South Carolina Education Committee Removes Evolution From Standards

Toe, The writes "The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee approved new science standards for students except for one clause: the one that involves the use of the phrase 'natural selection.' Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, argued against teaching natural selection as fact, when he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn. Fair argued South Carolina's students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy. Hopefully they're going to teach the controversy of gravity and valence bonds too. After all, they're just theories."

Re:States Rights

[Supp0rtLinux]

or better... if a majority of them do more poorly than their peers in other states, should they be allowed to form a class action suit against the education peeps or even the state?

Re:Evolution is a theory, but not "just a theory".

[gweihir]

Cool. Ham directly says he is not interested in truth, just belief and hence does not qualify as rational.

"War in Iraq is given by God" - S. Palin

[boorack]

Wake up folks. We still treat those creationist fanatics as silly curiosities and ignore fact that they are danger. They're real deal folks. In a system where legislation is bought and paid for, someone is putting gobs of money to push this crap down our throats. They are clearly trying to blur distinction between someone's beliefs and verifiable facts. This is power game. Maybe they see how much power do radical islamist clerics wield over undereducated, poor middle eastern people and they're trying to play the same book - and it seems to work almost as well in poor regions of USofA. Think of all those mega-churches and shady characters behind these, trying to put their their fingers whenever power is (army in particular). If we don't stop those fucks, they'll destroy everyone standing in their way using the same terrorist methods Saudis are using today in Syria or Chechenya. Future fascism will born in the US and use Holy Cross as its emblem the same way nazis were using swastika. Instead of just laughing at it, we should stop it in its tracks at all costs - in order to save both us and (honest parts of) Christianty. And no, corporate estabullshitment won't help us. Corporations will be as happy profiting from this as they were happy profiting from nazis in 1930-s.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[hondo77]

I'm an atheist, dumbass.

Re:States Rights

[Aryden]

Okay, then why send them to school at all? If I have to sit them down to teach them all the of scientific/mathematical.grammatical/literary/etc, the why the hell have an "outsourced" education system at all?

The education system should be teaching a defined framework of information across the board. It should not matter if you live in SC or NY, you should be learning the same fundamentals such as math, science, history and literature.

Re:States Rights

[silentcoder]

>By your logic if we didn't introduce kids to things like nuclear technology in high school, no one would go into that field in college.

No. By his logic- if you don't teach them basic physics, hardly any of them would (or could) go into nuclear technology. Evolution is to modern biology exactly as basic Newtonian physics is to Nuclear Technology - the gateway you need to learn in school the very bottom-layer fundamental pieces of knowledge without which you'll never be able to understand or learn the rest.

Not to mention - that - by YOUR logic, we may as well scrap art, literature and music programs entirely - after all, very few students will approach them as a career. Yet we keep them - because the one student in the entire history of the school who falls in love with stories and grows up to be a Tolkien or an Asimov or a Vonnegut is worth about a billion times more to society than the cost of having a literature teacher in every school. The one who grows up to be a Picasso or a Dali changes how people see the world for ever. The one in the lifetime of a school who may become a Ronnie James Dio or an Otep Shamaya are worth it all by themselves.

And the argument for evolution is much, much stronger than that: evolution the ground-work class that starts of nearly the entire supply of medical researchers, zoologists, doctors - hell damn near everybody who in anyway works with biology.
Scrap it and you will limit your supply of students in these fields almost entirely to private school kids who had the class - and the one or two outliers who read books about it on their own time because of personal interest.

I know - I live in a country where until almost the end of my high-school career there was no separation of church and state, I went through a school system where evolution was little more than a swear word - and I saw the country that did the world's first heart transplant turn into one that had to import doctors from Cuba just to raise it's healthcare system to the level of "terrible".