.
Nothing like taking a principled stand to fuck everything up
Baud
Someone needs to write a \children’s book about evolution entitled, “What Your Teachers Won’t Tell You.”
mikefromArlington
My Irish wife, who comes from what is just about 100% Catholic country thinks how Catholics and Christians over here push creationism is ridiculous. Sure, the older crowd in Ireland believe it but the younger, better educated generation knows better.
The Bible was fine for a time when there wasn’t a scientific explanation for events on the planet. Which, by the way, is one of the ways of determining an event is a miracle when an individual is going through the canonization process. But now that science has advanced, I don’t understand why religious leaders are fighting back against logic and scientific theory backed by some concrete evidence.
This isn’t the age of Aristotle any longer. Scientists aren’t to be prosecuted and ridiculed as is occurring now with the far right Christians and Catholics.
THE
Evolution Made Us All
h/t Pharyngula
eric
@joes527: yes….i call this the myth of the social hero. You hear people talk about how they would have stood up against racism in the south in the 60s, as if such a stance was easy. People are willing to destroy lives to win. they will boycott you, ostracize your children, physically threaten you. they are bullies that have no consciences
Baud
@joes527: Principles, like money, are more fun to play with when they belong to other people.
merrinc
@Grover Gardner:
My daughter is currently being educated in NC public schools (my son graduated HS last spring) and this is exactly why I have always made a point of discussing – in detail – what they are studying in school. Fortunately, I haven’t had to correct a whole lot of misconceptions, let alone outright falsehoods. Most of the nonsense they’ve brought home came from fellow classmates. A particularly obnoxious little twit in my daughter’s social studies class last year insisted on a daily basis that global warming is a hoax dreamed up by Al Gore and the other crazy old hippies to make money. We all had a big laugh over that one because when one thinks crazy old hippy, our former vice president is always the first to come to mind, right?
This year in social studies (7th grade), her teacher showed them the entire episode of Issac and Ishmael from the West Wing. She came home and asked if we could add the whole series to our Netflix queue. (Yes, I am a proud mama, thanks for asking.)
schrodinger's cat
Was it always like this or is this a new phenomena?
cmorenc
The ONLY reason vast numbers of teachers across America aren’t also similarly fudging on whether the age of the universe (13.7BY) and earth (4.5BY) are instead only around 8K to 10K years old (i.e. “young earth”) is that unlike Biology, the issue isn’t addressed in any required course in most school systems, nor is it addressed in high school physics. It’s only really discussed (except in brief passing fashion perhaps) by advanced courses offered by a scattering of high schools, taken by the sorts who are bent on scientific or engineering careers of the sort based on hard fundamental sciences, as opposed to say those going to be civil road engineers.
eric
@merrinc: may i recommend the Connection Series(s) from James Burke. they are on you tube and they are very engaging. She might like. There are three series, plus two other differently titled series.
lots of fun stuff.
Uloborus
@mistermix:
Not that this will change anything, but evolution isn’t controversial among anyone but Christian fundamentalists. It’s backed up by mountains of evidence. There are no competing theories, and no need for them because there’s no evidence against it that holds up to even a cursory examination.
@mikefromArlington:
The bible wasn’t even a good explanation then. The Jews that wrote it haven’t believed Genesis was a literal creation story for… well, a Hell of a long time. Long before Christianity.
@Original Post:
I don’t read these numbers the same way. I see them as heavily skewed by teachers who aren’t deliberately not teaching evolution, they’re just not meeting the actually very rigorous standard described here.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@daveNYC: The Journo just doesn’t understand science terms. The Journo heard “microevolution”, thought micro = molecular and voila, you get the strangely written sentence.
dennis
Is it any wonder that surveys rate us so lowly in science and math achievement, when half our population preaches that science is false, you should believe whatever myth you want to believe regardless of the scientific evidence, and everyone should just “make up their own minds?”
lacp
@mikefromArlington: Why are the religious leaders fighting? It’s about getting paid.
Punchy
Who fucking cares? Kids can figure out the game much faster than they get credit. They know damn well that god putting Adam and Eve on the planet isn’t science; but they know that all their teachers are colored by their backgrounds. Kids understand what’s science and what’s not when it comes to this creationism/evolution crap.
Now, if they’re injecting Jeebux into math lessons and U.S. history discussions, then there may be a problem….
cmorenc
The precise reason why wingnuts have made such a determined effort in some states to win majorities on state education boards and textbook selection committees is to not only to force selection of texts that walk gingerly around creationism vs evolution, avoiding teaching the latter as “fact”, but to thereby create a basis for disciplining teachers who depart from the approved curriculum contained in the textbooks.
scav
OT but useful if some are in need of reminding that Karma may be a viable theory: Man stabbed to death by cockfighting bird. Choose your titles. Man killed by armed bird? Man killed by own fighting cock? Carry on.
schrodinger's cat
OT Breaking news
Tunch’s long lost twin found in Japan
Click here for details…
Josie
Parents should not expect public school systems to teach anything controversial or demanding critical thinking, because they are just not geared for that. When you undertake to educate the masses, you can only handle basic skills, if that. I’m not sure that this is a new development. All parents should be ready and able to enrich their children’s education by teaching critical thinking skills, good judgment, artistic expression and any other processes the parent deems important. It may take extra time, but it is an essential part of parenting.
BR
Meanwhile, China is eating our lunch in scientific output:
http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/02/07/china-the-new-scientific-superpower/
This graph is only information sciences, but the trend is true across the board:
adolphus
@eric:
Eric: For issues related to evolution, I would also recommend the National Council for Science Education at http://ncse.com/
Lots of downloadable teaching materials and suggested curriculum. Some of it you have to pay for, but they are a very worthwhile organization.
HRA
@Punchy:
You said it much better than I could have ever contemplated.
Kids know more than they are ever given credit for.
El Cid
First off, States Rights!
Second, the only book anybody needs is the Bible. Magazines are permitted. Also, the Left Behind series.
Third, our children don’t need all this book learnin’ no way.
kay
This is so funny, because I spoke with grown daughter about this last night. She just realized she never learned evolution. She says her high school teacher admitted he wasn’t going to cover it, because it was “too controversial”. When he said that, she turned to a friend of hers (a girl who is still her friend) and complained and the friend said: “you believe in evolution?”
She was one of only two students in the whole class in a public high school in rural Ohio who “believed” in evolution, not counting the science teacher.
She thought about it because she read we’re 15th in the world in education.
Jude
I can blame them. When you take a job, you take the responsibilities that come with it. If you don’t want to teach people facts, don’t become a teacher. If you don’t feel comfortable dispensing the entire range of legal pharmaceuticals, don’t become a pharmacist.
The “cautious 60%” are doing more damage than the 13% who explicity advocate creationism, and they don’t deserve the jobs that they have.
I’m tired of people who don’t want to live up to their job descriptions getting a pass.
Zifnab
I remember back in high school when my biology teacher gave the state mandated disclaimer that we can neither confirm nor deny the validity of creationism. However, creationism would not be on the test. So we were encouraged to just follow the damn textbook.
My teacher was cool and my class was devoid of evangelical puppet-heads, though. So once that was done with, biology went down as one of my favorite classes.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Josie: You’re kidding, right?
WyldPirate
Interesting. Many of the primary problems with the issue of teaching evolution are covered by the first few comment
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum) starts us off with the “go along to get along” mentality by the schools. The administration/school boards don’t want to hear shit from the parents about this issue. Grover Gardner gives us a direct example of this type of “siege mentality” that many teachers fall under. Then we have mistermix giving us state-supported sanctioning efforts to try to weasel out of the controversy where no controversy should exist.
Why should no controversy exist? Because the theory of biological evolution is, from an evidentiary standpoint, the best-supported paradigm in all of science.
But why should we be surprised by this given the spinelessness of politicians and administrators in government? Why should we be surprised when the Rethugs have been packing school boards at the local and state level for years? These people have demonstrated their spinelessness for years. They have avoided evidence and propagated horseshit with their pandering to the magical thinking of the public for years. Authorities across the board in schools will abandon defending their teachers in a heartbeat.
I’ll add another problem with the teaching of evolution—many of the science teachers are wholly unqualified to teach science as education majors. Hell, for that matter, most undergrad Biology majors leave college without a broad-based understanding of science and especially evolution that would enable them to effectively teach the subject. Then you also have the fact that many of the students are believers in the particular strain of “Magical Sky Daddy” thinking that allows them top deny evolution despite the evidence even if they are scientists (especially BS-level) and educators.
It is seriously demoralizing watching the US devolve into an Idiocracy/Kleptocracy. This issue is just one of thousands that exhibit the fact that the US is slowly circling downwards in the toilet bowl headed for the sewer.
Dave C
As a biologist in training, this pisses me off to no end.
kay
@Jude:
It’s just really hard. They’re a powerful force. I’ve witnessed screaming, tearful fights over to To Kill A Mockingbird.
You have no idea what it’s like out there :)
merrinc
@eric:
Ah yes, Connections! Great suggestion; that was an amazing series. I hadn’t thought about looking for it on YouTube but we’ll add it to the list.
New Yorker
I should say I do remember evolution being covered as the basis of all biology in my high school bio class….but then again I was educated in New York State public schools, and we all know New York ranks as one of the fakest states in Fake America.
WyldPirate
@BR:
China also has a shitload of shitty and fraudulent science coming out of their country. Not unlike some of the shitty products made with substandard materials and ripped-off counter-fitting of goods, plagiarism and fabricated results
General Stuck
Reflexive belief in fairy tales from an old book frees up the murrican mind for more lucrative thinking on how to latch onto stray dollars. None of that libtard mental masturbation, egg or chicken shit, and wasted effort pondering which came first. It is the sunshine of an unfettered mind for hunting profit better than your neighbor. Purely natural for survival of the fittest in a capitalist habitat, so to speak.
Redshift
@Josie:
Oh, bullshit. Yes, a good parent should supplement their child’s schooling with more education and enrichment, but let’s not diss public schools by declaring they only teach “basic skills” just because some teachers have been bullied by the morons. I learned a heck of a lot more than “basic skills” in school, and there are plenty of really good teachers doing great work out there. (Yes, because of our idiotic system of school funding and various other factors, there are also plenty that aren’t, but a blanket dismissal of public education isn’t helpful.)
A Farmer
@kay:
Western Ohio rocks. By the way, did you see our new governor in George Will’s column Sunday? (pimping blog)
Citizen_X
I just want to add that in science, “intellectual commitment” /= “belief.” As a matter of fact, “belief” = 0.
@Punchy: Bullshit. If kids are so savvy, then why do those numbers either never change, or get worse?
Adults are obligated to teach the truth to young people. That’s why we have schools. Expecting kids to figure it all out on their own is reprehensible.
At least, that’s my belief.
RalfW
The reign of god on earth will, it appears, be entirely filled with idiots and fanatics.
We Unitarians will have a discussion about it over there in the corner.
jwb
@Josie: It’s not the educating the masses part that’s the problem; it’s expecting that you can educate the masses without putting adequate resources toward the education. Who has the time and money to “enrich their children’s eduction” as you advocate? Only those who do not need to spend that time doing other things like working to keep a roof over the family’s head and put food on the table.
Punchy
Cock pokes holes in asshole?
Zifnab
@Jude:
That’s incredibly harsh. If you think teachers shouldn’t need the luxury of remaining political, you have never been a teacher. Hell, I doubt you’ve ever even met a teacher outside of schooling.
I’ve known more than one teacher get shit-canned for damn near no reason at all. Teachers fired on the grounds of suspicion of gayness. Teachers fired for not picking the right girl to lead the student choir. Teachers who retired in the face of an avalanche of whining, nagging parents. And I haven’t even touched on teachers getting fired over evolution.
The modern high school is an incredibly politically polarized place. Half the parents want their kids taught from the Books of Ronald Reagen and Pat Robertson. The other half show up with “I’m a gay communist who <3 Nancy Pelosi" bumper stickers just to piss their neighbors off.
Teachers who aren't best friends with the Superintendent walk a very fine line on virtually every subject.
Violet
In elite private schools they don’t teach that creationist crap. They might in religious private schools, but not in the ones everyone really wants their kids to attend.
rickstersherpa
One of the big changes I have seen since I grew up in the 1960s is the way this issue has regressed over the last 30 years. I have to give Dobson and the others on the Christian Right credit for adopting the social psychology and sociology skills of Madison Avenue in spreading their belief system. The role of “church” in most people lives cannot be understated. Outside of work, it is the most important social activity most people have these days, and for the Evangelical churches you have to accept “creationism” as doctrine. That it has also become a political test issue with Movement Conservative is revealed by the way lay Roman Catholics are adopting it, even though the Church itself has always been careful to treat Genesis as allegory since the days of early Church fathers through St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Further, the Church, since Pius XII has accepted evolution as the source of the human body (the soul, well that is a matter of faith and not science and hence is another question). Here is most recent statement, which by the way is one of the shortest and most convincing arguments for the fact of evolution, as explained by Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, that I have ever read:
“According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the ‘Big Bang’ and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5 – 4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution.[33]”
WyldPirate
@Uloborus:
This is a wildly off base exaggeration.
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
I think I can boil this down for you:
Reading rots the mind.
There!
WyldPirate
@Zifnab:
This is a huge problem and it is becoming more widespread in post-secondary settings as well.
Teachers are guilty until proven innocent and are at the mercy of all sorts of wild-ass accusations from parents and students and the spineless behavior and desire to avoid litigation by the school administration.
There is little wonder why so many of the 60% of the “keep out of the controversy” crowd avid the subject. They have bills to pay.
FormerSwingVoter
OT: Man Killed By Angry Cock
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41466543/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
The Moar You Know
Yes, I can. Their fear encourages those who would “come after them” and has the unfortunate side effect of turning America’s children into idiots who believe science is a matter of belief – not the scientific method.
RosiesDad
It took hundreds of years to get from medieval times to flying to the moon and yet we are going to manage, as a society, to go back to the Middle Ages within the last 20 years of my lifetime.
Simply amazing.
Redshift
@jwb: And in part because the response of our Galtian overlords to women having professional lives (a good thing) was to declare that they would now pay everyone so little that two incomes are needed to keep “household income” where it was before with one.
matoko_chan
@rickstersherpa: consider the empirical data.
Partly this is because America is the first instantiation of a nation based on protestant thought, carrying on with the strong anti-intellectualism of Calvin and Luther, and partly…..it is simply because american conservatism has just become memetic selection for stupid…where positive social capitial rests not on IQ and education, but on loyalty and support for wrong, idiodic, non-empirical, bad, and counterfactual dogma.
but the lowest and the most oppressed among us will save us.
The demographic timer goes tick….tick……tick….
El Cid
I often hear anti-evolutionists express their comfort with ‘micro-evolution’ (‘small’ changes in their view such as bacterial resistance or bird differentiation recently) but being skeptical about ‘macro-evolution’ (evolution of humans from common ancestors with other primates).
These are the same people who can’t prove any cases of micro-miracles, much less macro-miracles responsible for creating the species and genera etc. differentiation they too accept.
Punchy
We have schools because the law mandates them. Perhaps you’ve never been a teacher….parents can initiate a shitton of problems for a teacher if they want. Can complain to principal, school board, state agencies. Can make up phony accusations. Can organize other parents to do likewise. Thus teaching this creationism/evolution becomes a survival technique.
It’s supposed to be all about the kids, but in the end, it’s all about parents. Always has been; the only diff now is that parents (esp. in the South) have been in a decade+ radicalization process caused by Fox News, Rush, Beck, and 8 years of Bush rule. And they’ve become vocal as hell.
FWIW — this doesn’t end in HS anymore. This helicopter parenting has oozed into the college scene; my BIL almost quit his professor gig due to the increasing inanities of the parents…..from 1000+ miles away.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Meanwhile, here in Illinois, I’ve learned that elementary schools apparently no longer teach about the dinosaurs. The excuse is that kids are all up on dinosaurs before they even reach grade school these days, but the suspicion among teachers is that it’s a way to avoid “controversy.”
(I put controversy in air-quotes because it’s not a controversy. It’s sheer moronitude).
Xenos
@Violet:
Oh absolutely. At the St. Grottlesex institution I attended back in the 80s there were a few students who had been told by their parents that the ‘big bang’ and evolution were radical ideas promoted by the communists. The teachers would have none of that shit. It was stamped out and stamped out hard, because the last thing they needed was parents paying $30,000 a year in todays’ figures getting pissed that their little darlings were going to blow a college interview by sounding like a superstitious schmuck.
kay
@A Farmer:
Well. Don’t get too crazy :) Western Ohio is adequate.
I read an article a coupla years ago that Toledo public school teachers are avoiding evolution, too, so it isn’t just rural.
I can’t read George Will because just the fact that he still gets paid upsets me, but your blog looks great.
matoko_chan
And you see….the founders and framers wanted the Noble Yeoman Farmers to have representation…not control. They tried their best to prevent that by design.
But such is human nature…trying to ensure the representation of Teh Stupid just led to the triumph of Teh Stupid.
Ash Can
@schrodinger’s cat: LOL! “Does this tail make my ass look fat?” (And I love the scenery in some of those videos!)
Strandedvandal
When I was student teaching my Jr. High Biology class, we started talking about Evolution. My Master teacher, a bitter old man, blurted out to the whole class, “Evolution is as likely as a hurricane going through a junkyard and creating a fully functional 747.” I proceeded to school him on the finer points of scientific theory, index fossils, etc. I was not a typical student teacher, 22 years old and scared to death. I was 35 at the time, seen the world, had my fair share of battles with the willfully ignorant, so I wasn’t backing down. We took the whole hour debating it and he tried to get me thrown out of the school. The next day, I continued talking about evolution, fielding questions, deflecting snide remarks from the BOM, until I threw him out of my class. That was fun. No one ever stands up to these self righteous assholes, too afraid to appear to attack their religion. It’s a wonder to me, why anyone would want to teach now.
Xenos
@matoko_chan:
That is a remarkably Christian sentiment. Just sayin’.
Redshift
It’s so weird. While fundamentalists don’t like the ideas of the Big Bang and the geological age of the Earth, I don’t get the sense that they provoke the level of passion that evolution does. I believe it’s because evolution was the defining issue when fundamentalist Christianity was born, so it’s baked into its DNA.
It’s much the same as how wingnuts reflexively declare people soshulist and communist, most of the time making it very obvious that they have no idea what those words actually mean. Since the Cold War was the defining issue in their glory days, they seem unable to let go of it even after it’s long gone.
catclub
@Alex: Yeah, but have you ever _seen_ a NaCl molecule evolve into a glucose molecule?
Whatta ya say now, smart guy?
I learned this argument technique on the playing fields of West Bumfuck, Alabama.
kay
@Punchy:
It is difficult. I once watched a 25 year old high school choir director stand there helpless while a parent-helper initiated a pre-performance prayer circle that excluded one girl. It happened so fast! I made a lot of noise, too late, but he was completely unprepared for that part of his “job”.
rickstersherpa
Back when married to his first wife and was a New Deal liberal, Robert Heinlein wrote a series of short stories that were interrealted. He called them “Future History.” and part of his “Future History” is that during a long term economic depression a charismatic leader created a political party based on religous fundamentalism and established a theocracy in the United States. Heinlein had noted something about the American character and culture that made this nonsense attractive to a lot of people, particularly in tough times. ahhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_History
From Wikepedia: … Three more unwritten stories fill in the history from just before “Logic of Empire” in the early 21st century through the beginning of “If This Goes On—”. “The Sound Of His Wings” covers Nehemiah Scudder’s early life as a television evangelist through his rise to power as the First Prophet. “Eclipse” describes independence movements on Mars and Venus. “The Stone Pillow” details the rise of the resistance movement from the early days of the theocracy through the beginning of “If This Goes On—”.
These stories were key points in the Future History, so Heinlein gave a rough description of Nehemiah Scudder which made his reign easy to visualize—a combination of John Calvin, Girolamo Savonarola, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, and Huey Long. His rise to power began when one of his flock, the widow of a wealthy man who would have disapproved of Scudder, died and left him enough money to establish a television station. He then teamed up with an ex-Senator and hired a major advertising agency. He was soon famous even off-world—many bonded laborers on Venus saw him as a messianic figure. He had muscle as well—a recreation of the Ku Klux Klan in everything but name.
catclub
@Redshift: You mean, their glory days were not the late 30’s, when they were siding with the Nazis (opposing support to England) and calling themselves America Firsters? Whocuddanode?
Xenos
@Redshift: It also helpful to point out that a reliance on Darwinian evolution theory as opposed to an unscientific politically correct theory helped the West out-compete the communists back in the day.
Their eyes lose focus for a bit while they scramble around for the next loopy argument.
Citizen Alan
Guys, back when I was a high school band director (I fled to law school back in ’97), I caught flack because I had the band form a peace sign on the field in a show based on music from the 1960’s. It wasn’t because of the suggestion of anti-war hippies, though. It was because “everyone knew” (except me, apparently) that the peace sign was actually a Satanic symbol Apparently, when you break the arms off of a cross and leave them hanging, you get a peace sign.
Zifnab
@RosiesDad:
:-p You’re not really in the Middle Ages until they take away your indoor plumbing. :-p
In all seriousness, though, we are no where near the Middle Ages. Information on evolution is widely and readily available to anyone with an internet connection. And the “debate” is turned up to such a high frequency that even people who believe in creationism are familiar with the general idea (or the hackneyed cliche) of evolution.
It’s the difference between no knowing and not believing. That’s a huge difference. And it’s one that isn’t sustained by anyone in the professional fields.
The problem you are encountering is one of populism. People who weren’t counted as existing 50 years ago – Tea Bagging luddites and village evangelicals – are suddenly getting a very big soap box. This level of ignorance has existed for a long time and over a large population. Only recently has that population been given a megaphone.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 50 years ago, folks in Kansas got to believe in Creationism and folks in Vermont got to believe in Evolution, and we left each other alone. Today, we’re in a genuine war of ideas. I’m of the opinion that the right ideas – those ideas that produce valuable work product – will triumph. Creationism and ID don’t produce anything. They will only survive so long as their think tanks and church hucksters are willing to funnel money into them.
Evolutionary theory can’t lose steam. It’s too damn useful. At the end of the day, it will triumph.
Xenos
@rickstersherpa: Heinlein even referred to them as the “American Ayatollahs” years before the term became familiar to most Americans.
My god, 1978 seems like life on another planet sometimes.
schrodinger's cat
@Ash Can: He is Shiro Neko, the white cat, he is quite the internet celebrity, like his compatriot Maru. I love his Zen kitteh vibe, and the strong Tunch resemblance, with white body and orange tabbeh tail!
liberty60
I connect this to Greenwald’s essay on the similarities between Egypt and the US; in that, the religious fundamentalists have hijacked the culture, and are ignoring the very real economic misery that is befalling us, in order to push and regress the culture for their own benefit.
I saw a fascinating slideshow at BoingBoing.net about Afghanistan in the 1950s- the author grew up there, and was pointing out that in the 1950s Afghanistan was actually a fairly modern place, where girls and boys went to high school and university, wore western clothes, and lived a modern life.
It was the reactionary forces of the Taliban that drove the country backward, as they are currently doing in most of the Muslim countries, and here as well.
This is why I can’t get too worked up over the creeping Muslimification that the Right is in a frenzy about; I am more worried about the Talibangelicals right here at home.
schrodinger's cat
What I don’t understand is why evolution is such an anathema to the true believers, if they believe that God works in mysterious ways why could he not work through evolution?
Villago Delenda Est
@Xenos:
It may be “Christian” in the red letter sense of the Bible, but it’s not “Christian” in the Mammon worshiping sense of the modern American fundamentalist.
A Farmer
@kay: Thanks. I don’t think our new gov. is very smart, but Western Ohio is better than Indiana, at least we have mostly paved roads, for now.
@matoko_chan: Easy, some of us Noble Yeoman Farmers aren’t fully members of Teh Stupid, at least most of the time.
A Farmer
@kay: Thanks. I don’t think our new gov. is very smart, but Western Ohio is better than Indiana, at least we have mostly paved roads, for now.
@matoko_chan: Easy, some of us Noble Yeoman Farmers aren’t fully members of Teh Stupid, at least most of the time.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
They can’t handle the concept of allegory. They just cannot.
They want science to justify their beliefs, which are constantly in need of reinforcement. They do not have faith.
Tom65
Yes I can, but it’s not the teachers you need to be concerned about. The local school boards are so cowed by the know-nothing voters that they refuse to back the teachers.
Xenos
@Villago Delenda Est: where the red letters of Christianity and Islam overlap there is some pretty decent philosophy and ethics. That was my larger point to MC, who seems to have missed the more interesting writings coming out of the Islamic revolutionary movement. Hint, hint, it is not all fundamentalist…
Villago Delenda Est
@liberty60:
Well, as Chris pointed out a few days ago, there are serious copyright infringement issues that drive the Christianists nuts.
Villago Delenda Est
@Xenos:
The overwhelming majority of “Christians” are into Christianity for the special effects (miracles, supernatural powers, afterlife) not for the philosophy.
A Farmer
per above comment:
Don’t hold my disgrace of the English language using run-on sentences against my the English teachers at my rural public school. I spent too much time as an engineer, forgetting how to write.
jonas
@Punchy: The problem is not that kids fall victim to mindless proselytizing. It’s that avoiding the topic of evolution means that they graduate or go on to college with little or no knowledge of how biological systems actually operate or how science actually works. So you end up with people who don’t understand how scientists can model climate change while “we don’t even know what the weather’s going to be like in ten days much less ten years”, etc. That’s bad for our society.
burnspbesq
One wonders why there isn’t an angry mob defending the teachers who want to teach good science.
Sly
Somewhat OT, but I’m in the social sciences by training and have found that the best way to teach evolution to those not scientifically trained is through historical analysis and a developmental narrative. Basically you start with Greek and Hebrew thoughts on the origins and structure of life and show how over the course of a few thousand years all that stuff was gradually discarded as bullshit.
Hey, if they want to teach the controversy….
RSA
I blame the fetish for local control that dominates our educational system. In many (most?) places you have schools funded by property taxes and school boards filled with local parent representatives. They want what they’re paying for, and if that’s a science education for their children that adheres to their long-held superstitions, that’s what they’ll get.
From the article:
I flat-out don’t believe that better training of science teachers is the issue.
PurpleGirl
OT: Take some time and go to the Google home page. They are celebrating Jules Verne’s birthday. Wonderful graphic, very steampunk and the view moves. (Watch for the balloon, too.)
artem1s
@Zifnab:
true, but it is probably only going to triumph on the private school level. Not those cheap ass xtian schools you see in every fundamentalist church these days, but Andover and the University School and such. Rich peoples kids aren’t having this argument. They are too busy trying to pass AP courses and get into the right university.
Personally I would think the best way to fight this on the state level is for the state university provosts to come to an agreement that any kid who attended a known ‘creationist’ school would be required to take a year or two of remedial science before they can be admitted as a degree seeking student. You’d be amazed how fast parents would drop this crap if they knew it was going to cost them a couple extra thousand in tuition to send their kid to college.
WyldPirate
@schrodinger’s cat:
This is easy when you understand the hardcore fundamentalist Christian mindset.
These people believe that the King James version of the Bible is the unaltered, exact word of God and that every bit of it is literally true. In their minds, it is all black and white with no metaphor, allegory, etc. There is no consideration of the fact that the gap between the original writings and the King James version to account for the fact that there were massive changes from the “original” text until the KJV was written.
The crux of the issue is that evolution makes the fundie head explode when they are faced with the fact that the very first story in the very first chapter in the BuyBull is a load of steaming horseshit dreamed up by Bronze age Jewish goatherders.
Kryptik
Well, this is a nice little downer to stumble on this morning.
Christ, we really are seeing the total success of Regression, these days, aren’t we? And it’s seems so utterly fucking unstoppable. Why the fuck should I even care about things around here anymore, when it seems the prime fucking motivator of politics these days is Hippie Punching?
Stefan
OT but useful if some are in need of reminding that Karma may be a viable theory: Man stabbed to death by cockfighting bird. Choose your titles. Man killed by armed bird? Man killed by own fighting cock? Carry on.
Proof, as ever, that you shouldn’t bring a knife to a cock fight….or, um, a cock to a knife fight, I also suppose…..
Violet
@artem1s:
Yep. I made the “elite private schools don’t teach this crap” further up the thread. You make a good point about increasing the requirements for kids coming from “creationist” schools.
I don’t see why creationism can’t be taught as an extra curricular type thing. Lots of kids go to religious schools to learn whatever their religion thinks they should learn. They also learn things that aren’t typically taught in schools, like piano or fencing or whatever. There’s no reason Christian parents can’t send their kids to “creation schools” so they can learn whatever stuff they want them to learn.
matoko_chan
@Xenos: @Xenos:
except the lowest and most oppressed among us ARE FUCKING BLACK AND BROWN CITIZENS Xenos the cudlip.
moo moo
jcricket
What really galls me is that conservatives spend all this time railing about how our kids are falling behind b/c of liberal namby-pamby multiculturalism and what-not. Instead it’s a combination of lack of resources in schools (b/c of too low taxes) and the “air” that conservative politics (creationism, global warming denaliasm, civil rights revisionism) suck out of the room.
I know our galtian overlords couldn’t give a shit b/c they’ll just lobby congress for more H1-Bs or just open offices elsewhere. All they care about is low taxes and lax regulations. But it’s amazing how the titans of industry (Koch, Scaife, et. al) managed to harness the prejudice and stupidity of a large portion of our population in such an effective manner to accomplish their own ends while simultaneously fucking the people that vote for them (economically speaking).
El Cid
@liberty60: This is untrue, because otherwise this would suggest that the Soviet invasion failed to turn the nation’s rule to fundamentalist warlord drug dealing terrorist maniacs like our freedom fighting Saudi-funded and Pakistan trained hired jihadists did. And if it did, too bad for them, because they were sacrificed to the US’ goals against the USSR.
matoko_chan
@A Farmer: if you’re an Engineer, you are not a Noble Yeoman Farmer.
moo moo
Zifnab
@Villago Delenda Est:
Religion isn’t about special effects at all. It’s about a community. You go to church and make church friends. Your parents make church friends. You all go to church parties. You fundraise for church activities. You meet every Sunday morning for a “moral of the story” lesson and then you all go out for pancakes at the local IHOP together.
It’s habit forming and community building and generally benign. Right up until the preacher gets on the podium and announces it is time to lynch all the gays because he had a vision of the Virgin Mary beating off a grizzle bear shaped like Satan. And everyone has to nod and follow along or not get invited to the next pot luck dinner.
Paul W.
@Zifnab: This was my experience in high school as well, and I grew up in Texas in the early 2000’s when Bush had just finished governating.
But, then again, my teacher was pretty awesome too.
Amir_Khalid
I don’t know much about Christian creationism, other than to note that it resembles the rejection of evolution I’ve seen in conservative Muslims — understandable since they are all invested in pretty much the same set of creation myths. How do Christian creationists look at the rest of the sciences, especially where current theory is particularly counter-intuitive — like, say, relativity or quantum mechanics? And how do they reconcile rejecting the science with depending on all the pervasive technology based on it?
Josie
@Redshift: I agree about the good teachers doing good work. I did not dismiss individual teacher effort. I referred to the system, which is antiquated and inadequate. I spent thirty years fighting the good fight, so I speak with some authority. Until Americans are willing to put money and effort into their educational system, we will have what we have now–mediocrity.
@jwb: I agree completely. I did the enrichment for three boys while working full time for years. It is not easy, but for those of us fortunate enough to be able to, it is a must. The sad part is seeing the children whose parents don’t know enough or care enough to even try. For them, the answer is a complete overhaul of the system. Good luck on that.
adolphus
@artem1s:
This is already happening, though in little ways.
I don’t have a more recent link but go here:
http://ncse.com/news/2008/08/victory-california-creationism-case-001374
For a story at NCSE on the University of California successfully defending their policy of excluding students who used Creationist textbooks in high school. Not excluding, really, more like denying them credit for taking classes based on those textbooks. I will look for a more recent post on this topic.
EDIT: A more recent article on the same case. http://ncse.com/news/2010/10/end-acsi-v-stearns-006258
matoko_chan
@jcricket:
wallah…..America suppressed biotech for a decade in the name of medieval ensoulment.
moo moo
Joseph Nobles
No governmental funds for abortion, no governmental funds for teaching evolution.
And, oh, let’s be afraid of the encroaching sharia law! How dare Muslims try to invade Christian turf!
vtr
I have often wondered why it is that some people who so fervently call themselves Christian and believe totally in the Word of Jesus – the Gospel – insist on adhering to a mythological dogma is irrelevant to the New Testament and Christ. As opposed to, for instance, thinking of other people the way you’d like them to think of you.
jayjaybear
@Zifnab:
FTFY. It goes the other way…the hucksters and think tanks flog the hell out of Creationism and ID because it makes them money.
joes527
Because parents and school board members defer to confident teachers.
Yeah, that’ll work.
The above quote is stupider than creationism.
AliceBlue
I graduated in 1971 from a rural county school in north Georgia. We were taught the theory of evolution as a matter of course; no one got upset. Our reading list in lit glass consisted of most of the books that are controversial today (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, etc.). It’s just unreal that things have deteriorated to this level. I’m glad I don’t have kids.
matoko_chan
@Amir_Khalid: America suppressed biotech for a decade in the name of medieval ensoulment aka “freedom of religion”.
moo moo
Amir_Khalid
@Zifnab:
For a moment there, an utterly inappropriate image went through my mind.
Kryptik
@Joseph Nobles:
Don’t forget, no funds for letting gays serve like real Americans (‘cuz they obviously aren’t), no funds for making sure the air is clean (because that costs businesses, don’cha know!), no funds science research in general (because dammit, we know everything already, it’s in the Bible and Adam Smith!).
And they’re winning. They’re always fucking winning.
A Farmer
@matoko_chan: Due to the Great Recession (and maybe job performance), I went from full-time engineer and part-time farmer, to full-time farmer and unemployed engineer. With the coming local government cut-backs, the next couple of years don’t look good for private-sector civil engineers serving the public sector.
Xenos
@matoko_chan: Moo backatcha. The most oppressed within the Dar el Islam are often the poorest and blackest. Read up on the Zanj rebellion, if you care.
In checking the wikipedia in looking to see if the scholarship is online, I found that it is now thought that the word “shenzi” in Kiswahili arose from “zanji”. That should give one pause. It is not just the glory of Bilal, MC. You have been reading too much propaganda.
ETA: ‘arised’ corrected to ‘arose’. Too much french is frying my brain.
4jkb4ia
@catclub:
Wait a second, that was Father Coughlin. Not the Protestant fundamentalists this commenter was talking about.
Kryptik
@vtr:
Because they’re not Christians. They’re Bad, Wannabe Jews. They ignore the New Testament except for when Paul says that Gentiles can eat pork and should hate gays, and for the Rapture. They have no Jesus to them, because Jesus was a fucking hippie. The Jesus they know of is about as real as the cobbled together deified strawman idol they have of Reagan.
They want the brutal god of the Old Testament, because despite calling themselves Christian, they don’t follow any of his teachings to a whit. You will know them by their works indeed.
matoko_chan
@Amir_Khalid:
by suppressing biotech research.
no money for escr, for ectogenesis, for anti-scenescence research.
the dignity of stupidity
if we SCIENTISTS solve the Riddle of Death, christianity is doomed.
Judas Escargot
@Zifnab:
Creationism and ID don’t produce anything. They will only survive so long as their think tanks and church hucksters are willing to funnel money into them.
In a world where the best empiricist always wins, I’d agree with you. Given most of human history, though, I can’t be as certain about this.
Religion is about power and control. Science (with its pesky knack for eventually proving false claims to be false) is therefore perceived as a threat. Where/whenever Creationism/ID serves the power interests, there will be Creationism/ID.
Unless and until these religious leaders stop perceiving science (and other Enlightenment values) as a direct threat to their personal wealth and power over others, these folks will continue to pollute the intellectual landscape.
matoko_chan
@Xenos: al-Islam has its own problems, but they have NOTHING TO DO with conservative selection for stupid.
there is a biological basis for all behavior.
moo moo
Ash Can
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s all about the far more practical and concrete issues of authoritarian control. Once church members start thinking for themselves, the pastor’s power and/or cushy lifestyle is threatened. The Bible makes for a handy rule book for enforcing authoritarian rule, and deviation from it is not tolerated.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kryptik:
Adam Smith would be appalled that his great work is so poorly understood by these “acolytes” who stopped reading once Econ 101 was over.
matoko_chan
@A Farmer: your substrate is Engineer.
moo moo
Villago Delenda Est
@Ash Can:
Yup. This is all about the shamans maintaining their positions, which does not involve any actual physical labor, at all.
Sentient Puddle
@matoko_chan:
The hell?
cckids
While this isn’t one of the reasons we started homeschooling our younger 2 kids, it is sure as hell the main reason we continued through high school. I know I am not the equivalent of a trained math & science teacher, but I can damn sure find accurate books & tutors if needed. We work from facts, not fantasies. When I was debating sending my son to public HS, one of his friends, who was a freshman, told me that she knew the Bible was accurate & true because her biology teacher told her that men have one less rib than women, so the Adam/Eve creation story was proven!! So there! I got the book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, & had the kids read it before they started Biology. It is quite the eye-opener on the politics of education, the dishonesty & corruption the religious right bring to our schools.
matoko_chan
@Xenos: amg you dont have a clue. im synthethizing qphysics, maarifa and the unified Arabi/Carroll theory of spacetime.
go wallow in your ditch liquor summore, you stupid cow.
jrg
@Amir_Khalid:
Them’s some mighty fancy words.
LOL, no, but seriously… The forces that make your GPS work are the same ones that cause the grass to grow, or keep airplanes from falling out of the sky – the magic of the baby Jeebus.
Villago Delenda Est
@matoko_chan:
Let’s talk about something relatively sane, like the status of Star Wars/Star Trek books to the on screen canon, shall we?
Kryptik
@Villago Delenda Est:
Hell, Jesus would be appalled at most of these jackasses professing to govern by his example.
Villago Delenda Est
@jrg:
Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
Citizen_X
@Punchy: Actually, I have taught…but at the college level. And I felt pretty insulated from pressure, but that’s because the administration gave teachers wide latitude to do their jobs.
You’re right, the pressure is awful at the High School level. I could teach High School, and I need a job, but it doesn’t look like a very attractive prospect these days.
jrg
@Villago Delenda Est:
My dog thinks light bulbs are magic. That’s not because light bulbs are “advanced” in the modern sense of the word, it’s because she has an IQ of about 3.
Amir_Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est: So they do believe in magic. And yet they condemn the Harry Potter books.
Ash Can
@Sentient Puddle:
Don’t worry. Sooner or later the teacher will figure out that matoko is playing around and not paying attention in class, and will confiscate her i-phone.
agrippa
Ignorance is bliss.
This sort of stuff is one reason that the USA may not be able to keep up with the rest of the world.
I hope that there are enough people with some sense to keep things going decently.
matoko_chan
@Ash Can: im the teacher.
i haz TA.
twiffer
yeah, i can blame them.
i know teaching sucks. dealing with parents sucks. having to bow to their whims sucks. it’s a crappy job for crappy pay that isn’t worth doing unless you love teaching kids. i can understand, i can empathize, but i can still blame them for cowardice.
evolutionary theory is the fundamental underpinning of our understanding of biology. if you aren’t going to commit to teaching it, you have no business teaching biology at all. yeah, yeah, i know teachers are often generalists untill you reach college. i don’t care. it’s akin to teaching geology, but being iffy on plate tectonics. or a physics teacher saying the laws of theromodynamics are actually just suggestions.
people fear the teaching of evolutionary theory because it challenges their personal religious beliefs. i think that’s kind of the point. school is not designed to reinforce beliefs, but (ideally, i admit) to teach children: not only the accumulated body of human knowledge, but how to think critically. how to learn. there is no way to do that without challenging belief.
polyorchnid octopunch
@matoko_chan: Dunno if you noticed or not, but so were the vast majority of early Christians.
4jkb4ia
@jonas:
This was ALMOST what I was going to write if I had any contribution to this thread. Not knowing how science works is a failure of science education that goes beyond evolution. It is more related to the science fair story I saw in the NYT the other day–tools aren’t being given to people to make them want to be scientists/engineers themselves.
The policy in the one college-level biology course that I had was “You don’t have to believe it. But you have to know how it works.” The crazy parents are not just protecting their kids’ right to believe in creationism but protecting their right to believe in all the lies about evolutionary theory their churches have told them. That is where schools have every right to step in.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir_Khalid:
Months and months ago, over at PZ Myers’ place, he had a quote from a guy who assured his audience that the concerns about 2012 related to the Mayan calendar were a non-issue, mainly because the numerology upon which those concerns are founded is not “biblically based”.
Missing the entire point about numerology in the process, but what the hey…
Ash Can
@cckids: Good lord. If my son were ever to run into crap like that in the Chicago Public School system, I would seriously flip my shit. Of course, this being a godless islamofascist communistic Big City (TM), I’m pretty confident he won’t.
Mike R.
This is the evolutionary path that produced the Tea Party. A strain so devoid of intellectual curiosity that it can be molded by billionaires to advocate for politics that are in their own worst interests. The stupid is strong in them.
scav
If m_c’s the teacher, the war is clearly lost. Game Over.
Ash Can
@matoko_chan: Of course you are, dear.
catclub
Would the heads of right wing nut jobs explode if you told them that Sharia Law forbids the teaching of evolution?
matoko_chan
@schrodinger’s cat: shiro means white in japanese…..and also death.
the death cat.
themann1086
@Xenos: That’s mighty white of ya’ to say.
El Cid
@matoko_chan:
Of course there is. Every single scientist accepts that fact.
For example, humans who are born without brains or heads do not tend to thrive as successfully as those with greater luck in having developed along typical human genetic instructions.
Likewise, inorganic bits of stone or piles of ash do not have such a biological basis for their behavior. Though their lack of biological functions does explain their lack of ‘behavior’ in the animal sense.
What scientists differ on is in how biological materials interact with particular behaviors, or even how to measure, or even how to logically define, behaviors and the biological systems which appear to be related to them.
That’s the typical ‘argument’ you repeat here, that very last bit. Not that there is a biological basis for all behavior, per se.
ed drone
@Citizen Alan:
The lack of historical knowledge strikes again. The peace symbol is a holdover from the Nuclear Disarmament movement of the 1950s, and represents the letters “N” and “D” in international semaphore usage. Or so I read in Sing Out! magazine in about 1958 or so.
Like this:
http://inter.scoutnet.org/cgi-bin/semaphore?text=N+D&font=font0
Of course, the nutterati wouldn’t accept Sing Out! as a source, anyway, that dirty commie rag! But it is the history of the symbol. The circle the two sets of lines are in represents the swing of the ends of the semaphore flag sticks (or represents the one world we live in, if you want the 1950s ND take on it).
Ed
matoko_chan
@polyorchnid octopunch: they hella arent naow, are they? check out SANE conservative Larison and his League of the South membership.
WEC is a political demographic in America.
thing is….they know about the hammergun of the demographic timer.
and they still cant turn the racism off.
matoko_chan
@El Cid: are you farking nutso?
i have a linked a body of EMPIRICAL scientific DATA here, including savannah principle, backfire effect, social brain hypothesis, SNT and EGT.
you dont liek what i say…..refute it.
go for it you WATB.
dont pretend i dont know what im talkin’ about.
El Cid
In those polls (Gallup and others) which report on what % of Americans accept the science of evolution, hid the extent of Americans’ refusal to see evolution as a material process.
Such that Gallup began discussing this in different terms to emphasize a distinction between those accepting an actually scientific view of evolution and those holding evolution as either entirely an illusion or as the product of magical intervention by a deity.
Bear this in mind when discussing how many Americans accept the science of evolution.
Only 16% view it as a physical process free of divine intervention. That is, 4 out of every 25 people.
If these stats were imagine to be identically applied to any given sample, then if you know 25 people, only 4 of them accept a non-magical theory of evolution.
Ash Can
@ed drone: That’s what I have read too, with the circle of the peace sign indicating the word “total,” hence, “total nuclear disarmament.”
matoko_chan
also social brian hypothesis, SNT, and rubberband theory.
put em up, El Campeador.
lets see your science chops.
evinfuilt
Yes, yes I can. If they dont’ want to teach, don’t. But standing aside and calling it education is a farce. The 60% are more to blame than those teaching creationism.
cckids
@Ash Can: Well, this IS Vegas, so kinda-big-city, but unfortunately education is low on the priority list. We’re #1 in drop-outs & they are desperate to keep kids in schools, but FSM forbid they pay teachers better. Hence, homeschooling–not perfect, but since there is no $$ for private schools, here we are. Also, due to my oldest son’s medical issues, I can’t be at a job anyway.
Not to be all John Holt on people’s heads, but after 7+ years now of having my kids out of the school system, I have to wonder if some of the anti-intellectualism running rampant isn’t as much a feature of the system as a bug. So much is taught to the test, so much emphasis (at least here) on getting everyone up to “standards”, kids get (to me) a ridiculous amount of credit for showing up & taking the tests. One HS science class here bases 25% of the kid’s grades on their NOTES! There is a decided de-emphasis on thinking, reasoning, etc. It is actively discouraged at times, because it isn’t neat, color-coded & easily put away when the bell rings.
Suppose we are deliberately forming a nation of sheep, who don’t know how to push back?
matoko_chan
@El Cid: WTF.
no. you cant spin this.
liek i said, your long battle with the moors has corrupted your cognitive abilities, El Campeador.
matoko_chan
@cckids:
yes.
American education is a hideous procrustean bed.
that is what NCLB is–stretching the stupid and lopping off the intellectual limbs of the hypersapients.
Ash Can
@El Cid: I can live with that 38%, because they’re not the ones who are going to be hindering the actual teaching of evolution. Their beliefs co-exist with evolution, rather than conflict with it.
Ash Can
I’m just going to frame this and hang it up and admire it for a while. I’ll let the rest of you handle the punchlines.
Poopyman
@Violet:
It’s called Sunday School. And if you don’t want me to come and teach evolution in your Sunday School, keep your Creationism out of my Public School.
ETA: Don’t take the “your” personally. However, the “my” should definitely be taken as “I, Poopyman”.
El Cid
@matoko_chan: First, no, it is not my task to accept your arguments and refute them. You will note that I have not addressed the substance of your arguments at all.
However, as usual, you make an art of mistaking what people are actually saying.
I have actually been in the midst of real scientists, biological and social, debating the things you act as though you yourself have rendered proven regarding intelligence. When I choose, I will listen to them, not you, not blog commenters as a set either.
Again, though, you could maybe get it through your thick, obsessive compulsive head that I simply explained that ‘there is a biological basis for all behavior’ is in no way a statement which reflects a view of the relation between, say, intelligence and evolution in the specific senses in which you speak: IQ, for example.
Again, I really don’t give a shit what you think about the relationship between evolution and measures such as IQ.
Let me repeat that: I am not interested in your comments here regarding that topic. Not interested. Not addressing it. Not interested. Not giving the slightest shit whether this makes you think you’ve defeated me or proven something or not. Unrelated to what I just said. Unrelated. You are in no way a credible voice to me in whom I’m interested in having any discussion on your favorite topic.
Declare victory based on such statements, dance around, do whatever. Just like the weirdos here who think that people who get annoyed at an argument or say rude things proves that ‘they win’.
No scientist disputes that there’s a biological basis for behavior. None. None. Not even for different discussions of ‘intelligence’ and ‘behavior’ than you repeatedly discuss.
Anyone discussing such topics needs to define their terms. “Intelligence” having a biological basis is simply uncontested, depending on what definitions one is addressing. No one who is a real scientist or appreciates the workings of DNA seems to miss the significance of evolution’s role in differentiating a pretty broad measure of ‘intelligence’ between houseflies and humans.
Statements such as ‘there is a biological basis for all behavior’ are simply undefined statements. Not an argument at all. Simply undefined, vague, useless. Such a phrase says nothing about your favorite topic.
Finally, let me repeat, conclude whatever you want — I am not interested in discussing with you your preferred subject of a particular set of definitions of ‘intelligence’.
And that’s what it is — a particular set of definitions of intelligence, having no application to the notion of ‘intelligence’ or ‘behavior’ as rooted in biology
I hope that as a teacher you will be able to comprehend the difference between points made regarding scientific views of the basic relation between biology and animal behavior itself or a basic definition of intelligence applied across all animal species, or at least read these sentences and have the words bounce around in your head for a while.
Any response from you addressing your belief that you have proven this or that regarding IQ and the like will, of course, be ignored, as I’ve repeated here almost as many times as I think you might need, I’m not interested in your views / arguments on this topic.
matryoshka
There are so many individual comments here I’d like to respond to! To keep it short, I will just say that public schools existed initially because of gov’t strong-arming, and many families resisted public education up to about 1820. After the Industrial Revolution and the enactment of child labor laws, we simply needed a place to warehouse kids while their parents worked. In fact, schools in the late 19th century were very open about their mission of training kids for factory work: even today, we have bells, broken blocks of time, disciplines as “parts” of the day to be assembled into “an education” or a product (diploma). As waves of immigrants came in, Dewey and others saw public education as a democratizing force, one that could teach basic skills but also establish a distinctly American set of lessons and values to a wide swath of humanity. Rousseau, Steiner, and some others influenced the more humane and liberal view of education as being a vehicle of unfolding something essential within each individual. As science became more of a source of wisdom in society, education was further shaped by it into elaborate testing schemes and formats, time-studies of teaching, and a Cartesian view of the child as an empty vessel that is “inputted” with knowledge. So when we talk about education and its purpose, we are talking about a complex, historically altered and politically influenced organism, much like the Bible. Neither the Bible nor the public schools can be said to be about “teaching the truth” if you know what you’re talking about.
I was a high school teacher for 7 years. I can’t begin to describe the pure hell that parents can put a teacher through if they want to, and it has nothing to do with not being committed to the job. If you are working 24/7, always on call, always available to be someone’s scapegoat, you are committed. Fuck anyone who says otherwise. Parents showed up in my classroom, jerked my gradebook out of my hands (looking at all the other kids’ grades to compare their kid’s grade in an effort to prove I was unfair to their little felon). Religious kids, parents, and administrators were very organized and systematic in their efforts at harassing ANY teacher they thought was “liberal,” “gay,” or upsetting to their world view. For instance, I got hassled for teaching _Farewell to Manzanar_ because it was one student’s opinion that Japanese internment never happened in America. The principal urged me to teach a less “controversial” novel. The principal changed her exam score to a passing grade, even though she wrote only that “it never happened” in response to an essay question about the book. So when people say it’s bad out there, they are right.
Ash Can
@cckids: I can understand an emphasis on good note-taking, since this is an essential skill for college. Grading it, however — especially as heavily as 25% — seems redundant at best. I can see, instead, covering it in the orientation packet, with follow-up coaching by the guidance counselor as needed.
polyorchnid octopunch
@matoko_chan: You’re an idiot. You seem to have conflated US christians with the world population of christians. I have a clue for you; there are a lot more christians in latin america and africa than there are in the US.
You’ve really got to get your head out of your totally us-centric ass.
cckids
@matoko_chan: Well, not all of American education. There are places that are doing pretty well. And there is only so much you can do when you are determined to educate EVERYONE, no matter their starting point or how shi**y their parents are. Some of the most maddening parts of public school are a necessary function of crowd control.
But many of us, at least those over 40, remember a time when public schools were not so herd-like. You were encouraged to think, to question, to do outside work. In many places, that is gone, and I don’t know entirely why.
I do know, going back to the premise of the thread, that pressure from parents is the bane of existence of most teachers, and the root of many problems with the schools. They want their kids passed, with a diploma, and too many of them don’t truly care if the kids can do the work or learn much of anything. I know there are SOME poor teachers, but many, many of them are doing the best they can with what they have. The parents, by & large, don’t have the teacher’s back; they defend & cause drama on their child’s behalf at any provocation. And, of course, the parents who can’t be bothered to be involved at all in their child’s education.
There is no easy, quick solution.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@jwb: I think there’s a bigger problem with Josie’s theory than that. Basically, any topic could then be removed from the curriculum by any astroturf organization that deems them “controversial.”
I mean really? Just don’t teach anything controversial? That basically means shut down the schools, because you can get people to argue about every last aspect of the public education system. Nice solution – assuming what you deem to be controversial is universally accepted. Is it really that hard to examine your ideas and try to figure out where you are making yourself the final arbiter of what is right despite the fact that others might disagree?
El Cid
@matoko_chan: You’re an idiot. You can’t comprehend the most basic statements anyone makes. I have no idea why you might think yourself familiar with English grammar or its associated lexicon. God-damn, but you’re a thick-headed moron who literally thinks you’re a brave warrior smacking down people who aren’t in any way talking about what you believe them to be talking about. It’s a free country, but, Jesus Fucking Christ, it’s like ELIZA beginning to assert that it was a leading scientist. Except ELIZA’s responses to questions and statements were more relevant to any topic than yours.
kay
I have often wondered why conservatives, who complain constantly about a lack of order and discipline in public schools, constantly trash public school teachers as over-paid, under-worked morons, thereby completely undermining any authority or legitimacy public school teachers have.
They must think their kids aren’t listening.
If they want kids to respect teachers, they should probably stop reviling and defaming teachers.
These are the mysteries of the conservative soul.
Violet
@Kryptik:
But DADT was overturned, so gays can serve openly in the military. So they didn’t win that one in the end. And the air and water is cleaner than it was in the 1960’s and 70’s. Remember the River of Fire? How about the smog in L.A.? The air quality isn’t great now, but it’s better.
I know we have to be vigilant because any progress could be set back at any time and money can be taken away from important projects, but I also think it’s good to recognize that we have come some distance in important fights, even as others (fracking, for instance) loom.
polyorchnid octopunch
@matoko_chan: Great. So post some of that data. Put up or shut up.
Ash Can
@matryoshka: Good grief. Shame on that principal for not backing you up. That’s unconscionable.
cckids
@Ash Can: Yes, exactly. This teacher had a specific format of note-taking that the kids HAD to follow: color-coding, definitions on one side of the page, etc. It took a lot of thought & time (at least to me). I tutored more than one freshman taking his class who were so caught up in taking the notes properly that they couldn’t follow along in class at all!
I kept coming back to my own high school years, and to my experience with my own & other homeschooled kids. Kids truly do learn differently, even to how they take notes. What works great for one may be a huge burden to another.
Catsy
@Sentient Puddle: That’s just one of our resident trolls, matoko_chan. About one out of every ten sentences from her comes out as intelligible English. Of those, about one in a hundred contains some sentiment that is not a variation on “you are all stupid cattle”.
Understanding the rest requires aggressive personal use of a magic decoder ring, wood alcohol, and a baseball bat made of frozen stupid.
Poopyman
@kay: Amen! Back In My Day (TM), any kid giving lip to a teacher paid for it at home, and parents always were respectful to teachers — at least in front of the kids. They could have a different discussion in private, but teachers and parents presented a united front to the kids.
cckids
@kay:
Amen! The kids are always listening & drawing conclusions. They have BS detectors that are very finely tuned, at least unless & until they get drowned out or taught differently.
edited to remove extra “the”, sounded like SP
Rick Taylor
Wait, To Kill a Mockingbird is controversial in some areas?
El Cid
@Ash Can: I can live with that percentage, and the believers in the divine steering of evolution are not a threat to the teaching of evolution.
Let’s assume that some portion of this sample of respondents do not believe that evolution has required the intervention of an all-powerful deity in a steering manner but that it was responsible for the creation of the Universe and setting it up to lead toward the results we live with today. A really, really, really clever design.
In that sense it would be a perfect design, accounting for factors which are literally impossible to predict as in quantum physics.
There’s still a remaining portion who believes that evolution was a process which required the steering either at each moment or at crucial junctures.
This simply emphasizes to me the widespread rejection of the notion that physical processes are just that.
Evolution as a process requiring divine guidance is not even that.
It’s a rejection of the notion that the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient God they believe in was incapable of creating a “clockwork universe” (a) not needing its constant attention, and (b) not able to hide its tracks sufficiently as to make it seem to not occur via magic.
Point (b) making that whole notion of needing faith to believe in such a deity irrelevant, because, poof, there’s your proof. No faith needed.
cckids
@Poopyman:
This. My siblings & I joke that if we’d ever been in trouble at school, the teacher would have to dig us up to punish us, because our parents would kill us.
El Cid
@polyorchnid octopunch: Please, please, no. You have rubbed the turd lamp, and now the crap genie will appear. You don’t have two more shit wishes, either.
kay
@cckids:
They’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to hear the Great Campaign against public school teachers.
“Teachers are dumb, lazy and not really interested in children. Now go in there and show some respect.”
It’s ludicrous.
El Cid
@Catsy: you is all stupid cow
tiny brain reject my entire argument on relation of eggplant to tire pressure
why you not read my million billion posts on this before you who are dumber than letter ‘z’ because you wrong side of crusades
kay
@Poopyman:
I did that. I think it works better for everyone. It also lets them be kids, you know? “We’ll handle it”. They get to go off and do whatever.
It’s fun now, because I can finally tell my daughter “your kindergarten teacher was unhinged and unfair”. She’s FINALLY vindicated in her complaints:)
Ash Can
@El Cid: Careful, you’ll sprain your brain writing like that. I’d hate to see a consistently excellent commenter like you go on the DL.
matryoshka
@Ash Can: Well, ya see, I already had a target on my back because I was teaching while gay. No way was anyone going to back me up, least of all a conservative, white, Baptist dude who was trying to get himself appointed regional viceroy or something. This is a single incident. Pile up about 100 of those, some worse, some almost comical, and you get to the point where you realize it’s just not worth the $32,000 a year you’re pulling in as someone with a degree (and advanced grad work) in the content area and a master’s degree in education–not the usual “I gots a BS Ed. so I can teech” candidate. It’s sad, because I still care so much about education and kids, but I also have enough dignity not to put myself in that position any more.
gwangung
@matryoshka: Not surprising. Pretty much Holocaust revisionists (I mean, we got actual internees still living). Being protected and promoted by the right wing.
Poopyman
@El Cid: Eerily familiar, this is.
Like @Ash Can: says, if you keep that up, your writing is going to freeze that way.
kay
@Rick Taylor:
It is, because of the rape issue. I had a “discussion” about that, once, in school, on parent’s night, with another parent. It didn’t go well. There were cross-accusations of not reading the book. I read a different book than she did, apparently, because what she said was in there wasn’t in there.
Ash Can
@kay: This also teaches a valuable skill of professionalism for the future. Kids grow up knowing that workplace conflicts are best settled behind closed doors, with the conversation including only those two (or narrow few) who are directly involved in the conflict.
matoko_chan
@polyorchnid octopunch: i have posted it here ad nauseum.
tell meh why should i do it again?
Ash Can
@matryoshka: Ugh. That makes it so much worse. If you’re not in the education field now, is there any way you could relocate to a more civilized environment? I hate the thought of education talent going to waste.
Catsy
@El Cid:
This may be one of the greatest sentences ever written on this blog. Are you sure you’re not the spoof responsible for matoko_chan?
Though back to your ELIZA comment, I’ve sometimes wondered whether or not she’s really an elaborate Turing test program written by the people responsible for Engrish.com.
liberal
@WyldPirate:
Well, at least KJV has some beautiful writing and had a big impact on the English language, IIRC.
:-)
El Cid
@Poopyman: Battle not with rotting carrot peels, lest ye become a rotting carrot peel, and if you gaze into the tall kitchen trash can, the tall kitchen trash can gazes also into you.
Uloborus
MATOKO-CHAN (but not any specific entry):
Incidentally, please learn to spell your own handle and then stop misusing -chan. Yes, you’re female. No, it does not apply to you. It reflects a level of intimacy that does not exist between you and us – even though it’s a fairly mild level of intimacy. It also suggests that you’re something we find adorable, which we don’t. It’s also something you DON’T CALL YOURSELF. It is a way OTHER people address you. Oh, there are girls who stick ‘-chan’ on the end of their name, but in Japan if you do that you come off as pathetic and trying too hard. Especially if you’re an adult.
Criminy, I had ONE year of Japanese and I know this stuff.
liberal
@Catsy:
Let’s be honest with ourselves: it would take one hell of a clever computer program to come up with a neologism as idiotic as “basegank.”
Catsy
@matoko_chan:
Pretty much everything you post here is ad nauseum by definition.
Josie
@El Cid: I laughed out loud. Thanks for lifting my foul mood.
matryoshka
@Ash Can: Aw, that’s kind of you to say. I did move to Chicago after I left education, but not to teach. I make more money now, and I don’t have to work a fraction as hard as I did as a teacher. I consider it a closed chapter, but not really a wasted one. I got an up-close and personal view of what we’re up against in this country.
matoko_chan
@El Cid: sry, el Campeador, but ad hom doesnt refute bias.
your bias is in your name.
you know nothing about Islam and you cannot learn.
The anti-intellectual tradition of protestantism is also bio-basis of behavior, and you cannot accept that, because you. dont. want. too.
you dont refute beacuse you cannot.
you are the FOXnews of the left.
dig Assange.
that is the reality of Balloon Juice.
you want to display your values to your peers.
you dont give a fuck about the material.
kay
@Ash Can:
It does.
Teachers really do have to keep order and to do that they need a certain amount of authority, so I tried not to undermine that.
Xenos
@themann1086:
Thanks, bro! Gimme five!
(Actually, I am just twisting MC’s tail. I am not much of a Christian in any case. I do, however, have a very high albedo, for whatever that is worth, to wit, not much and way too much.)
Barb (formerly Gex)
The problems are parents first, a culture that denigrates intellectualism, a culture unwilling to invest in education. There are many more things that are a problem before I’d start looking at the teachers. This whole economy is designed to work on incentives. The incentives in teaching are terrible, so I take the view that the people who are in it are doing what they can because they are invested in it. More so than any of the people who always bitch about teachers.
JITC
If no one does we’ll continue down the idiocracy road. We’re already at the point where intellectuals cower in fear of the mocking and harassment of the idiocracy. The next step is complete rule by it and eventual elimination of intellectuals (ironically, an example of de-evolution). We are right at this point.
I don’t want to have to face angry mobs of ignoramuses but we have to.
El Cid
@matoko_chan: I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re replying too. The ad hom is not intended to win an argument. It’s intended to display intense derision. Derision is still okay in the world. You seem to be comfortable with it and throwing it around.
God damn, if it weren’t for your ad hominem arguments and misinterpretation of the subjects of peoples’ comments, you’d have pretty much nothing to say at all.
And you are entirely incorrect about the relation between eggplants and tire pressure. This is because you are directly descended from the Chrysler building, and you cannot learn because steel girders only count when you put in buildings and not in yogurt, and yogurt has never industrially favored for use in windshield wipers.
Because you cannot acknowledge the modern name of Cameroon, you are unable to comprehend the full volume of what I do not say.
matoko_chan
@Barb (formerly Gex):
false. they are more than willing to invest in an education culture to make more WECs.
religion “takes” biologically best between the homo sapien sapien ages of 7 and 15.
they are intent on making memetic reps.
matoko_chan
@El Cid: refute me then el Campeador.
i think you cannot.
try just one.
Protestantism is anti-intellectual.
Triassic Sands
No, I can’t blame them for not wanting angry mobs coming after them. But I can blame them for doing the wrong thing, regardless of the repercussions. No quality is more important for a teacher than intellectual honesty. While it isn’t sufficient, it is necessary, and without it no person should ever teach. Period.
Barb (formerly Gex)
And with that, it is time to stop. Once you get matokoed, it’s time to go.
matoko_chan
THIS is what i think about Balloon Juice–It’s all bullshit. It’s ALL bullshit.
you cudlips have the capacity to THINK but all you do is preen for your peer groups.
fuck you all.
Catsy
@matoko_chan:
Holy fuck, but that is a lot of crazy to unpack.
Not that I expect any of this to penetrate, but:
1. A name is a label. It is incapable of bias.
2. Mindreading and projection.
3. A tradition–which is a social and mental construct with no physical form–cannot form the biological basis for anything.
4. A single pseudonymous blog commenter is not in any way analogous to a $30 billion media empire, regardless of any merits or traits they do or do not possess in common.
This is not an argument you have written: it is gibberish. Palin’s word salad is more intelligible.
This is why your contributions here are completely devoid of value. You add nothing to the Internet except noise.
And I think you know it. The aggressiveness with which you bleat out your typical nonsense and the ignorance and dysphasia that pervades your comments can only come from a deep-seated awareness of your own insignificance and a desperate need to prove otherwise.
The thing is, nobody’s buying it. To the extent that anyone here pays attention to you at all, it is as an object of well-deserved mockery and laughter–not with you, but at you.
You’re nothing here except a mascot, a running joke.
Amir_Khalid
@El Cid: Your comment #214 is a thing of beauty, sir.
Bubblegum Tate
@artem1s:
Well, some parents would drop this crap. Others would lawyer up and scream that they’re being denied their constitutional rights to freedom of religion, they are victims of liberal fascism, blah blah blah.
Either way, I’m on board with it. I like the “if you want to teach your kids bullshit, that’s fine, just don’t expect us to recognize it as anything but bullshit” approach.
matoko_chan
@Catsy: refute the historical anti-intellectual tradition of protestantism, then Catsy.
you can’t.
and you know it.
moo moo.
THE
The Story of Creation.
matoko_chan
@Amir_Khalid: bi la kayfah, Immortal Brother.
Lincolnshire Poacher
At my school you had options.
If you wanted evolution and a science track for college you requested this one biology teacher. If you wanted “Jesus” and “The world was created in 7 days” or science wasn’t for you, you requested the other biology “teacher.” I guess the administrators felt this was the best way to remedy any sort of controversies.
Both instructors despised the other. The creation science biology teacher had awards from the Discovery Institute and his car had a sticker “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” The real science, evolution teacher was formerly a state marine biologist, worked for the National Parks, and had a Darwin fish on her car.
Just my two cents.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: This response plus
@Catsy: this one
made my afternoon. You guys rock. Really.
Teachers: I don’t blame them for not wanting to rock the boat because their jobs are tenuous; they have to deal with stupid shit from parents, principals, and kids on a daily basis; they have to teach to the test for the most part. It’s easy to say they should be intellectually honest or whatnot, but the system is a mess. I wish it weren’t such the case that the batshitcrazy is allowed to roam free, but it is.
@Bubblegum Tate: This I like. You can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.
Lyn
@ schrodinger’s cat
When I went to a conservative Christian school in the early 1970s in Miami, we had a GREAT biology teacher who taught us evolution as the basic principle of life science. And there were no protests or complaints. I’m absolutely sure that at the same school now there wouldn’t be any evolution taught
Catsy
@matoko_chan:
I don’t need to. Nor was I trying to.
What I was responding to was, among other things, this statement of yours:
This is utter gibberish. As I already noted, a tradition is not a physical or biological thing. It is a social construct: it exists as a concept, a pattern of behavior.
A concept, a collection of thoughts with no physical form at all, cannot form the biological basis for anything at all. It is a physical impossibility.
You have no argument of any value whatsoever to engage. There is nothing to refute because your assertion is physically and logically impossible.
And this isn’t just a one-off nitpick. I could do this with pretty much any thread in which you appear. Your arguments are filled, front to back, with this kind of inane word salad. Nobody takes you or your bovine arguments seriously because you’re largely incapable of communicating those arguments clearly in internally consistent English.
Like I said, you’re nothing more than a running joke here, and I think you know it.
Catsy
@asiangrrlMN: Can I have an Internet gold star?
Brachiator
@matoko_chan:
I am beginning to worry about you. If you were an angry, sulky teenager, your increasingly incoherent ramblings would clearly be a cry for attention. In an adult, this is more like a sad, desperate plea for help, for intervention. I’ve seen more coherence coming from Charlie Sheen on a porn and coke binge. Or from BOB on a typical day.
Are the recent events in Egypt and elsewhere unnerving you?
This is nonsense and you should know it. Perhaps you should look more to the example of someone like Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Birunī instead of continuing to indulge in foolishness.
kay
@Lyn:
Everyone got really complacent. Too, we were busy with arguments over religious displays and Christmas carols. While we were worrying about that,they invented a whole pseudo-science curriculum.
It really takes constant vigilance. I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle a paying job while monitoring the situation.
Peter
@matoko_chan: Protip, matoko: You have to establish your argument before you can demand that people try to refute it. And no, a survey on level of evolutionary belief is not sufficient evidence to prove the insane contradictory point you are trying to make.
Svensker
@Punchy:
Seriously? You haven’t been around many evangelical families, have you?
My favorite Young Earth moment came when an evangelical student was learning basic astronomy and they were talking about a star that was so many million light-years away. She got this look on her face and said, “wait, if it’s a million light years away, that means the universe has been around longer than 10K years…” It was lovely to see the light shining in.
BombIranForChrist
I went to public school in Ga, and our 5th grade Math teacher opened every day by reading from the Bible. She told us that she knew that she wasn’t supposed to, but she was going to read from the Bible because she was a Christian and they couldn’t keep her from being a Christian and reading from the bible is what Christians do.
Svensker
@matoko_chan:
You are especially obnoxious today, little one.
Mike
I’m pretty sure the reason Creationism is attractive is that if we are evolved, we are like animals, we are made of meat, we will eventually die and rot.
And that’s a major bummer, man.
Brachiator
@Mike:
On the other hand, we might make great sandwiches.
Jeanne ringland
@cmorenc: Excuse me? You had to call Civil Engineering a non-sciency major?
My husband is one. The courses were sciency to the max. Depends on which school is doing the teaching.
I took a bio college class called evolution and the teacher spent the first half hour of every session apologizing to the Christians in the class.
themann1086
@Xenos: Hah, I didn’t know you were kidding. I’ve had (very liberal, otherwise privilege-recognizing) people try to say to me, sincerely, that I was being “very Christian” because I did something nice. It started with me snarking “That’s mighty white of ya” and ended with me giving a lecture about “Christian not being a synonym for nice” nor “non-Christian an antonym for nice” and them calling me “touchy” and “overreacting”.
Sigh.
More “on topic”, El Cid is doing a great cudlip-chan!
Catsy
@Mike:
Indeed.
Kira
@matoko_chan: You know, from someone with a Japanese handle, I seriously expected better.
Shiro can mean “white,” or “castle,” or “margin,” or “fried chicken innards onna stick.”
Death is “shi.”
Just sayin’.
polyorchnid octopunch
@polyorchnid octopunch: I haven’t seen you post any data. I’ve seen you make lots of assertions, but no data. Where’s the data?
polyorchnid octopunch
@Ash Can: She can come to Canada. Top salary for a teacher in my board is a little over a hundred k. I guess the powers that be up here decided that teachers deserve better pay than bus drivers and garbagemen.
Captain C
@Zifnab:
I’m not sure about that. They seem to produce a lot of useful idiots who will happily attack (or vote for or against) what- or whomever their masters sic them on.
Captain C
@WyldPirate:
And this is why tenure (i.e. due process rather than “at will” employment) is essential.
Of course, for some people, having the schools turn out a bunch of credulous idiots who will do what they’re told may be a feature and not a bug.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Catsy: I disagree, somewhat. She is basically spot-on in her analysis of wikileaks; clearly she has some programming education under her belt at minimum, given that she seems to grasp network effects pretty well at the level posited by Assange in his writing. That she dresses it up in neo-Stephenson apparel is a bug, not a feature, but she does understand it very well… his approach is to make the value of a set of edges among nodes of a digraph hidden from the rest of the network represented by that graph very very expensive.
I just wish she would lose the rudeness to people. matoko_chan, you might be very intelligent but you’re not very smart. You’re not helping the goal of your arguments when you gratuitously insult everyone who disagrees with you in any respect whatsoever. Are you on the spectrum, by any chance? Maybe trending towards Asperger’s?
El Cid
@matoko_chan:
You can think whatever you want about my lack of interest in ‘refuting’ such weirdo non-arguments as this.
I don’t care if you rush out right now and contract a trophy to be made in honor of your victory of the Battle of Balloon Juice Comments On the “Can You Blame Them” Post of February 2011.
Have at it. Enjoy yourself.
But this entire challenge follows your entire trope of having no idea what the fuck anyone else is saying, what points they’re addressing, or how any of that would have any relevance to your ramblings whatsoever.
You have no idea whatsoever on my opinions about the intellectuality or lack thereof in Protestantism. None. That subject hasn’t come up in any comment I recall.
My best guess at why you might have made some assumption or another about me and my thoughts on Protestantism — other than more tedious promotion of your love of Islam which also has zero to do with anything coming close to a discussion of science outside the heroic but historic role of Islamic scholars in the European medieval period — has to do with the name I use to blog under.
Which I commonly explain has to do with the poem rather than with the actual historical character. Anyway, he appears to have been a figure who was more a mercenary than anti-Moorish / pro-Christian fighter, by the way, a guy who fought with and who recruited Moorish fighters, against rival Christian armies. Not because of some liberal religious outlook beyond the frequent subjugation of religion when necessary for profit. Would it settle your stomach if I were to have, say, adopted the name “Al Inkishafi“, the famed Kiswahili poem by Sayyid Abdullah bin Nasir about the fall of the Sultanate of Pate Island, off of Kenya, from the height of its power and glory to nothing after its attempt to conquer Lamu?
Would that be better? Would that be less Crusade-y for you? Allow you to clutch subjects and verbs and adjectives and pronouns and nouns and so forth?
You still are completely incapable of understanding what it means to define terms relevantly in order to make scientific arguments and judgments. Else you stubbornly refuse to do so for whatever hallucinatory reasons.
This statement is of a political and philosophical and cultural nature, having nothing to do with biology whatsoever, except to the extent that Protestantism is generally defined as a set of religious emanating from biological organisms we know as ‘humans’ and that it does not occur in plants or archaeobacteria or in humans who lack heads or who have been dead for many years.
Apart from the nonsensical nature of the statement in and of itself in a supposedly discussion of biological science, I’m curious as to any of my statements which you think reveals an outlook on my part regarding Protestantism.
Unless it’s a lack of sufficient numbers of quotes on how ‘science’ proves that Islam is awesome and how super-amazo-genius this or that Muslim political movement is.
But there’s no chance anyway that you’d be able to grasp any of the points made above, much less respond to them in a manner more logically relevant than copying and pasting a history of shape note music notation as compared with the climatic origins of the period of greatest expansion of the Songhai Empire.
Seafood is anti-intellectual. Refute it. You can’t, because bzzzzzt – please turn record over to continue the story.
polyorchnid octopunch
@matoko_chan: John Locke. Next!
Catsy
@matoko_chan:
No, it doesn’t.
shiro = 白
shiroi (adjective: white) = 白い
shi (death) = 死
They are not the same words. They are not even written with the same characters.
Captain C
@catclub:
I don’t know, but I’d like to see that experiment.
El Cid
@Catsy:
Hey now. Don’t bust my bubble. With the right pseudonym, the world will be mine.
Peter
Damn, El Cid, you are on fire today.
matryoshka
@polyorchnid octopunch: If only Canada would have me! They’ve made immigration much harder for Americans lately. There has to be a need for a particular profession to get a work visa, or so I’ve heard from folks who checked out that option during the Bush debacle. But good on Canada for paying its teachers a living salary.
Catsy
@polyorchnid octopunch:
The comment of mine to which you’re responding wasn’t really intended as a serious argument, just a straight line that I couldn’t pass up. But as to the substance of your response:
I have no way of knowing for sure what she does and doesn’t understand. I can infer a great deal, however, from the way she presents her arguments.
What I get from her writing is that she has a very superficial understanding of most of the things she discusses–the kind of shallow base of knowledge that comes from reading a lot of Wikipedia articles and other resources without actually understanding all of the material. It’s enough to throw around buzzwords and sound knowledgeable to someone who isn’t an expert in a given field, but it’s not enough to discuss a subject on any kind of a sophisticated level.
Which is fine–most of us have varying levels of skill in Google-Fu or Wikido, and that’s how we learn about important subjects with which we’re not familiar but can’t devote the time to studying deeply. The problem is that she then proceeds to act as if her intarwebz scholarship gives her special insights that the rest of us cattle can’t possibly hope to grok.
Worse still, she appears incapable of presenting her insights in reliably intelligible English. And that too, in and of itself, is fine: I don’t know whether or not English is her first language, and if it’s not then it’s perfectly understandable that she’d struggle with grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
Except that it gets worse. Even when she manages to make her verbs and subjects agree and remembers to punctuate her sentences, her arguments are full of inconsistencies, logical impossibilities, and just plain bizarre assertions that appear utterly divorced from the world in which the rest of us live.
Finally, as you point out, she’s relentlessly abrasive, condescending, and hostile to anyone who corrects her misinformation no matter how gently they do it.
In other words, it’s not just that she’s belligerently ignorant, borderline illiterate, and arguably unhinged–it’s that she’s frequently all of these things at once.
She might have some original thoughts and insights ricocheting around in her head somewhere, for certain values of “original”. But if they ever manifest in writing as anything that’s worth reading, I’ve obviously missed it.
polyorchnid octopunch
@matryoshka: Well, that’s mostly been as a response to the problems that the US has made in the last ten years for Canadians to enter the US. I’ve not been to the US for years now, because I’d have to spend hundreds of dollars to get my papers in order, when in the old days all I needed was a birth certificate and another form of ID.
The towns on the other side of the river (er, the St. Lawrence) must be hurting badly because of the undoubtedly massive drop in Canadian tourism they’ve experienced. I know some river rats of long standing, and they are now very very careful to make sure they don’t cross over to the US side of the river; if you drift over the border and don’t have your passport, you can expect to spend the night in the hoosegow, put on a list of people not permitted to enter the US, dropped off on the Canadian side of the bridge the next morning, and to lose your boat.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Catsy: Yep, she’s a hard read. Like I said… intelligent but not very smart.
I think her brain is hooked on triumphalism, personally. This of course is exactly the same problem that the people she likes to fulminate against have. I’m hoping that at some point she’ll be self-aware enough to realise that she’s acting in exactly the same way as the people she professes to despise.
matryoshka
@polyorchnid octopunch: Jeebus. It’s worse than I thought. I was very surprised to learn that I had to have a passport to go to Canada a few years back. I know my grandparents used to vacation there as easily as they could travel the Midwest here. My great-grandfather served with the Canadians in WW I. Think that would buy me any good will? ; )
Bostondreams
Ah, evolution. What fun. My first year teaching World History in a small rural school in Florida, I taught about 5 types of early man and required students to be able to compare and contrast these types and explain the strengths and weaknesses of each, as well as discuss the blow your mind idea that at some point in our history, there were two different types of human beings alive on this planet.
The first parent night, I had a parent come into my room and say, and I quote, “What are you teaching my kid, you damn Yankee?” That was freaking disturbing.
I also have a number of young earth creationists in my classes. I started prefacing our discussion of the early years of human history with ‘I don’t require you to believe this, and I am not challenging your worldview or faith, but this is important to know for college.’ Cowardly? Perhaps, but it covered my behind.
Then there was using clips from ‘Jesus Christ: Superstar’ to teach about the relationship between Jews and Romans and the teachings of Jesus (from a historical perspective), and the angry letter I got from the pastor accusing me of using an anti-Christian film…
gelfling545
Just this past weekend I was discussing with an old friend what we had been taught in a Catholic high school in the 60’s. We both remember the Sister who taught biology (yes – Sister)saying that “Science is not about the Bible and the Bible is not about science. They serve different purposes”. I guess ground has been lost since those days.
Ab_Normal
My spawn’s attending a Jesuit Catholic high school and her biology classes have been straight-up science, no religion chaser. (The Catholic Ethics class she’s required to take this semester is another issue…)
gelfling545
@Ab_Normal: When I voiced reservations about my (gay) nephew doing his grad work at a Catholic college he told me that it wasn’t Catholic, it was Jesuit. Apparently this is a significant difference (and he loved it there.)
scarshapedstar
I can kinda blame them, but only so much.
I think it’s high time biologists developed a basic biology curriculum that leave even the very most brainwashed students unable to deny the reality of evolution. This is what these teachers need.
(imo)
The Commenter on BJ formerly known as arguingwithsignposts
Posting in an epic thread. well done, BJ commentariat
bago
@RalfW: For a second there I thought you were a unitoligist. All hail the marker and whatnot. (Religion from Dead Space, FYI)
matoko_chan
@El Cid:
. gotcha! and there we have have it. your resentment is showing, el Campeador. Of course al-Islam is evolutionarily superior to christianity! it is the next evolutionary stage of monotheistic religion.
and that is what is really drinking your milkshake.
@Catsy: yes catsy, shiroi. i was wrong.
keestadoll
Thank you Juicers for once again inspiring to action. I have two boys in Catholic school and live in a small rural area–perfect opportunity to do a side by side comparison of science education in the schools (theirs vs. the public schools here). I have been contemplating a topic for submission to one of the most awesome newspapers (local or otherwise)ever, and I think this is IT. I have a feeling that there will be little difference between the school systems, but we’ll see. Thanks everyone! Game on!
matoko_chan
@El Cid:
I See You.
This is what really offends you, isnt it? EGT, the evolutionary theory of games.
Christians believe their faith commands them to proselytize. Muslims believe their faith commands them to resist proselytization.
Defense against proselytization is the most successful CSS on the planet right now.
and yes, protestantism is anti-intellectual. it was a revolt against the intellectualism of the Jesuits, the Catholics and the Anglicans, that had captured science and literature and biblical exegesis.
This is common knowledge.
matoko_chan
@polyorchnid octopunch: good guess, im an aspie.
i get obsessed with detail, and i dont socialize well. it infuriates me when people dont read my links and commence lowing and braying about things they could easily understand just by reading.
i dont want to be part of your community or be your “friend”.
i am interested in Cole because he switched sides, liek me.
perhaps al-Ghazalis definition of adab might help here.
adab is often translated as manners….that is not correct. that is orientalism and western culture chauvinism.
i am not “polite”.
and while i have a wide variety of interests, culture, evolution, games theory, qphysics, politics….i never cross the beams, academically or professionally.
this is a political blog on the internet.
who cares?
matoko_chan
Or we can use Herberts dunefinition….
hahahaha!
DPirate
We should stop trying to teach evolution in public schools. There isn’t enough time to “teach” it, they can only state it as a simple fact, and no high school student really needs to hear about it. It is ludicrous to keep having this stupid debate all the time.
Why is it unconstitutional to teach creationism, tho9ugh? We teach a great deal of stuff to kids in school that is wrong. History, mainly. I suspect that it just doesn’t fit the dogma.
@Bostondreams: Man, you are hateful to require those kids to perform all that crap. How is any of that going to help them in life? Better to compare birds to dogs to fish than imagined primates to other imagined primates. (Yes, imagined, regardless of whether they existed or not).
matoko_chan
@Ab_Normal: unlike the anti-intellectual protestant tradition, the Jesuits are pro-intellectual.
they will do her no lasting harm.
i went to catholic school myself.
and look how that turned out.
muwahaha
;)
matoko_chan
@Catsy:
is shorthand for read the fucking linkage.
foolish meh, always thinkin the cudlips might learn to read.
:)
misanthropope
yes, absolutely i blame them.
if you don’t back evolution because you don’t “believe in it”, you are merely incompetent. if you do know the facts of the matter, and you don’t present them because they are unpopular, you are a liar.