Christian Homeschoolers Returning to Dark Ages
BevK November 22nd, 2006
http://www.newscientist.c…ldren-well.html
Well, that’s the inference you get when reading “Home-schooling special: Preach your children well”, an article at New Scientist. Hat Tip: Homeschool Buzz
We learn that
New Scientist investigated how home-schooling, with its considerable legal support, is quietly transforming the landscape of science education in the US, subverting and possibly threatening the public school system that has fought hard against imposing a Christian viewpoint on science teaching.
and
This bothers Brian Alters of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the changing face of science education in the US. He is appalled by some home-schooling textbooks, especially those on biology that claim they have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution. “They have gross scientific inaccuracies in them,” he says. “They would not be allowed in any public school in the US, and yet these are the books primarily featured in home-schooling bookstores.”
One such textbook is Science of the Physical Creation from A Beka Book, a leading retailer of home-schooling books based in Pensacola, Florida. It argues: “Evolution is a concept that attempts to free man from God and his responsibility to his Creator.” Alters worries for the students who learn from such texts (see “Book learnin’”). “If they go on to secular university, home-schoolers are in for some major surprises when they get into an introductory biology class.”
The face of this giant bogeyman of creationist brainwashing is of course HSLDA, Patrick Henry University, and Exodus Mandate—Organizations which most homeschooler have nothing to do with.
These are the folks that get their knickers in such a twist over Intelligent Design that they regularly demonstrate their bias against other scientists.
Anti-ID Bias in Journal of the History of Biology
The Branding of a Heretic: Are religious scientists unwelcome at the Smithsonian?
The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics–e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.” Here was trouble.
The piece happened to be the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for Intelligent Design. According to ID theory, certain features of living organisms–such as the miniature machines and complex circuits within cells–are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by an undirected natural process like random mutation and natural selection.
Mr. Sternberg’s editorship has since expired, as it was scheduled to anyway, but his future as a researcher is in jeopardy–and that he had not planned on at all. He has been penalized by the museum’s Department of Zoology, his religious and political beliefs questioned. He now rests his hope for vindication on his complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs. A museum spokesman confirms that the OSC is investigating. Says Mr. Sternberg: “I’m spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career.”
