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Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

 
 
farmerman
 
  1  
Reply Wed 22 Dec, 2010 04:24 pm
@spendius,
why dont you go and Google yourself, itll make you sleep better.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 22 Dec, 2010 04:27 pm
@farmerman,
It never entered my head fm. Maybe I should try it.

I can't possibly sleep any better than I do.
0 Replies
 
tenderfoot
 
  0  
Reply Wed 22 Dec, 2010 04:51 pm
Only time Spendious wakes up is when he's pissed.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 22 Dec, 2010 05:45 pm
@tenderfoot,
You lot do like these one-liners you learned off the comics in the days when your Moms were breast feeding you through the school railings at playtime.
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Wed 22 Dec, 2010 06:54 pm
@spendius,
And your's is not? LOL
wandeljw
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 07:55 am
During the past year the Texas State Board of Education has been criticized on standards for both science education and social studies education. Now, a complaint has been made to the federal government regarding the standards for social studies.

Quote:
SBOE standards for social studies appealed to feds
(By GARY SCHARRER, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 20, 2010)

AUSTIN — A school curriculum teaching children about violent Black Panthers while playing down Ku Klux Klan violence against blacks is not only inaccurate but discriminatory, the Texas NAACP and LULAC said Monday in a joint complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education.

The complaint asks the department's Office of Civil Rights to review Texas' new social studies curriculum standards approved by the State Board of Education and to take legal action if the state tries to implement the standards the groups call "racially or ethnically offensive," as well as historically inaccurate.

The new standards also balance the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and attempt to point out positive aspects of slavery.

"It is our contention that the SBOE curriculum changes were made with the intention to discriminate, and the SBOE curriculum and other areas raised in this complaint were either the result of unnecessary policies that have a disparate or stigmatizing impact on African Americans and Latinos, or reflect disparate treatment or neglect," according to the complaint by Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Joey Cardenas Jr., state director for the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens.

The complaint also asks federal officials to investigate a general "miseducation" of minority students in Texas, in addition to "disparate discipline for minority students," the use of school accountability standards to impose sanctions against schools with high populations of minority students and the under-representation of Latinos and African Americans in gifted and talented programs.

A review of the new social studies curriculum standards by historians and college professors indicates that 83 percent of the required historical figures and notable persons for students to study are white. Only 16 percent are African American or Latino.

Minority groups, including state legislators, warned the 15-member State Board of Education throughout the curriculum standards process that it was shortchanging the achievements of minorities. Of the 4.8 million children attending Texas public schools last year, 66 percent were minorities. Whites make up two-thirds of the State Board of Education.

State Board of Education member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, has been a leader in the effort to develop new curriculum standards, which, he said, "significantly increased the inclusion of minorities that were, indeed, patriots in American and Texas history."

"These activists are never satisfied, and their whining to the federal government is silly and without merit," Bradley said.

Many minority figures were included in categories that students can study as examples instead of rising to required reading, he said.

"We consider that to be fool's gold," Bledsoe said.

The complaint includes several academic reviews of the state's new social studies curriculum standards.

"The decision to accent in the curriculum standards positive aspects of slavery and of slaveholding leaders of the secessionist Confederacy like the treasonous Jefferson Davis will likely have a negative impact on all children who are taught this distorted and biased approach to one of the more brutal forms of oppression devised by mankind," Texas A&M sociology professor Joe Feagin wrote.

African-American children will get a warped sense of their own history and white children will get a perspective that plays down the culpability of whites, said Feagin, author of 52 books on racial, gender and urban issues and a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

LULAC and the NAACP are seeking federal intervention, in part, because the state gets about $5 billion a year in federal money for public education

"Federal funding is what would motivate the state to possibly act without necessarily litigation," said Robert Notzon, an Austin attorney who works with the state NAACP. "But the motivation for the feds to get involved would be the violations of (federal law and the U.S. Constitution)."

A spokesman said the civil rights office will evaluate the complaint.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 08:55 am
@cicerone imposter,
Quote:
And your's is not? LOL


I didn't say anything about me ci. I said "you lot". It's just that you're no good at it. I enjoy them too but I'm a lot better at it. I make my own up.

I mean to say--I should "Google myself" and "sleep better" and "I'm pissed" are hardly in the higher realms of witty repartee. I was told the other day "to not give up my day job." I hope the level of creativity displayed by anti-IDers will never be communicated to the young and especially not in conditions of incarceration.

Science would wither away like the flowers in autumn.
Setanta
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 08:58 am
Positive aspects of slavery . . . sadly, i'm not at all surprised that those clowns think that's reasonable.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 09:34 am
@Setanta,
There are positive aspects to slavery. I don't know if they might outweigh the negative aspects or not. They probably did in many circumstances. And didn't in others.

I've seen a black man expressing gratitude that his ancestors were brought to the land of the free out of the heart of darkness.

Obviously, if nobody ever mentions the positive aspects they might seem never to have existed. It would hardly be educational to focus entirely on the negative side and ignoring the positive.

Many people say that most of us are wage slaves. Have the migrant fruit pickers a choice? What is slavery leaving aside the use of the word to posture as compassionate?

0 Replies
 
rosborne979
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 10:01 am
@wandeljw,
wandeljw wrote:

During the past year the Texas State Board of Education has been criticized on standards for both science education and social studies education. Now, a complaint has been made to the federal government regarding the standards for social studies.

The constitution requires a separation of church and state, but there is no constitutional restriction requiring the separation of bad-behavior and the state.

There is also no requirement for accuracy in historical records (and education), so this could be a hard issue to legislate.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 10:07 am
@spendius,
We all understand the creativity of creationists, and nothing more need to be said on that score. Poooof! And god made the universe.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 11:46 am
@cicerone imposter,
Think of the efficiency ci. You have been taking it for granted for far too long.
cicerone imposter
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 12:15 pm
@spendius,
There's a huge disconnect between what the christian bible says about the age of this planet vs what we learned through science that it's over 4.5 billion years old.

Poof doesn't cut it in the real world.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 02:32 pm
@cicerone imposter,
Tell me ci. what advantageous lessons do you draw from all the efforts and treasure expended in finding out about the origins of the planet and the history of organic life? The only one I can see is the satisfaction of attacking the beliefs of others whose curiosity might be saisfied, has been satisfied, by the Biblical version.

There is another one, I suppose, which is sketched in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I have mentioned it before.

Quote:
No matter, Sir, (said Johnson;) they consider it as a compliment to be talked to, as if they were wiser than they are. So true is this, Sir, that Baxter made it a rule in every sermon that he preached, to say something that was above the capacity of the audience.


He was addressing Sir Joshua Reynolds the famous artist.

fm's sermons usually use such a technique which one might presume he has derived from sermons he has read. He can get down in the gutter when he feels the need though. wande's quotes are larded with such stuff.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 02:34 pm
@spendius,
I must confess to having done it many times in the pub.
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 02:39 pm
@spendius,
spendi, You still don't understand that humans are curious about our existence - which includes our environment, history, geology, paleontology, our universe, and evolution. The different sciences allows us to understand most of these subjects heretofore unknown just several centuries ago.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 03:15 pm
@cicerone imposter,
I covered the point of curiosity. If you read back you will see I did.

I know plenty of humans who have very little interest in our environment, history, geology, paleontology, our universe, and evolution.

I understand the advantages I asked you about when there's a career involved. But there's a great deal of science in which the practitioners involved don't insist we are kept up to date with it.

Why is this subject so special? Suppose the satisfaction of human curiosity had been given over to the Biblical version, or other creation myths, for the precise reason that not to do drives everybody mad. Attenborough looks a bit out of it to me.



cicerone imposter
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 05:08 pm
@spendius,
spendi, Haven't you learned that simple lesson that most things are self-taught? They can't spoon feed you stuff you're not interested in. All the information is out there on Google. It's up to you to seek any information of interest to you.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 05:54 pm
@cicerone imposter,
Have you nothing to say that's not obvious to the average 12 year-old?

I asked you what advantages you felt in knowing about evolution? I think you are using evolution as a club to beat Christian teaching on sexual morality in the absence of any recommendations what sexual morality should be when applied to the masses as opposed to your personal circumstances.
cicerone imposter
 
  0  
Reply Thu 23 Dec, 2010 06:18 pm
@spendius,
You must then be less than 12, because you keep making childish statements, and I feel the need to explain them to you in elementary language. I try to be patient with a child like you.
 

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