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Kansas Board Advances a Draft Critical of Evolution

TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 9 (AP) - The State Board of Education has approved the latest draft of science standards that include greater criticism of evolution.
        The board approved the draft on Tuesday by a vote to 6 to 4. It then voted to send it to be reviewed by outside academics. The board is expected to give its final approval in October.
        The draft says the board is not advocating the teaching of "intelligent design," which contends that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent creator, not evolution. But the language favored by the board does come from advocates of intelligent design.
        In a debate on Tuesday, board members opposed to the draft said religion had no place in the science classroom.

In related news, dissenting members of the Kansas State School Board were placed in stocks in the city square to be ridiculed and taunted by villagers as they pass by on their way to the weekly witch burning. Meanwhile, in technology news, a delegation of Kansas legislators has set out on foot to the unexplored badlands of Nebraska on a quest to steal their fire.

All kidding aside, this is not a good thing. As a Texan, this shouldn't bother me. After all, the more critical thinking-deprived students who come stumbling out of Kansas schools to join their Wal-Martified workforce, the better Texas looks to future potential employers as a source of educated labor. I mean, it's not like well educated Texans are falling for this IDiocy. But as an educator, I just despise seeing students hornswaggled by a dumbing down of genuine learning. The people trying to sell repackaged creationism as intelligent design are essentially con artists, twisting information to keep their segment of the public riled up and misinformed so that they can continue to sell their books, charge their speaker fees, and get off on all the attention.

Intelligent designers are no friends of religion, peddling their snake oil of a supposed conflict between religion and science where there is none. In the long run, this reckless malarkey will disillusion rational people and turn them off to all religion, as the public comes to see either intelligence and religious faith as polar opposites, or come to see science as the enemy of religious faith. The controversy will feed the disaffection so many kids today feel toward school as well, making it appear that all public learning is a sham, a political football tossed around by narrow minded factions.

Kansas politicians knuckling under to these extremist bullies are taking a step toward their home state's ruin. The history on this is clear: extremists always do two things to a society. They polarize communities over trivialities and then they run the society into the ground. From there it’s a natural devolution from ramming make believe theories into schoolbooks to ramming airplanes into somebody else's buildings. The sooner this nonsense gets smacked down the better off we'll all be.