“While courts have held that some criticism of evolution in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state, deniers of climate change argue that they are simply pushing academic freedom.”
Sam Favate writes at the WSJ Law Blog:
There’s a new battle brewing in America’s classrooms, and while it doesn’t have the religious implications of the evolution vs. creationism debate, it has prompted several state legislatures and local school boards to get involved…
State boards of education in Texas and Louisiana have established standards to require the presentation of climate change denial as a valid scientific position, while legislators in Tennessee, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Kentucky have introduced bills to mandate equal time for climate change skeptics’ views in the classroom, according to OPB. Earlier this week, we told you about an Oklahoma bill that would cover teaching climate change in the same way it covers evolution — require that alternate theories be presented…
In many ways, the fight over this is just beginning, since new national science standards for grades K-12 are due at the end of the year, and are expected to include climate change. That’s expected to increase resistance at the local and state levels in some areas. The legal fight — at the legislative and judicial levels — will surely intensify.
K-12 schools should teach scientific method. When they teach specific theories, it should be done in a manner to encourage the students to be skeptical. The teaching should include having the students conduct their own experiments to either support or falsify those theories. Teach them the importance of logging their data and documenting their results, and then providing that to other students to try to duplicate the results.
Public schools now are turning out non-thinking, non-curious students. That is why this nation (maybe the world) is in scientific decline. Science classes shouldn’t be teaching any particular dogma or belief. They should be teaching how to do the scientific work required to support or falsify a hypothesis. Nothing in science should be taught as settled or consensus.
I agree in general with Mr. Kolb. Bright students can understand how the theory of Evolution came from a geological understanding of time, the understanding of genes through Mendel works, and how coding is done through DNA sequences. Mendel’s works are the kind of Science that we both cherish. Although he was a monk, Mendel did not appeal to divine revelation of the anti-evolution folks, or the polling results used by Climate Change people.
Sam Favate writes at the WSJ Law Blog is a typical moron hack. Skeptics do not claim that the climate does not change. We are skeptical that there is any scientific evidence the human activities are causing catastrophic climate change. Get it right Favate, you dumb ass!
Climate change and Evolution like quantum physics, string theory, dark matter…have no business being taught in public schools. These are not subjects non-college kids can learn anything from on a scientific basis. There are no experiments or equations, or theory they can possibly understand and test. They should stick to chemistry, acceleration diagrams, cell biology. Things the kids can actually learn from and test. I only hope that climate change and evolution are given a 5 minute lip service and then the teacher gets back to real grade school level science.