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The Libertarian

Vin Suprynowicz

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DICTATING LESSON PLANS VIA CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

Steve Brown, a Las Vegas masonry contractor and member of a nondenominational church, has filed an initiative petition proposing a constitutional amendment that would require Nevada teachers to tell their students that questions remain about the theory of evolution.

Mr. Brown, who has three school-age children, admits he has no organization to help him gather the 83,184 signatures he would need to acquire by June 20 to get his proposal on the November ballot. (To amend Nevada’s Constitution, he’d have to win voter approval this year and again in 2008.)

“I just want them to start telling the truth about evolution,” Mr. Brown explains. “Evolution has occurred, but parts of it are flat-out unproven theories. They’re not telling students that in school.”

The petition wants students to be informed before the end of the 10th grade that “although most scientists agree that Darwin’s theory of evolution is well supported, a small minority of scientists do not agree.”

The proposal says several “areas of disagreement” would have to be covered by teachers, including the view by some scientists that “it is mathematically impossible for the first cell to have evolved by itself.”

Students also would have to be told some scientists argue “that nowhere in the fossil record is there an indisputable skeleton of a transitional species, or a ‘missing link.’ ” And Mr. Brown would require that students “must be informed that the origin of sex, or sex drive, is one of biology’s mysteries.”

Mind you, this would all be carved in stone as a constitutional amendment.

Truth is, few scientists will tell you anything is “mathematically impossible” -- particularly something like the beginning of life, which can be empirically demonstrated to have occurred at some point. This sounds more like a religious assertion.

Nobel prizes for discovering human sex hormones date back at least to 1939. From 1970 to 1998, more than a quarter of all Nobel Prizes for Physiology and Medicine were awarded to scientists whose work revealed some aspect of hormone action at the molecular level.

But even if we agree the sex drive remains “mysterious,” what if future discoveries in biochemistry render it less mysterious? Would the courts then find Mr. Brown’s amendment bars our schoolchildren being told that? If scientific consensus holds a “missing link” skeleton has indeed been discovered, would the courts then rule it illegal to show a picture of that skeleton to Nevada schoolkids? Wouldn’t they be obliged to, under Mr. Brown’s amendment? You can’t just take a red pencil to the Constitution if it turns out you got it wrong, you know.

(In fact, petrified remains of early mammals are surely a “link” between earlier, simpler life forms and modern humans. The only thing that keeps them from being “missing links” is that they’re no longer, you know ... “missing.”)

Mr. Brown is hardly as “over the top” as some of his companions in evolutionary skepticism. Of course kids should be taught we don’t have all the answers. From what I recall, I was taught precisely that.

But placing a requirement in law that children be taught something is “mathematically impossible” brings to mind the short-lived attempt of the lower house of the Indiana Legislature, in 1897, to simplify the task of Indiana schoolchildren attempting to solve for the area of a circle by enacting a statute declaring that pi should equal 3.2, precisely. (The Indiana Senate killed the measure after referring it to the Committee on Temperance, “apparently in fun.”)

Mr. Brown spoke to The Associated Press about his proposal following a Feb. 27 decision by the Utah House to scuttle a bill that would have required public school students there to be told that evolution isn’t empirically proven.

Last month, the Ohio Board of Education deleted a science standard and lesson plan encouraging students to seek evidence for and against evolution -- another setback for “intelligent design” advocates who maintain life is so complex it must have been created by a higher authority.

But critics of evolution did get a minor boost in Kansas in November, when the state Board of Education adopted new science teaching standards that treat evolution as a flawed theory.

Such squabbles are a predictable outcome of the domination of American primary and secondary education by tax-funded schools. State schools fall naturally into teaching a standardized curriculum, and minorities will inevitably object to some part of that standardized subject matter.

But America has done amazingly well in avoiding religious strife by keeping religious teaching separate from law, thanks to a federal Constitution that bars government from imposing the doctrines of any one religion. (Whether some of our schools now teach a “religion of Environmentalism” not yet subjected to nearly as much scrutiny as Mr. Darwin’s epiphany on evolution, is perhaps a subject better left for another day.)

We would run an enormous risk in tampering with such success by turning that tradition on its head, setting a precedent for micromanagement by imposing what amounts to religious views via lengthening chains of warring constitutional amendments.

(Assuming our educrats would even listen, of course. I would fully expect that gang to print up all Mr. Brown’s required verbiage on paper placemats and hand them out in the cafeteria on fish-and-chips day.)

Will history find that everything taught in our government schools today is 100 percent correct? Of course not. Just as no medical school today would teach the old doctrine of the “four humours,” so will the scientific understanding of today doubtless be demonstrated to be incomplete, and in some cases just plain wrong. And that’s before we even consider the on-purpose misinformation.

(Is Thimerosal safe? Is autism a mystery? Does something called HIV cause AIDS? Does the Second Amendment really protect no individual right to own machine guns? Is global warming a problem -- and if so could it be effectively impacted by any conceivable government “energy policy”?)

But we must teach science as best we know it, in order to train succeeding generations of chemists, doctors, and engineers. And despite the word games that allow a fundamentalist minority to insist “Evolution is just a theory” (purposely failing to note that scientists use the word “theory” to mean something other than “wild guess” or ”untested hypothesis”), this is science that has been vetted and refined through more than a century of experiment and archaeology, a far cry from -- P.J. O’Rourke’s famous example -- the doctrine that holds the world sits on the back of a giant turtle.

(Mr. O’Rourke was ridiculing the “multicultural” notion that the giant turtle theory should be given equal weight in our schools with the Copernican “theory” that the earth orbits around the sun.)

And how is evolution incompatible with belief in a God, anyway? What hubris to deny others the right to explore the methods God may have used to create us.

Religious believers who take exception to the teachings of the government schools are free to home-school their children, or to send them to private academies that inculcate any doctrine they please. Indeed, they would be wise to do so, just as anyone who loves their children and doesn’t want to see them dumbed down into book-hating sociopaths would be wise to do so.

Should tax credits or some other form of relief be found, to make such alternative schooling more affordable for those who otherwise find themselves “paying twice” to support government schools they neither endorse nor use? Sure.

But the question here is whether government-school “curriculum reform” can be effectively brought about through the vastly unwieldy process of constitutional amendment, a strategy both desperate and dumb.

Here’s a counterproposal: Rather than trying to “reform” the unfixable, if for some reason you have allowed your children to be incarcerated in the government schools, simply take them aside when they’re about 12 and explain to them that much of what they’re about to be taught in middle school and high school is government propaganda, and just plain wrong.

This revelation is the first step toward adulthood and freedom. It might be the most important lesson you ever teach them.


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