From Borowski's view, the program is anti-American in the sense that it teaches students that the United States is equal to other countries. "My fear is that my kids are going to be taught America isn't better than any other country in the world," Borowski says.Are they teaching that America isn't better, or are they merely staying failing to present propaganda that it is better? I mean, think about it, I can envision a teacher being neutral in a way annoys people used to our usual cheerleading history classes, but I can't envision a teacher getting up in front of a class and saying, "America isn't better than any other country." As much as I love this country, a neutral approach is perfectly reasonable, especially for an international program.
The anti-Christian complaints scare me though:
At the core of the program is the "Theory of Knowledge" course, which, among other things, teaches students how to identify ideological bias...Maybe someone more familiar with the book can fill in the details, but my understanding is that Sagan hardly deals with conventional religion in his book. What we seem to have here is parents' fear that their children will learn to think scientifically. Know what? Scratch what I said about my love of this country. I love some parts of it, like the constitutional freedoms surpassing those in even other advanced democracies. On the other hand, I'm embarrassed that teaching scientific thinking would be considered controversial.
The anti-Christian critique was brought to the forefront during a January school board discussion about the required reading for the "Theory of Knowledge" course. Objections were raised about including Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World without the inclusion of a book to counter it. In the end, two board members, Dave Eaton and Bill Wenmark, voted against the book list, but the entire board voted 5 to 2 in support of it. Even so, dissent is a rarity in a district where the board usually unanimously agrees on everything.
Spotting cranks:Via Anne, some tips.
Elf names:Yet another silly meme, via Pharyngula
| Your Elf Name Is... |
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Fighting God:Austin Cline responds to an e-mailer who wonders why atheists spend their time fighting something that doesn't exist. Once again, I must observe that people do spend their time fighting thinks like bogus cures and belief in alien abductions.
1 comment:
Actually, I just finished Sagan's book. I was actually surprised at how respectful of religious beliefs he was. He was not at all dismissive. He is even surprisingly respectful when debunking some of the worst pseudoscientific or antiscientific beliefs. One area where he is quite harsh, though, is in his discussion of the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, but it didn't appear to me to be because he was trying specifically to be harsh. Just relatively dispassionatedly describing what happened, the hysteria that led to the deaths of thousands in most horrible ways, how people used false accusations of witch-hood as a means of settling scores, and how government officials used it as a means of apropriating the property of the executed, was more than enough.
Perhaps that's what they interpreted as being an attack on religion, because elsewhere the book is almost solicitously respectful of religion.
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