Stumble it!ECLJ… why is that familiar?
posted in Creationism by themaiden |I wonder if the ECLJ is at all related to the American Center for Law and Justice which put out a frantic warning not long ago that, to paraphrase, “Religion is under assault. Christianity is under attack. The nation is collapsing. The Lib’rals are guttin our values, stomping on our Bible-based Constitution, educating our children, putting condoms on our men and shoes on our women.” Oh… hey, looks like they are related. The PDF of the ECLJ’s document is hosted at the ACLJ’s website.
The document itself looks like the usual creationist ‘teach the controversy‘ claptrap wrapped in the rhetoric of free speech and free expression.
The point seems to be that teachers have a right to free expression and so they ought to get to say what they want in the classroom. In fact, the point is not far from one made by Case Luskin last year.
I responded:
Scientists do “only want certain scientific views in the classroom”. Scientists, and anyone else sincerely interested in education, want only views with strong evidence and sound arguments in the classroom. And the place for the evidence and the argument to be evaluated is within the professional scientific community. I don’t think that is too much to ask, nor do I think it is unfair to new or unorthodox ideas. Any ideas worth their salt will quickly find better than a small fraction of a percent of support within that community. Anything not capable of garnishing much support has no business in the classroom. Legislation like this bill provide legal grounds individuals could exploit to bypass this process, to the certain detriment of the students and shall we mention the costs to the taxpayers?
The same thing has been tried in Oklahoma and in New Mexico.
Sorry. ‘Academic freedom’ is not a back door to teaching fringe science to grade school kids. Grade school is for the basics. Argue with real scientists, and win. Then tell the kids. Jumping the gun, skipping the professors and going straight to the kids is doing them a disservice. It is doing everyone a disservice. It would be putting kids at the mercy of whatever fantasies their teachers happen to harbor. This is not the point of ‘academic freedom’.
‘Academic freedom’ applies to the upper levels of the educational process, which means the people encountering such freedom directly are already old enough, experienced enough, and (unless the creationists have their way) educated enough in the solid basics that they have a fighting chance at effectively evaluating the information themselves. Ten year olds mostly swallow things whole– no offense to ten year olds. And that, I think, is exactly the point of these ‘teach the controversy’ schemes– feed kids the bad science while they are still gullible and cripple their ability to evaluate the good science.
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