without time your watch means nothing:
At first sight it therefore looks sound to introduce biological ID as an episode in the history of science. But this would not resolve the culture wars. For Paley is wrong and Darwin right; there is a natural, selectionist explanation in principle for eyes and wings and brains, and accumulated evidence for such a process in each case as well. There is no other honest way of telling the story. Even if the teacher pretended neutrality, Darwin must win. So what you would be doing is exposing students to a refuted argument for the existence of God. You would risk transforming every biology classroom in the Bible Belt into a Kulturkampf free-fire zone; and since truth will out, the end result must be the defeat of biblical fundamentalism. Many of us would welcome this result, but the process would be wrenching, and possibly even physically violent.James Wimberley/The Reality-Based Community 06.Jun.0
-
via the percipient and incipiently peripatetic T. Matrullo
-
The whole school system is a "science classroom" but we're not supposed to acknowledge or recognize that because it skews the experiments and the programs resulting therefrom.
So teaching religion can only be done in college, as a kind of biology of various nonsenses, with political stuff to make it significant. Religion matters because it has effects in the political world, would be that.
Otherwise you could spend some time bringing kids up through the stages of knowing we've experienced as a collective, without shitting on everything that came before as inferior weak and nonsensical.
The idea of children learning in age-ranked pods of gradient-driven artificial competitions is not derived from science, it is science, it's a scientifically proposed and initiated solution to the problem of non-consensus learning, it's not organic in the polarized non-scientific use of the term.
Because make no mistake children who never go to school, never learn to read, never get taught things by people whose sole occupation it is to teach children, those kids learn stuff, their heads get filled with ideas about the world and how things work, not in the detailed and documented way of the educated, closer to the chimpanzee in many respects, but there's a world in those unschooled heads that's a lot like the world in your head.
You say oh but most of it is nonsense, and I say yes. Oh yes indeed.
But that's not the point. The point's the proprietary inoculation of a believed-in worldview that tends to create that world when critical mass among the believers is achieved.
Goals, it's about goals. The best goals are inarticulable and cannot withstand rigorous scientific investigation for that reason, that they can't be put forth clearly and distinctly; the least, the most dangerous, are catchphrase-ready and easily put forth in simple declarative sentences. The anti-anti-Darwinians don't have a flag particularly, they're a loose agglomeration of concerned smart people who see things drifting away from the dreams they were sold as young and up-and-coming heirs to the future. Who sold them those dreams? Ah, we're not supposed to talk about that.
Some of what this is is the best anyone could do, the stench and filth of mass urban poverty, children working ten hour days six days a week in disease-producing work environments, out of that and into the classroom. Out of that factory uber alles world and into...well into this one precisely.
That early days educational reform was earthly salvation of a benign and benevolent form most truly yes. But the unspoken faith that placing all kids of a certain age together and throwing proven fact-assimilation tools techniques and strategies at them will maximize anything let alone their individual potential as human beings is void. That's not what it's about.
So what are these "classrooms" in which the teaching of alternative explanations for the state of our present existences is proposed and criticized?
Who created them?
Why are they there?
Maybe we could start with that. And recognize that whatever we're doing it came out of the superstitious past, the believer's world - and can we see, now, how like the disdain of modern man for the chimpanzee our arrogance has become?
Those goofy monkeys and their cartoon behavior. Your grandmother believed things about the world you know to be wrong. Cast her away.
