Unintelligent By Design

OK, let me just say this and get it out of my system. American public education really really is going down the tubes. Between what the LEFT is doing to our curriculum by inserting their peculiar "religious" beliefs into history and the arts (see the "Ten Commandments of Multiculturalism") ; and promulgating environmental "science" by indoctrinating into kids as young as 5 years old in environmentalist propaganda; and what the RIGHT is doing, equally determined to foist their Christian religious beliefs off as "science", I would have to say that if our kids learn to think and reason from school, it will be a frigging miracle.

Charles Krauthammer has a must-read column up about the Christian Right assault on education, "Let's Have No More Monkey Trials":

But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."

Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology.

I have written repeatedly on the detrimental effects brought about by the PC and Multicultural curriculum in K-12, as well as at the university level (see here, here, here or here, for example) David Broder, whose excellent column I linked to a few days ago, bemoans the lack of American History being taught and the general dumbing down of the curriculum, and comments:

We are running a terrible risk. Our very freedom depends on education, and we are failing our children in not providing that education.

The unintelligent design of our K-12 curriculum is a complete travesty. The religions of political correctness, multiculturalism and Gaia are already polluting young minds in almost all areas of study--even math and science. We don't need an ill-informed and angry Christian RIGHT to decimate whatever is left of arts and science education.

Someday we will deeply regret this idiocy. As our students fall behind and the best and brightest are taken out of the public education arena (and who can blame parents for doing that?), the public schools will become mere indoctrination camps--shall we call them madrassas?-- for whichever side holds political power at the moment.

If freedom depends on education, how will this country fare in the future as our educational system trains our children not to use reason and logic to determine truth, but to use their feelings and beliefs as the gold standard for understanding and interpreting the world. That is simply unintelligent.

Unintelligent by design.