Apparently, the Kansas Board of Education just loves being mercilessly mocked by the entire world.
Students in Lisa Volland's advanced biology class examine flowers, lemons and corn under the microscope, pondering how the plants evolved over time to improve their chances of survival. The Topeka West High School teacher does not discuss the biblical story of creation or "intelligent design," just "the big e-word," as she jokingly calls it. "I don't think you can talk about living organisms without talking about evolution," she said. "We don't talk about religion."
Classrooms like Volland's have come under scrutiny -- again -- in Kansas' seesawing battle between left and right over the teaching of evolution. The battle could heat up over the coming weeks, with Kansas' State Board of Education expected to revise its science standards in June. In 1999, the board deleted most references to evolution in the standards, bringing international ridicule and wisecracks from the late-night comedians. Elections the next year made the board less conservative, resulting in the current standards describing evolution as a key concept for students to learn. Last year's elections gave conservatives a majority again, 6-4. A subcommittee plans six days of hearings in May, and advocates of intelligent design plan to put nearly two dozen witnesses on the stand to critique evolution.
National and state science organizations plan to boycott the hearings, contending they are going to be rigged in favor of intelligent design. "We are concerned that the hearings will be an attempt to give scientific credibility to a nonscientific concept," said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
One wonders how much chance the soon-to-be-revised standards have of surviving federal scrutiny. It's clearly a transparent attempt at inserting religious concepts into state-sponsored schools. (Given the peculiar ability of Kansas' state courts to serenely ignore blunt directives from the Supreme Court, only a fool would take these cases into Kansas' own courts.) However, given the grand guignol brouhaha soon to occur on Capital Hill over the federal judiciary, these are anything but ordinary times for this sort of case.
Quite apart from anything else, forcing intelligent design into the classroom in this way means that you're only hearing one version of a religious creation myth. What about Hinduism? What about Islam's version? (Teaching that in Kansas these days would be a ragingly popular decision, no doubt.) As a purely practical issue, both of those religions are practiced by larger numbers of people than western-style Protestantism (albeit not here, to be sure), so surely those should be taught as well.
Of course, teaching creation as comparative mythology -- aside from being woefully inappropriate to biology classes -- would be entirely beside the point of this sort of thing, wouldn't it?
Posted by iain at May 02, 2005 04:38 PM
