He had me going there for a while. I thought, well, this guy's an engineer, a "propulsion technician," he must know something I don't.
Screwball in the side pocket, banked off the far rail
dont they have some car plants down there in alabama?
not only do we have to make sure we dont buy a car machined on a Monday, we now must be concerned about whether the cam shaft even touches the lifters.
dont even talk to me about the tires
Sorry,
I should have posted it as such... It kinda seemed funnier without.
Please forgive me.
It was funnier... I hope I didn't spoil the joke.
The reason jokes and hoaxes like that work is there are plenty of folks out there who lack the knowledge and thinkin' skills to recognize 'em for such. Pretty much the same with the religionist approach to objective science, IMO. Nonsense often finds a wide audience of willing takers. Thats why stuff like Phishin' and Nigerian Millions scams work and stick around.
To me, the real point is neither a lack of knowledge nor thinking skills... it is just hard-headed claptrap, of which there is a lot in some circles. (Apparently those not fully rounded.)
Quote:Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to some absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period."
Barnam said it best, "there's a sucker born every minute."
I thought it was appropriate for this paragraph
Quote:
Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the way math is taught to Alabama's children. One member of the state school board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of pi into the state's math textbooks, but thinks that the old value should be retained as an alternative. She said, "As far as I am concerned, the value of pi is only a theory, and we should be open to all interpretations." She looks forward to students having the freedom to decide for themselves what value pi should have.
ebrown_p wrote:I thought it was appropriate for this paragraph
Quote:...She looks forward to students having the freedom to decide for themselves what value pi should have.
Yes...
I guess there comes a time in life when you have to decide (everthing, including your own self awareness) for yourself. But first there comes a time in life when you need to learn enough to be able to weigh the issues using some knowledge which has come before you.
To me, the argument of "letting kids decide for themselves" is overly simplistic because it ignores the benefits of accumulated human knowedge. If you took the "let them decide for themselves" tac to an extreme, we would do away with education and interaction alltogether and let our children grow up feral. This would certainly provide us with some very creative results to the problem of survival, but I don't think it would contribute to the overall benefit of our kids, or future generations.
Critical thinking should be a part of education, but without knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, the effectiveness of "deciding for yourself" is blunted beyond usefulness.
Letting kids decide for themselves is the essence of Montessori teaching which I think is a superior method.When Montessori-educated children do choose a discipline, they are given the available accumulated knowledge which may be our most valuable asset.
"Letting our children grow up feral... now that did send a chill down my back.
the noble savage was far from noble.
I always thought the noble savage was far from savage.
I always thought they were just people conditioned by culture and circumstance.
I think there are nobles and savages in every culture and circumstance.
Learning
from the December 07, 2004 edition
A who's who of players in the battle of biology class
By Randy Dotinga | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
In the long battle over the teaching of evolution in American public schools, activists Eugenie Scott and Bruce Chapman both like to claim the role of underdog.
Ms. Scott feels outgunned by the hefty financial resources of her opponents and worries about "frightening" budget cuts on her own front. Mr. Chapman, meanwhile, argues that his troops are vastly outnumbered in some important areas. "We're up against a whole ... establishment," he says.
Two peas in a pod? Not quite. While they both claim to face entrenched and powerful foes, Scott and Chapman are on the opposite sides of the evolution debate. Scott is the country's leading advocate for the teaching of evolution in the classroom, while Chapman's Seattle-based institute promotes an "intelligent design" theory that suggests that only an all-powerful force - not the randomness of natural selection - could have created the incredible complexity of life.
Besides a desire to be seen as soldiers in a challenging and important war, the two leaders and other activists on various sides of the debate over evolution in public schools share other similarities: They're fully committed and, in some cases, well-funded.
Armed with millions of dollars in donations, dozens of people are devoting their lives to ensuring that their beliefs are the ones kids learn in school. As a series of new battles over evolution erupts in the South, Midwest, and Northeast, just about everyone claims to be dedicated to the principles of science.
Adherents of the theory of evolution, of course, include many scientists, possibly the wide majority of them. Proponents of teaching biblical creation and intelligent design boast their own scientists, too, some at prestigious universities and others at places like the Institute for Creation Research, which runs a museum and center in the San Diego suburb of Santee, Calif. "I'm a scientist, and I love science," says its president, John Morris, a geologic engineer. "But I'm also truth-driven. If I see error that needs to be confronted, truth needs to be taught and spread."
Mr. Morris and others are watching closely as public schools in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin wrangle over the teaching of evolution.
In perhaps the most far-ranging move, a tiny, one-high-school district in southern Pennsylvania mandated instruction in the theory of intelligent design, which has appeared over the last couple of decades as an alternative to both Darwinian evolution and a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. The theory doesn't specify the identity of the creator of the universe, and its proponents include people of faiths other than Christianity.
The budgets of the evolution critics are large, according to recent financial documents.
The Creation Research Institute reported spending $4.5 million in the fiscal year ending in 2003; three-year-old figures for the Discovery Institute, a think tank that tackles a variety of issues beyond evolution, show that it spent $2.2 million. Answers in Genesis, a Kentucky-based ministry that promotes creationism, reported expenditures of $5.8 million as of 2002.
By contrast, the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif., the only group of its kind in the US, spent $606,000 in the fiscal year ending in 2003. Funding is so limited that Scott, its executive director, once responded to a critic who said evolution is a religion by suggesting that her organization would have a lot more money if that were true.
Now, Scott - whose small staff provides resources to teachers and parents - worries that her budget will shrivel because donors are tapped out after the presidential election.
The Discovery Institute's Chapman scoffs at Scott's "preposterous" claims of underfunding. "There's huge bucks in evolution studies at every major university in the country," says Chapman, former director of the US Census Bureau. "We're not up against the National Center for Science Education. We're up against a whole Darwinist establishment."
Outside their common interests in funding and the principles of science, the opposing sides share one more thing: a belief that the battle over evolution isn't just about what goes on in the classroom.
To many supporters of Darwinian evolution and the principles of natural selection, the debate boils down to church versus state. They feel science must defend itself against religion in the form of creationism and what they consider to be its newest guise - intelligent design.
The debate is a "symptom of a much bigger problem in this country," says Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, who battled efforts to change the teaching of evolution in her local school district and now studies the national controversy. She says the debate revolves around "the religious right's dislike of secular education and secular society."
Scott adds that society's understanding of science itself is in danger. "Science is the quintessential example of critical thinking. It has to do with testing explanations rather than just accepting them because they sound good or because they suit your prejudices."
Critics of evolution, for their part, also see bigger issues at play. Chapman contends that his opponents promote an unwarranted belief in the concrete - "unless you can see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, it doesn't exist."
"There's all sorts of things that remain mysterious in life," he says, "and one of them is the origin of life itself."
Adds Morris, at the Institute for Creation Research: "Evolution reaches its tentacles into every area of society," he says. "If we are mutated fish, that means something. If we're created in the image of God, that means something else."
The article au1929 quoted wrote:The debate is a "symptom of a much bigger problem in this country," says Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, who battled efforts to change the teaching of evolution in her local school district and now studies the national controversy. She says the debate revolves around "the religious right's dislike of secular education and secular society."
She's right, this is the crux of the problem and the main motivator behind the push for non-evolution in science class.
The article au1929 quoted wrote:Critics of evolution, for their part, also see bigger issues at play. Chapman contends that his opponents promote an unwarranted belief in the concrete - "unless you can see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, it doesn't exist."
And this statement proves her point above.
The core disagreement here is over the philosophy of naturalism. The validity of Evolution is merely the tangible aspect of the difference in world views.
To protect the integrity of science education, I think more needs to be done to make people aware that naturalism is a critical aspect of science, and that people are free to believe in naturalism or not, but that science wouldn't be science without it.
Without reading back to see if it has been discussed, I am just going to offer my opinion as a previous Biology teacher...
The object of Bioilogy is to discuss the science of the study of life. Evolution is part of that science. It is a scientific theory that looks through the historical evidence that has led researchers to the point we are today. The impose a non-scientific discussion into a science class seems rather ludicrous to me. It would be good were Biology a philosophy class, but makes for bad science education.
Teachers have enough trouble teaching the other aspects of life science to need to worry about now including a unit on belief over science.
Rosborne,
McGentrix makes a good point about the difficulty of teaching philosophy as part of a science class. Also, would it be appropriate to teach naturalism at the elementary or secondary level?
