Category Archives: Social Studies

During his 2004 campaign for president, George W. Bush told a group of Old Order Amish that “God speaks through me.”

Now, according to The Independent Bush his claiming God told him to invade Iraq:

“President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden’s stronghold of Afghanistan as part of a divine mission to bring peace to the Middle East, security for Israel, and a state for the Palestinians.

The President made the assertion during his first meeting with Palestinian leaders in June 2003, according to a BBC series which will be broadcast this month.

The revelation comes after Mr Bush launched an impassioned attack yesterday in Washington on Islamic militants, likening their ideology to that of Communism, and accusing them of seeking to “enslave whole nations” and set up a radical Islamic empire “that spans from Spain to Indonesia”. In the programmeElusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.”And “now again”, Mr Bush is quoted as telling the two, “I feel God’s words coming to me: ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God, I’m gonna do it.”

Mr Abbas remembers how the US President told him he had a “moral and religious obligation” to act. The White House has refused to comment on what it terms a private conversation. But the BBC account is anything but implausible, given how throughout his presidency Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, has never hidden the importance of his faith.

From the outset he has couched the “global war on terror” in quasi-religious terms, as a struggle between good and evil. Al-Qa’ida terrorists are routinely described as evil-doers. For Mr Bush, the invasion of Iraq has always been part of the struggle against terrorism, and he appears to see himself as the executor of the divine will.

He told Bob Woodward – whose 2004 book, Plan of Attack, is the definitive account of the administration’s road to war in Iraq – that after giving the order to invade in March 2003, he walked in the White House garden, praying “that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty”. As he went into this critical period, he told Mr Woodward, “I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will.

“I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I will be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then of course, I pray for forgiveness.”

Another telling sign of Mr Bush’s religion was his answer to Mr Woodward’s question on whether he had asked his father – the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 – for advice on what to do.

The current President replied that his earthly father was “the wrong father to appeal to for advice … there is a higher father that I appeal to”.

The same sense of mission permeated his speech at the National Endowment of Democracy yesterday. Its main news was Mr Bush’s claim that Western security services had thwarted 10 planned attacks by al-Qa’ida since 11 September 2001, three of them against mainland US.

More striking though was his unrelenting portrayal of radical Islam as a global menace, which only the forces of freedom – led by the US – could repel. It was delivered at a moment when Mr Bush’s domestic approval ratings are at their lowest ebb, in large part because of the war in Iraq, in which 1,950 US troops have died, with no end in sight.

It came amid continuing violence on the ground, nine days before the critical referendum on the new constitution that offers perhaps the last chance of securing a unitary and democratic Iraq. “The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region” and set up a radical empire stretching from Spain to Indonesia, he said.

The insurgents’ aim was to “enslave whole nations and intimidate the world”. He portrayed Islamic radicals as a single global movement, from the Middle East to Chechnya and Bali and the jungles of the Philippines.

He rejected claims that the US military presence in Iraq was fuelling terrorism: 11 September 2001 occurred long before American troops set foot in Iraq – and Russia’s opposition to the invasion did not stop terrorists carrying out the Beslan atrocity in which 300 children died.

Mr Bush also accused Syria and Iran of supporting radical groups. They “have a long history of collaboration with terrorists and they deserve no patience”. The US, he warned, “makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbour them because they’re equally as guilty of murder”.

“Wars are not won without sacrifice and this war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve,” Mr Bush declared. But progress was being made in Iraq, and, he proclaimed: “We will keep our nerve and we will win that victory.”

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In her article for The Village Voice, Anya Kamenetz describes the “Dispersed and unequal”
circumstances that displaced New Orleans students are experiencing in the Baton Rouge, LA schools. Baton Rouge is the site of one of the longest running school desegregation cases in the US.

The experiences of the students sent to Baton Rouge are a test case of [Jonathan] Kozol’s contention that racial segregation, exacerbated by testing, is the central problem in our public school system. Overt racism does not seem at work; the African-American East Baton Rouge superintendent, Charlotte Placide, is making the direct decisions about the treatment of these students, and Ms. Sherry Brock, Ms. Clara Joseph, and their respective staffs are each obviously working as hard as is humanly possible to teach their students with the tools at their disposal. Yet it is very easy to see how the continued structure of segregation is hurting the chances that something good can come from this disaster, for those who most need a second chance.

Kozol has just published a new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, which he called in a recent Salon interview “the angriest book I’ve written in my life.” He finds that Brown v. Board of Education has failed; schools are now just as segregated as they were in 1968, and black and Latino schools are still dramatically inferior and underfunded, receiving a national average of $1,000 less per student each year. [Kozol’s article “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” was published in Harper’s Magazine last month.]

Kozol’s findings are support by the research of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, which published a report in 2003 titled “A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?”.

Key finds from the Harvard Civil Rights Project Study include:

The statistics from the 2000-2001 school year show that whites are the most segregated group in the nation’s public schools; they attend schools, on average, where eighty percent of the student body is white. The two regions where white students are more likely to attend substantially interracial schools are the South and West. Whites attending private schools are even more segregated than their public school counterparts.
Our schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority student enrollment approaches 40% of all U.S. public school students, nearly twice the share of minority school students during the 1960s. In the West and the South, almost half of all public school students are nonwhite.
The most dramatic growth is seen in the increase of Latino and Asian students. Latino students are the most segregated minority group, with steadily rising segregation since federal data were first collected a third of a century ago. Latinos are segregated both by race and poverty, and a pattern of linguistic segregation is also developing. Latinos have by far the highest high school dropout rates.
Conversely, at the aggregate level, Asians live in the nation’s most integrated communities, are the most integrated in schools and experience less linguistic segregation than Latinos.1 Asians are the nation’s most highly educated racial group; the rate of college graduation for Asians is almost double the national average and four times larger than Latinos.
The data show the emergence of a substantial group of American schools that are virtually all non-white, which we call apartheid schools. These schools educate one-sixth of the nation’s black students and one-fourth of black students in the Northeast and Midwest. These are often schools where enormous poverty, limited resources, and social and health problems of many types are concentrated. One ninth of Latino students attend schools where 99-100% of the student body is composed of minority students.
Paralleling housing patterns from the 2000 Census, this study shows a very rapid increase in the number of multiracial schools where at least one tenth of the students are from three different racial groups. Three-fourths of Asian students attend multiracial schools, but only 14% of white students do.
The nation’s largest city school systems account for a shrinking share of the total enrollment and are, almost without exception, overwhelmingly nonwhite and increasingly segregated internally. These twenty-seven largest urban systems have lost the vast majority of their white enrollment whether or not they ever had significant desegregation plans, and today serve almost one-quarter of our black and Latino student population.
The balkanization of school districts and the difficulty of creating desegregated schools within these cities show the huge consequences of the Supreme Court’s 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision2 blocking city-suburban desegregation in metropolitan Detroit. According to one recent study, metropolitan Detroit schools were extremely segregated in 1994 and had the highest level of between-district segregation of all metro areas in the country.
In 1967 the nation’s largest suburban systems were virtually all white. Despite a huge increase in minority students in suburban school districts, serious patterns of segregation have emerged in some sectors of suburbia as this transition takes place. Many of the most rapidly resegregating school systems since the mid-1980s are suburban. Clearly segregation and desegregation are no longer merely urban concerns, but wider metropolitan issues.
The largest countywide school districts that contain both city and suburban schools are mostly concentrated in Southern states. These districts, with about half the enrollment of the big cities, had far more extensive and long-lasting desegregation and far more opportunity for minority students to cross both race and class barriers for their education.
Many of the nation’s most successful plans are being dismantled by federal court decisions as the courts have been changed from being on the leading edge of desegregation activity to being its greatest obstacle. Since the Supreme Court changed desegregation law in three major decisions between 1991 and 19954, the momentum of desegregation for Black students has clearly reversed in the South, where the movement had by far its greatest success.
During the 1990s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased by 13 percentage points, to a level lower than any year since 1968.

In his book, Kozol also argues that the inflexible testing requirements imposed by No Child Left Behind create a sense of “siege” in the poorest schools, punishing them by withholding funds and forcing teachers to teach by rote and to the test.

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Well so much for civil society. Seems the new approach of Republicans in the US is to flaunt their racist beliefs.

Bill Bennett—a former US education secretary and national drug czar and fulltime right-wing moral crusader who has made millions of dollars from his Book of Virtues and lecturing people on morality, while blowing $8 million in high-stakes gambling—claimed that the crime rate in the USA could be reduced by aborting every black pregnancy in the country.

Bennett made the statement on his morning, drivetime radio talk show, carried on 115 stations across the US on the right-wing Salem Radio Network.

Addressing a caller’s absurd suggestion that lost revenue from aborted pregnancies over the last 30 years would be enough to preserve Social Security, Bennett said:

“If you wanted to reduce crime, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Bennett was discussing the decline in the crime rate—apparently inspired by “the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.” (Media Matters)

Listen the clip from Bennett’s radio show here.

In CNN’s coverage of this story Bennett defends his racist remarks.

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http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/07/id

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2002522889_evolution27.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-na-dover26sep26,1,4383005.story?coll=la-news-learning

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/pp/05275/581245.stm

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/12797106.htm

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/12793013.htm
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051001/INTELLIGENT01/TPEducation/

Does God wear a lab coat?
The latest round in the culture wars pits Christians advocating ‘intelligent design’ against secular parents who want kids taught evolution only. Is there a middle ground? SHAWN McCARTHY surveys the view from Harrisburg, Pa.
By SHAWN MCCARTHY
Saturday, October 1, 2005 Page F3

Brown University professor Kenneth Miller proclaimed from the witness stand this week that he is a Christian Darwinist — a position that would be considered oxymoronic by more extreme partisans in the acrimonious debate over the teaching of biology in the United States.

Mr. Miller was the first witness in the case of Kitzmiller v. the Dover District School Board in Pennsylvania, the latest U.S. legal battle pitting Christian opponents of evolutionary theory against advocates of separation of church and state.

Eleven parents are suing the Dover school board for introducing the concept of “intelligent design” — which holds that the world was created by an “intelligent designer” who set evolution in motion — into biology class. The parents argue that intelligent design is a thinly disguised version of creationist theology and, as such, does not belong in a public-school science class.

But the Kitzmiller case is not just a scene from the current culture wars, sparked by the rising aggressiveness of U.S. fundamentalist Christians. It is a 21st-century instalment of the centuries-old contest between religion and science, a conflict that most famously led to the trial of Galileo Galilei by the 17th-century Inquisition.

Prominent scientists have often dismissed traditional religion as mere mythology and superstition, just as Christian leaders have denounced evolutionary biology as godless and evil.

On the stand this week, Mr. Miller sought to bridge those two solitudes, arguing that society should render unto science that which is scientific — and leave matters of faith to religion.

A Roman Catholic who co-wrote the leading biology textbook in the United States, Mr. Miller insisted there was no conflict between faith and science. “I believe not only are they compatible, but they are complementary,” he said.

He is a fervent opponent of the intelligent-design movement, the latest salvo in Christianity’s 146-year-old war on Charles Darwin’s theory that all species evolved from a single life form over billions of years through a process of natural selection.

He testified that the movement’s reliance on a supernatural designer is unscientific. But he criticized prominent Darwinists who fail to distinguish between scientific theory and philosophical speculation when they assert that the theory of evolution reveals a godless universe that is unfolding in a random manner.

“I believe God is the author of all things, seen and unseen, and that would include the laws of physics and chemistry,” he told the Federal Court.

But where Mr. Miller sees an unseen planner, other scientists perceive no plan at all, other than nature’s laws. Since it was first advanced in the mid-19th century, Darwinism has been extended beyond the realm of natural science and — through Social Darwinism — become associated with a mechanistic world view that sees man bound by laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University zoologist and prominent evolutionary theorist, summed up this worldview in his 1986 classic, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Mr. Dawkins dismissed religion as “the big lie.”

Theistic scientists argue that thinkers like Mr. Dawkins have poisoned the well of public discourse by creating the impression among lay people that the evolutionary theory necessarily entails atheism. And in a country like the United States, where 78 per cent of poll respondents identify themselves as believers, such a perception is bound to cause problems.

“In the context of the war between evolution and creationism in the United States, the problem is perhaps less with believers who read the Bible as a literal account of creation, and more with believers who read Richard Dawkins as a literal account of evolution,” said William Grassie, executive director of the Metanexus Institute, a Philadelphia-based think-tank dedicated to bridging the worlds of religion and science.

Mr. Dawkins took his ironic title, The Blind Watchmaker, from an early version of intelligent-design theory espoused in 1802 by English cleric William Paley, who argued that, much as a watch suggests the existence of a watchmaker, the evidence of complex design in the universe indicates the existence of a designer — that is, God.

Current proponents of intelligent-design theory resurrect Mr. Paley’s watchmaker analogy by arguing that evolution fails to account for exquisitely complex organisms in nature. That complexity, they argue, reveals the existence of a designer.

The movement to promote intellectual design has its genesis in the creationist battles that have been waged throughout the United States. In a 1987 ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the teaching of creationism — a literal biblical account of man’s origins — on the grounds that it was a sectarian religious belief.

As a result, proponents have refined their approach to offer an alternative that does not directly mention God. Mainstream scientists have overwhelmingly rejected intelligent-design theory as unsupportable and untestable.

William Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University who will testify for the school board at the Kitzmiller trial, argues that throughout nature, scientists can see examples of organism that are “irreducibly complex” and could not have been the product of evolutionary processes alone.

But for every one of the examples Mr. Behe provides, Mr. Miller suggests evidence that they are not at all “irreducible” — but comprise constituent parts that had different functions before their appearance in particular organisms.

In the intelligent-design textbook, Of Pandas and People, which the Dover board purchased and recommended students read outside the classroom, authors Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon argue that evolution has failed to provide answers to key questions such as the beginning of life from an inanimate world, or the differentiation of species through a slow mutation process.

Robert Pennock a professor of philosophy, science and technology at Michigan State University, testified this week that scientists continue to work on the unanswered questions of evolutionary theory — but that those gaps do not imply a supernatural answer.

The intelligent-design movement, which is largely backed by fundamentalist Christians, appeared to receive some support this summer when a Roman Catholic cardinal wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times criticizing “neo-Darwinism.”

Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, Archbishop of Vienna and lead editor of the 1992 Catholic catechism, wrote that neo-Darwinism — described as “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” — is incompatible with church teaching.

Mr. Miller rebutted his coreligionist, saying he was mistaken to assert that modern Darwinism is inherently atheistic because it was guided by random variation and natural selection.

“Biological evolution fits neatly into a traditional Catholic understanding of how contingent natural processes can be seen as part of God’s plan,” Mr. Miller wrote in reply to Cardinal Schonborn, “while ‘evolutionist’ philosophies that deny the Divine do not.”

Shawn McCarthy is The Globe and Mail’s New York City bureau chief.

Analysis: ‘Intelligent design’ case to undergo 2-pronged test

Sunday, October 02, 2005

By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the parlance of the sports world, defense attorneys in the federal “intelligent design” trial will have to come from behind when testimony resumes this week.

They’ll have a tough time overcoming the first week of testimony, in which plaintiffs and former board members from Dover Area School District said the school board was motivated by religion when it changed its biology curriculum last year.

The case pits the school district against 11 plaintiffs, who believe that intelligent design — a concept that says biological complexity presents evidence of a designer — is a Trojan horse that brings God into public schools.

First Amendment professors and constitutional law attorneys following the case seem to agree. After the trial’s first week, it appeared that certain board members were motivated by religion, and not an educational purpose, when they amended the curriculum to include intelligent design.

“I would certainly say that from what I have seen thus far, I find the evidence troubling,” said Valerie Munson, an Eckert Seamans attorney who specializes in church-state issues. “The school board’s policy will probably be found to have a religious purpose, and to advance religion, in violation of the First Amendment. In other words, it [will] fail both the purpose and the effects prongs of the constitutionality test.”

But she also adds that the trial, expected to last more than five weeks, is in its early stages, and the defense team, Thomas More Law Center of Michigan, has yet to offer any evidence. “Cases are never a slam dunk,” she said. “If they were a slam dunk, they would never be going to court.”

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III is being asked to apply the two-pronged test to this case, in which the plaintiffs claim the Dover board violated the Constitution’s establishment clause.

The first test is the “effect” test — whether the theory itself, and its appearance in the ninth-grade biology curriculum, is religious in nature. In other words, to be legal, intelligent design must neither promote nor inhibit religion.

The second test can be called the “intent” test — even if the judge does not determine that intelligent design is an inherently religious concept, he may find that the school board had the purpose of promoting religion. In legalese, the school board must have a bona fide secular purpose in teaching intelligent design.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, must win just one of these match-ups, not both. A third prong, the “entanglement” test, is not being applied.

As with the criminal court system, the burden of proof lies not with the defense, but the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are striking blows on both sides — using expert witnesses to argue that intelligent design isn’t science and using witnesses to show that school board members wanted to bring God into the classroom.

The expert witnesses — two biology professors and a theologian — have testified to the “effect” side of things, arguing that intelligent design, because it infers a creator from biological evidence, is biblical creationism, updated with new scientific terminology.

But the fact witnesses, testifying to the “intent” test, have provided the most compelling evidence, said Eugene Voloch, First Amendment professor at UCLA. The courts, he said, have left the door open for “intelligent design” in a perfectly crafted test case, but this isn’t such a case.

The school board, based on what he’s read, was “animated by a desire to promote the biblical account” of creation. This week, plaintiffs testified that, over a two-year period, the school board intermittently discussed God, religion and creationism, before finally changing the biology curriculum in October 2004. Board meetings were like “old-time Christian tent revivals,” a former school director testified.

“It’s conceivable that if the court was looking only at the ‘effects’ test, the board might have a shot,” Voloch said.

Marc J. Randazza, an attorney with Florida-based Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters, a First Amendment law firm, agreed with his colleagues.

“The first problem I see is testimony that clearly demonstrates that the majority’s motivation was to promote the Christian [theory] of creationism. Although there has been some attempt to characterize this as promoting intelligent design as a means of offering an alternative theory to Darwinism, I can’t see a shred of honesty in this characterization.”

He said the plaintiffs also win the “effect” challenge, but not as convincingly.

(Bill Toland can be reached at btoland@post-gazette.com or 1-412-263-1889.)

October 2, 2005
In Pennsylvania, It Was Religion vs. Science, Pastor vs. Ph.D., Evolution vs. the Half-Fish

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 30 – When Casey Brown testified this week, she embodied the pain and division the intelligent design controversy has wrought in Dover. Mrs. Brown sat stiffly on the witness stand, her mouth as tight as her gray ponytail, recounting how she had run for school board on the same ticket as the board members now facing her from the defense table.

The board is being sued by 11 parents who say that intelligent design is creationism cloaked as science, is inherently religious and has no place in a ninth-grade biology class.

Mrs. Brown said her political alliances and friendships had become strained in the last couple of years as some board members had pressed for changing the biology curriculum to teach creationism on par with evolution. They wanted to buy an intelligent design textbook, “Of Pandas and People,” in place of the newest edition of the standard biology text.

Under cross-examination by Patrick Gillen, a soft-spoken defense lawyer, Mrs. Brown was asked whether she recalled visiting the home of a board member and admiring a carving of the Last Supper.

“The Lord’s Last Supper, yes sir,” Mrs. Brown said. “I had never seen such a beautiful carving.”

But she said she did not feel comfortable when the board member asked her if she was a born-again Christian. She also said she felt disturbed when another board member, who was among those most insistent about teaching creationism, drove her home from a meeting and asked the same question.

Suddenly, his manner changing, Mr. Gillen pounced: these were Mrs. Brown’s friends, she was in their homes, in their cars, and she found it offensive to be asked about religion?

“Yes, I do, and I still do, sir,” she said.

A bite in his voice, Mr. Gillen asked if she thought religion should not be discussed at all.

“I wouldn’t presume to discuss religion within normal circumstances,” she said, “except within my own family.”

Mrs. Brown and her husband quit the board the night members voted 6 to 3 for intelligent design.

Worlds in Conflict

The trial presents a particular challenge for the journalists from science magazines. In the courtroom hallway during a break last week, Celeste Biever, a reporter for NewScientist, was interviewing a courtroom regular, a bearded local pastor who says he considers evolution a lie.

“You want half-bird, half-fish?” she asked, drawing a dotted line on her notepad.

“Yeah, why not,” the pastor said.

Later, out of the pastor’s hearing, Ms. Biever said with fascination, “He thinks evolution is a bird turning into a fish turning into a rabbit” – one straight line of common descent, instead of a tree with common roots.

Ms. Biever was finding that she could not cover the trial the way she would a classic courtroom face-off. When you put intelligent design up against evolution, she said, “It’s not a head-on collision between two scientific arguments; it’s orthogonal,” with the opponents coming at each other from right angles.

“It’s apples and oranges,” Ms. Biever said.

Her readers do not take intelligent design seriously, she said, so she was striving for “local color.” Her readers want to know, she said, “Why is this happening here?”

“We’re not just science cheerleaders, and I don’t want to overlook any valid argument for intelligent design,” Ms. Biever said. “As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t heard one yet.”

As for the pastor, after four days of listening to science experts dismantling the case for intelligent design, he was unimpressed.

“They’re babblers,” said the pastor, the Rev. Jim Grove, who leads a 40-member independent Baptist church outside of Dover. “The more Ph.D.’s you get, it seems like the further away from God you get.”

Dover school board members were well aware they were inviting a lawsuit over church-state issues when they voted last October that biology students should hear a statement telling them that there were gaps in the theory of evolution and that intelligent design was another theory the students should examine.

But the board forged ahead, having been assured that they would have the backing of the Thomas More Law Center, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to providing legal representation to Christians, and its chief counsel, Richard Thompson.

One Side of the Culture War

In courtroom breaks Mr. Thompson occasionally sits next to board members and puts an arm around their shoulders. White-haired and dapper, he has said little in court, leaving most of the cross-examination to his two co-counselors.

But this week, he became the public face of the intelligent design movement, stepping into the ring of cameras and microphones outside the courthouse each afternoon, taking every question until, one after another, the reporters slipped away.

As a former Michigan prosecutor who tried repeatedly to convict Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Mr. Thompson is comfortable in the spotlight. He failed in his prosecution of Dr. Kevorkian and eventually lost a bid for re-election; voters told pollsters they did not share his outrage over assisted suicide.

Mr. Thompson’s major argument in defending the board is that intelligent design is not religion, but science. He is, however, absolutely open about his own religious motivations.

During the lunch break on Thursday, Mr. Thompson said he founded the law center to defend Christians who he thought were losing the culture wars. The center was initially financed by Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza. Both men are Roman Catholics.

“There are two worldviews that are in conflict,” Mr. Thompson said. “I do feel that even though Christians are 86 percent of the population, they have become second-class citizens.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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In his commentary for Inside Higher Ed, Gerald Graff, a professor of English and Education at U Illinois, Chicago, argues that there are good pedagogical reasons for “teaching the controversy” of evolution versus so-called “intelligent design.”

[Graff coined the phrase, “teach the controversy” is his writing about the cultural wars (and he’s concerned about how the religious right has appropriated the phrase in their efforts to bring religion into science under the guise of ID).]

I think Graff makes a good case and I’m inclined to agree with him. Evolution, as Graff points out, is about has solid a scientific theory as there is, so the issue is not about “gaps” in Darwinian thinking.

There is nothing gained pedagogically by merely dismissing the creationist poseurs behind ID. And, there is plenty of room for students learn about ways of knowing, rationality/irrationality, religion and science by engaging the debate.

Graff thinks

“Scientists like Coyne and Dawkins concede that debate should indeed be central to science instruction, but they hold that such debate should be between accredited hypotheses within science, not between scientists and creationist poseurs. That’s hard to dispute, but, … I can at least imagine a classroom debate between creationism and evolution that might be just the thing to wake up the many students who now snooze through science courses. Such students might come away from such a debate with a sharper understanding of the grounds on which established science rests, something that even science majors and advanced graduate students now don’t often get from conventional science instruction.”

The point being that teaching that relies merely on reference to authority is not the way to create students who understand their world and can thinking critically about it.

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George W. Bush and Harlan McCraney, “Presidential Speechalist”

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"Okay class, today we're going to watch a movie. It's about democracy and despotism."

"Kevin, would you please turn out the lights. Okay Ceola, you can start the projector."

View today’s social studies movie here:

After you’ve watched the movie, rate your community on these four scales:

What sort of community do you live in? Is your community headed for democracy or does despotism stand a good chance?

Bonus Question:
How does your community train its teachers? Do you agree with the teacher educator in the movie who says:

“Young people cannot be trusted to form their own opinons. This business about openmindedness is nonsense. It’s a waste of time to try to teach students to think for themselves. It’s our job to tell ’em.”

Why? Or why not? (Please give examples to support your position.)

Remember what happens in your community matters for you and everyone else.

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