Lying to Students
Just when I start to despair that the idiocracy of our current political discourse is being perpetuated by Texas' control over textbook standards, I am reminded that sometimes - though not often enough - the lies backfire.
PZ Myers has the latest example:
A short letter in this week's Science echoes a point I made in my last article: lying to students will not win them over to your cause. It's what will eventually lead to the defeat of creationism, which prompts them to lie ever more in order to drown out that damning evidence.I was always a mediocre student, especially in high school. I never really knew what I wanted to do, and nothing seemed to excite me. This changed in my senior year, when a creationist visited my biology class.
On that fateful day, all the science students were herded into the school auditorium, where we listened to a long and richly illustrated lecture describing literal creationism. We were informed that in an effort to "balance" our education, we would soon hear an equally long lecture on evolution. This, like many things I heard that day, turned out to be false. The evolution lecture never materialized. Remarkably, I graduated from senior biology having learned only about creationism.
School had finally gotten my full attention. I wanted to know what we were missing, and why. For the first time in my life, I willingly (eagerly even) picked up my textbook and studiously read it. With growing interest, I realized that evolution made an awful lot of sense, and that I was being hoodwinked by my biology class.
It's hard to overestimate the appeal of rebelling against the system to a teenaged boy, and that day marked the beginning of my path to a career in evolutionary biology. We learned other things in science class that year, too--for example, that all actions have an opposite reaction. For at least one sulky teenager in the small town of Owen Sound, Ontario, it took a creationist to make him into an evolutionary biologist.
There aren't enough of them. Not nearly enough.
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2 comments:
Good/sad stuff.
Of course, both sides-- or any side in any debate-- have the same problem.
In this context, those who over-sell Evolution (as a comprehensive "explanation" for the development of life)-- beyond its irrefutable power as evolution-- risk the same thing.
If there is gravity, there is evolution.
One of these days, Herr Schansberg, your lack of education will meet reality. Although you hold yourself out to be an educator, you fail the smell test. We smelled the stench of you repressive politics and social doctrine. Fortuneately the
Economics I learned has nothing to do with sky wizardry. It does have to do with the public's right to participate in the allocation of natural resources to social demands. In your Economics there is no measurement of the social cost of enterprise. In your Economics WalMart creates jobs, instead of transfers them. In your Economics it makes no difference that WalMart's profits leave the communities where they are earned and shipped overseas where they aren't taxed and are never re-invested --- they just disappear, evaporate in the moonlit ether. In your Economics, a gawd fixes the mistakes capitalists make, instead of sending them to jail. In your Economics, religion is either a natural resource or the demand to which it is allocated. Religion is everything.
That conclusion alone disqualifies your self agrandized standing as an educated man. Or even your appointment as a qualified educator. Your Economics is the shitstorm that created the mess we're in today.
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