It’s not like the United States put a man on the moon and then brought him back or supervised mapping the human genome or anything useful like that. So it stands to reason that anyone at all, including people who live in countries where witchcraft is a capital offense, are free to fret about Florida classrooms. The beauty of pomo (post-modernism) is that it never needs to make sense, just make complaints.
From Giorgia Guglielmi at Nature:
Education bills would allow people who live in the state to review and recommend instructional materials to be used in schools.
That’s shocking, especially when you consider that the people who live in the state are forced to pay for the schools and to send their kids to them (if they can’t afford private). 😉
Who told these serfs they had rights?!
Florida’s instructional-materials bills could alter classroom content in a less direct way.
Allowing taxpayers to have a say in what goes on in public schools seems innocuous, says Brandon Haught, who teaches environmental science at a secondary school in Orange City, Florida. In reality, the bills, together with last year’s law, expose schools to activists that oppose the teaching of topics such as evolution and global warming, he says.
Allowing taxpayers a say had better be innocuous. That is what representative government is about.
What’s more, the bills and the law use language that makes it easier for individuals to target such topics, Branch says. The documents state that educational materials should be “balanced” and “noninflammatory”, but they don’t specify who decides whether something is inflammatory, he says. “It’s a real worry that those labels will be slapped onto any kind of material that people oppose.”
If we are talking about discredited icons of Darwinian evolution, there will be some pretty ripe targets long before we get to “any kind of material that people oppose.”
See Jonathan Wells’s Zombie Science for the graveyard catwalk of Darwinian evolution.
Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education (that is, Darwin in the school and, more recently, climate apocalypse lobby), offers
These measures would allow local school districts to use alternative education standards as long as they are equivalent to or “more rigorous” than the state ones. “But we’re not told how to measure rigour,” Branch says. More.
Idea: Why don’t we wait to see whether the new standards are more rigorous? For decades, the United States has spent more on education and got less for it than most Western nations. We can afford a bit of time to seeing whether a new broom sweeps cleaner.
See also: Indian education minister doubts Darwin; stands by fact that theory is under fire
and
Father of neo-Darwinism (Fisher’s theorem) Ronald Fisher critiqued at his own memorial?