quote:I don't understand what it is about evolution that scares parents. It's just a scientific idea, not a moral one, and not one that is particularly inspiring to kids. All you have to do, if you are a creationist, is send your kid to school, and when he comes home, ask, "What did you learn about?" If he says, "Evolution," then you say, "People outside our religion sometimes believe in evolution, but we don't. We believe that the animal were created much more recently by God." And that's it. End of discussion.
I have never understood the reasoning behind trying to shape your kids' beliefs by preventing them from even hearing ideas put forward by other faiths and systems of thought. Someday, they'll be adults, and they will hear this stuff anyway. If it matters to you that they remain steadfast in the beliefs you have taught them, then for heaven's sake, make sure they get to hear what other people think, and then teach them your opinions on the same subjects. I mean, do you really want them to be shocked and horrified when they find out that there are other ideas in the world? Sheesh.
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Actually, it was me with my quotation vs quote ax grinding. And you're welcome to pick apart my posts, they're full of errors Posts: 3493 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:The reason I bring up the Sandia Report is that it seems everytime the subject of education comes up, it becomes clear that the vast majority of americans feel that our schools are giving our children inferior educations. That simply isn't true.
The schools aren't inferior because we churn out kids who don't know how to read. The schools are inferior because we churn out kids are very good at thinking, i.e., attending to what calls for thought.
This mistaken emphasis in education was sufferable before technology took away the need for a lot of tradecraft and the lack of technology minimized the damage that a few boneheads could inflict, and when national policies were left to the few who voted and the administrators. The problem is that now human relations are becoming more complex at the same time our mastery over the earth is becoming more complete. In a world of nukes and automatic weapons and microwaves and the nimble workings of international commerce and human relations, now we actually need people to have to think.
___________________ Instead of cabinetmakers, we have button pushers, and anyone who has ever worked in a factory knows that button pushing does not call for nearly the same amount of thought and attention to the wood that cabinet-making requires. Instead of grocery markets run by grocers, we have supermarkets run by zombies. But now that we don't need cabinet makers or grocers, and even drones are becoming irrelevant, we need to thinkers deciding thoughtfully, what's next. I'm not so worried that the want of thinking is going to lead to irresponsible policies which will lead to physical destruction, though sometimes I'm a little worried, but mostly I'm worry about living in an affluent slum or a world devoid of that quality which makes us human, a kind of Dark Ages, a wasteland where a numb people are still not thinking, bereft of that human spark and living like Walmart animals.(The only Science Fiction reference I can think of are the cattle in "The Time Machine.")
I'm not just talking about burned out cities like Detroit, but Orange Country California has the same eerie quality, and with a world grown smaller and more complex, I just don't know. Not thinking is going to not only be that quality which stops our progress, but that quality which precipitates our downfall, not as a nation, but as a world.
Our energy policy is a result of not thinking. The Iraq mess is a result of not thinking. The inability to go to the Sudan, a result of not thinking. Our healthcare situation, and yes, even our transnational corporation gaffaws may be pointed to not thinking, not to mention the plethora of horribly unimportant artistic work out there. As to the 2 million people in jail, the problem isn't that they don't know how to read, it's the thinking. The drug problem, thinking. Teen age pregnancies, thinking. Hell, even rampant consumer debt is linked to thinking and not reading.
The drug situation is the most evident, though. It's not a supply side problem, it's a demand problem, and that demand would be sliced if people had the anticipatory powers and self-respect which thinking provides. All of those crimes and mistakes which were born out of, "I wasn't thinking at the time." That faculty is what should be addressed in school.
_________________________________________________
And finally, about evolution:
Teacher: Everyone cover one eye. Okay, now there is a way you can see, right?
Class: Yes
Teacher: Is there some sense in which you can't see?
Class: Yes
Teacher: Religion and Science are kind of like that. It's completely appropriate to say that you can see, and it's appropriate to say that you can't see. (Theaetetus, Plato) Now Copernicus showed that the earth moves around the sun, right?
Class: right
Teacher: But the sun is going to set around 6 pm and rise around around 5:30am.
Class: right
Teacher: So saying that both earth revolves around the sun, and the sun rises and sets around the earth is appropriate, right? (What is called thinking, Heidegger)
Class: right
Teacher: We all know that the earth is round, right.
Class: right
Teacher: But anybody who has ever been to the midwest knows that it's as flat as a board.
Class: right
Teacher: So the earth can be appropriately said to be flat and round.
Class: right
Teacher: It's kind of the same thing. Science and Religion concerned with each other. The only thing that can withdraw religion is between you and your religion. Science can tell me which gene I inherited from my mother, but it can't tell me that she loves me. Science just isn't concerned with that.
____________________________
Evolution vs. Creationism is a softball issue, and there are very easy ways to teach it in a way that calls for kids to think instead of asking them to turn their brains off. My beef with teacher training is that I don't know enough teachers who would have been able to answer this very pertinent question.
quote:Icky wrote: (This refers to secular private schools. Religious schools, though, are much quicker to kick people out. Most of their students aren't rich anyway.)
I don't know where you're getting that idea in bold. This has not been my experience at all. Perhaps you could cite something?
quote:Icky also wrote: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and the fact that most private school teachers get paid more. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This statement casts doubt on your whole post, JNSB, because this is, across the board, contrary to fact (as Elizabeth noted).
Yeah. This was just sloppy posting on my part. The alarm bells went off in my mind went I used the words "fact" and "most", but somehow I convinced myself to let them fly anyway. The private school my little brother went to did have teachers that were paid much better than public schools. But I certainly should not have extrapolated that to "most". Thanks for challenging me on this, Icarus, and you too, Elizabeth!
Posts: 1423 | Registered: Sep 2003
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JNSB, The private school where my father teaches pays very well, better than public schools. They also have incredible benefits. If it is a boarding school, a teacher, especially a young teacher just starting out, can save almost every dollar they make, as room and board is included. My first job was at a junior boarding school in Lake Placid. My dad taught there, and I went as a seventh grader, and wanted to go back and teach.
We made 9,000 dollars the first year. (1985) Ouch. I spent every penny. A frugal (Read cheap) friend of mine saved everything he could. When he left there after the second year, he had over 10,000 bucks saved. He ate every meal there, and would only go out if there was Happy Hour food. He was one of those people who was always included in the round-of-drinks, yet never hosted a round. But I digress.
Icarus wrote: "Your life's work can go suck an egg!"
Icarus, my life's work is now crying. I have to go and cheer it up. Sheesh. Some people are so cruel.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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About the evolution and creation thing - my kids learn about evolution and I address by talking to them about it. I don't have a problem with the theory being taught. I have a problem with the theory being taught as absolutely true, and examples being given of this proof that have already been discredited, like Haeckel's drawings.
I want my children to think, I don't hide evolution from them and say "God did it this way, and everyone else is wrong, end of discussion."
I want them to see both sides, but I also think schools do a poor job of showing both sides, and there is a lot of material out there on intelligent design that I make sure my kids see at home.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Did you point out that Darwin didn't believe Haeckel's drawings, and that they've never been considered support in the scientific community for evolutionary theory?
They get included in textbooks because there are lots of them, there are few other drawings purporting to showing the development of embryos, they're in the public domain, and they're pretty.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Irami, it's worth noting that your examples of a teacher teaching two contradictory "right" facts, in each case one of the facts was more "right" than the other.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Elizabeth, just wait until my daddy's lawyer finds out you singled me out for humiliation in that way!
-o-
quote: quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Icky wrote: (This refers to secular private schools. Religious schools, though, are much quicker to kick people out. Most of their students aren't rich anyway.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't know where you're getting that idea in bold. This has not been my experience at all. Perhaps you could cite something?
You got me there--it was a throw-out point. I based it on the fact that parochial schools cost, on average, half of what non-religious private schools cost:
It just seems to me to be intuitively true. However, I could not find statistics on the average income of parochial school students online. Has it been your experience that parochial students are "rich" as opposed to middle class or upper middle class? How do you define "rich"? My parents sent me to Catholic school from 7th to 12th grade. My classmates were much wealthier than me, but my parents were able to swing it with some sacrifice despite most assuredly not being rich. (My parents were both teachers.)
In any case, this statement was thrown out there for balance. I was granting that parochial schools might be an exception to what I was saying about private schools also having a hard time kicking students out, due to the extreme wealth of many of their students. If it's false, then this furthers my own point.
(The original statement was based not only on the possibility that wealthy parents might someday donate, but also on the fact that they have greater access to lawyers. At my old private school, we could pretty much count on getting sued each time we expelled a student. We were, at any given time, involved in three to five lawsuits, and that's normal for most schools. And no, I don't have a link to back that statement up; it's anecdotal.)
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote: there is a lot of material out there on intelligent design that I make sure my kids see at home.
That's a slippery slope. If you set them looking for the same kind of proof, I think you are inviting trouble. I think it's more appropriate to explain how a bed is both a collection of atoms and a bed, and that one cannot inform the status of the other. It's not hard to show that science doesn't solve all of our concerns, just as science can't tell you the difference between a good book and a great book.
Tom:
I really don't think so. It's a shifting perspective. It just shows that things are different depending on what you use as criteria, and that there is a virtue in using the appropriate criteria for the appropriate judgment.
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Oh, yeah, Icarus, well just YOU wait until the teacher's union hears about this! They will do, um, well, not much at all to protect me.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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You don't teach theories, not the way you spoke about them. That you can just box them up neatly, and put them on the shelf, as if to compare with one another. If you look at the world, think which about what the world calls for, not the theory.
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I'm just wondering what the reaction will be when other religions demand equal time, unless you'd rather leave it a vague, "and some people believe a religious figure or Divine Being created the world."
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It's not about equal time for one religion or another. It's about what we teach in school. You don't teach that some people believe this and that some believe that, but you can address some of the problems that are associated with "is" and that's enough.
quote: I have a problem with the theory being taught as absolutely true...I want them to see both sides, but I also think schools do a poor job of showing both sides...
First, any good science teacher should _never_ present anything as "absolutely true". That simply goes against the nature of science. On the other hand, if you want science teachers to give equal time to intelligent design, then you are asking us to teach outside of our field. Intelligent design has been soundly rejected by science. If you want to have it taught in some other class (for instance modern theological thought for instance), by all means do so. But don't pretend that it is science.
Posts: 57 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
*dryly* And this is why I teach in a religious school -- and one that gives me a lot of lee-way.
I do teach evolution, most years (last year we were SO behind we just never got to it). I show the students a great video I got from PBS (originally from a Canadian source, who makes a lot of great science videos); talk about the differences between natural selection, microevolution, and macroevolution; list a few of the problems with evolutionary theory; give them my understanding of their party line (in that I teach in a Lubavitch school, and the official Lubavitch view on evolution does not jibe with mine), and my personal views (essentially intelligent design).
I think it is very important that they have some idea of what the generally accepted (to the degree that there is such a thing) view of evolution is, and understand that not all the details of it run counter to their/our (well, more run counter to theirs than mine) beliefs. And I appreciate the fact that I have NEVER gotten any flack from the administration or parents about my approach, although I have had some -- easily dealt with -- concerns expressed.
*twinkle* And I'm sure my approach deeply offends the separation-of-science-and-religion folks, but then again, that's why I teach where I do. And most of the time, I do point out that science and religion have different domains. I'm just not a never-the-twain-shall-meet believer.
After all, to me, one of -- if not the main -- reasons to learn science is to learn more about God. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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rivka -- interestingly enough, there's nothing inconsistent between "weak" intelligent design and evolutionary theory. The idea that things happen because of God is perfectly acceptable to science, in the sense that its completely outside of science's purview. Now, if one tries to make a "scientific" theory of intelligent design, where one asserts it is scientifically more likely that things happen because of God or the like, that has been shown to be unsupported by science in every permutation so far presented.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I know that, fugu. And I'm not terribly interested in making it into a scientific theory -- especially since, in my experience, most of the books and papers which do so boast not only bad science but poor theology. *grin*
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I regard people making more than $70,000/year as "rich" (yes, it's a very subjective term). It should probably not be a problem for these families' kids going to college, provided they budget and save correctly, avoiding debt and not buying a new car every other year. But I also suspect that a lot of these families do have debt, and aren't mostly fiscally responsible. They certainly wouldn't seem very rich then. And I'm not including those families with serious medical bills, or who had their businesses destroyed in natural disasters. Paying off those bills wouldn't make 70 grand per year seem like very much.
From your first link:
quote:On average, private school students come from families with higher incomes than those of public school families, and have parents who have reached a higher level of education than the average parent (Moe, 2000). Forty-seven percent of private school students come from families making at least $75,000 a year (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Parents of private school students are also more likely to be white, Catholic, and Republican (Moe, 2000).
Perhaps your family income is more than $70,000 and you don't feel rich, so you don't think of that as rich. I know some families that bring in more than $100,000/year but still talk about winning the lottery. To me, it's laughable how easily we get caught up in making more to spend more.
Posts: 1423 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
JNSB, you're analysis of finances is a little overbroad. For people who work in DC, for example, $70,000 won't qualify for a mortgage on a modest townhouse less than an hour away from the city.
Certainly, a family making $70,000 a year is not poor. But it's not enough to send 3 kids to a 4-year college without significant assistance or loans.
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"3 kids to a 4-year college without significant assistance or loans."
Or five. (sorry, Dag)
I agree that salary soes not necessarily mean wealth. Our house, a three bedroom ranch bought at 98,ooo dollars ten years ago, would be worth three times as much if it were moved 60 miles east, with 1/4 the amount of land. My salary as a teacher would not increase much, but I would not be able to afford my own house.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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quote: Forty-seven percent of private school students come from families making at least $75,000 a year (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002).
That's ALL private schools, not specifically religious ones. And, incidentally, I'm pretty sure that a family income of $75,000 a year qualifies as "middle class" by any standard you care to use. And no, Cor and I combined do not earn that much, and neither did my parents, so no need to speculate on how rich we are, or how we spend our money.
In any case, again, why argue about it? You're right: ALL private school parents are rich beyond the ability of words to describe. I grant you that. After all, it makes my point.
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