Sunday, February 12, 2006
Most Obnoxious Students Ever
So the creationists are now training elementary school students to disrupt class with their malarkey:
This is the environment that produces travesties like George Deutsch's NASA memos. Look: if you want to believe the world was created by a man with a flowing white beard or a flying spaghetti monster, I won't bother you. If you want to teach that to your children, I think you're doing them a disservice, but I won't stop you. But if you train your kids to waste other kids' time with bronze age bullshit in their science classroom, we're going to have words. Science isn't partisan and it's not religious; science doesn't care. Either leave it alone, or give up anything it's done for you and go back to wandering in the desert waiting for manna to fall from the sky. Actually, why not do both? Nevada's nice this time of year.
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"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"The end result of this is that rational students have their time wasted with this disingenuous nonsense (is Ham suggesting that no assumptions about the past can ever be made unless based on personal experience or the Bible?), and teachers feel pressured not to mention any of what science tells us about the past for fear of having a kid stand up again and recite what he's been trained to say. The story's in the L. A. Times; this Ken Ham guy is on a nationwide tour training people to aggressively challenge evolution. He tells adults that the lies and misrepresentations he's teaching them are "Christian Patriot Missiles," unbelievably enough. The analogy is apt only because of the Patriot's high failure rate. The bad news is he's not talking to small fringe groups; the quotes above are from an event attended by 2,300 students. It's times like these I'm glad I'm not a teacher anymore.
The children roared their assent.
"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.
This is the environment that produces travesties like George Deutsch's NASA memos. Look: if you want to believe the world was created by a man with a flowing white beard or a flying spaghetti monster, I won't bother you. If you want to teach that to your children, I think you're doing them a disservice, but I won't stop you. But if you train your kids to waste other kids' time with bronze age bullshit in their science classroom, we're going to have words. Science isn't partisan and it's not religious; science doesn't care. Either leave it alone, or give up anything it's done for you and go back to wandering in the desert waiting for manna to fall from the sky. Actually, why not do both? Nevada's nice this time of year.
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