The pro-superstition and anti-evolution Discovery Institute must be doing backflips over their wild successes in Louisiana.
Science Magazine, Louisiana Creates: New Pro-Intelligent Design Rules for Teachers:
Last year, Louisiana passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, a law that many scientists and educators said was a thinly veiled attempt to allow creationism and its variants into the science classroom. On Tuesday, the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted a policy that sharpens those fears, giving teachers license to use materials outside of the regular curriculum to teach “controversial” scientific theories including evolution, origins of life, and global warming. Backers of the law, including the Louisiana Family Forum, say it is intended to foster critical thinking in students. Opponents insist its only purpose is to provide a loophole for creationists to attack the teaching of evolution.
“We fully expect to see the Discovery Institute’s book, Explore Evolution, popping up in school districts across the state*,” says Barbara Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, is a proponent of Intelligent Design. In a statement on the institute’s Web site, its education analyst Casey Luskin hailed the new policy as a “victory for Louisiana students and teachers.” The policy will now be printed in the Louisiana Handbook for School Administrators, which public school officials use as a guide.
Phil Plait, the renowned skeptic, author and astronomer behind the Bad Astronomy Blog, and President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, has a take on this that is dead-on:
So they changed tactics again, now claiming that teachers need “academic freedom” to discuss controversial theories. The thing is, evolution isn’t controversial. Not among real scientists, that is. It’s a manufactured controversy, with reality on one side, and antiscience creationists making stuff up on the other.
The ultimate irony of all this is that the last thing the creationists want is academic freedom. What they really want is for children to learn only their errant beliefs, and get no real science education.
Precisely. This isn’t about freedom, academic or otherwise, but is simply about telling other people how they must live their lives and how they must raise their children, and that is anything but freedom. “Ultimate irony”, however, is quite an understatement. As I’ve said before, when discussing the Creationists’ recent claims that reading the Bible (in public schools, of course) promotes critical thinking:
The bottom line is that nothing, absolutely nothing, is too patently false, too intentionally misleading, too unnecessarily obfuscating of the real issues, or even too hypocritical for these people [to use as a justification].
[via Bad Astronomy Blog]
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