"Science" textbook for Christian schools can't even explain electricity
 

A friend posting this link on her FB wall: http://www.dangerousminds.net/commen...city_gives_up/

The thing that terrifies me is that this is allegedly a *science* book! Here is the scary part:

"Electricity is a mystery. No one has ever observed it or heard it or felt it. We can see and hear and feel only what electricity does. We know that it makes light bulbs shine and irons heat up and telephones ring. But we cannot say what electricity itself is like.

We cannot even say where electricity comes from. Some scientists think that the sun may be the source of most electricity. Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it. All anyone knows is that electricity seems to be everywhere and that there are many ways to bring it forth.

How would you have to change the way you get ready for school if you did not use electricity?"

Okay, the lies stack up fast and furious in that little excerpt.

1) It is simply not true that scientists don't know what electricity is or where it comes from. In fact, we DO know what it is. An electric current is caused by charged particles.

2) While the sun *does* produce moving charged particles it is NOT the *direct source* of electrical currents on this planet. We do not get electricity 'from' the sun. What happens is that the sun transfers energy to the Earth in the form of sunlight. That energy goes into, for instance, making plants grow. Plant-eating animals eat the plants and are, in turn, eaten by meat-eating animals or they die of other causes. Over sufficiently long amounts of time, the bodies of the fallen get turned into oil and we then drill the oil and use that to make electricity.

3) It is *also* true that the movement of the Earth--specifically the fact that the core of our planet is a core of liquid iron and nickel which is spinning which creates a current (yet more charged particles) which creates the magnetosphere that surrounds the planet and keeps the solar wind (those charged particles coming from the sun) from stripping away our atmosphere. But we don't get electricity from *motion* of the planet.

4) We can't experience electricity directly? If you believe that you've NEVER experienced static electricity (more charged particles) or you've never been on a hill top during a thunderstorm or you've never walked underneath a high-tension power line or you've never inadvertently shocked yourself. All of those are examples of directly experiencing electricity.

Now, lest someone way "yes but we can't see electricity" let me just cut that off quickly. Electricity is just light that is out of the wavelength our eyes are capable of detecting. If there had been ANY need for our ancestors to have developed the ability to see outside of a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum we would have those senses. Light is the same *kind* of 'stuff' as electricity, it's just that our eyes evolved to detect visible light but not, for instance, radio waves.

Cheers
Aj

Ugh. THIS is why I have a problem with private Christian schools. (same goes for homeschooling)

There has to be a fucking minimum standard for education, and there clearly is not.

Christian Science books? :blink: :simplelaugh: :huhlaugh: :superfunny:

Oh, the chapter on the moon is just FANTASTIC! Did you know that the reason why the moon is dark on one side is so that it isn't too bright for nocturnal animals and plants? LOL

Cheers
Aj

Is there no government standard test that the kids have to take each year to progress? Do they not have a government agency like OFSTED http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/ to grade each school on how they are performing, regardless of it being private or public??

Purpose of OFSTED

Problem is there is no national standard in the US that I've been able to determine. In Canada, each province sets the standard but it's pretty rigorous to keeping religion out of making decisions on books unless they are religious class (there are a lot of Catholic school boards and such).

The book is published by Bob Jones University, a Protestant Christian university out of South Carolina.

I think the fact that religious schools are allowed to push this out as acceptable is what is unfortunate. Religion, for those who believe and want to study it, has, IMO, it's place in a religious class. It should not be allowed, however, to transverse over to non-religious classes.

I hope this isn't a derail. The city of Pittsburgh puts its school board meetings on the public television channel. So while I sit and watch and listen, I am using the lap top to check the credentials of our school board members. Some are very qualified. Without going into what each brings to the table, not one was a former teacher. I found that alarming. And how about this. One was a high school drop out. It did not say if he picked up a GED along the way. But still......what does this say about public schools?
So as to not make it a sweeping statement, I'll add in my city?

These are elected positions.

My daughter attended a Christian School from grades 1 - thru 8.

She was never fed this drivel.

She learned the same georgraphy, history etc etc ad nauseum as did her cousins that attended the local public school, yes her faith was also explored on several levels as well, that's why I enrolled her there. To be sure she saw both sides of everything. Being Christian I wanted her to know that in my opinon that God has a hand in everything.

To say that all Christian schools teach this adgenda is IMHO predjudical and ludicrous. It's like saying all Preachers picket soldiers funerals.

Of course this is my opinion,and I don't support what I've read this particular school teaches, and no one in my family would attend such a school.

No one is saying ALL Christian schools. However, what one is taught in a sectarian school may very well depend upon which religion runs the school. Catholic parochial schools, just to take one example, are *less* likely to teach this kind of thing than some Southern Baptist or Seventh Day Adventist Christian Academy. If the school is run by some evangelical sect in the United States, the chances are high that students will get a *very* skewed science education that barely rates being called either scientific or education.

The larger point is not about the specific school it is about the fact that Christian schools are using texts written at Christian universities where the faculty either does not realize that electricity is a rather well-understood phenomena (in which case they have no business writing a science text) or they know but are lying in the text to further their religious agenda (in which case they should not be writing *any* academic text). If they can't get the small concepts correct, how are they going to get the big concepts correct? The simple answer is, they aren't.

Cheers
Aj

Linus:

There are no national scientific standards. There are *barely* national standards on reading and mathematics. One could reasonably go from kindergarten to 12th grade without *ever* having to demonstrate that you understand what an atom is or what it's constituent parts are (I'm not talking about the really small stuff like muons and gluons or quarks, I'm talking about proton, electron, neutron). One can go all the way through college in the United States without *ever* encountering the equation F=ma (Force = mass * acceleration) or having to explain the three laws of thermodynamics.

It's really quite remarkable if one thinks about it.

Cheers
Aj

I agree Aj - which is why I said no one in my family would ever attend where such drivel is being taught.

Sounds very odd that anyone with any education would write this, and pass it off to unsuspecting children.

When I attended Catholic school my parents decided to switch me mid year to the better one in another neighborhood, I was dragged into the office by my ear, it also left a huge mark from the nail when I ducked all the way to Mother Superior's office because I shouted out in science class that we do not come from spit and ashes and some dudes rib.

My father came in asked for his tuition back and reported the school to it's Archdiocese. It turned out they had been targeting kids from non Catholic backgrounds or kids who thought differently.

While I looked into schools for the Worm the Christian schools here have a curriculum to fight the gay agenda and evolution. Thank goodness I got him into a Charter School. It's scary what is allowed cause these kids go into the world ignorant, unprepared, and without knowledge!

It doesn't strike me as odd what-so-ever. It makes perfect sense given that there is an agenda within certain sects of American evangelical Christianity to undermine the credibility of science in their own domains. Saying "scientists don't understand what electricity is or where it comes from..." is a prelude to saying "and we all use electricity so if they can't even explain something as everyday as electricity, how can we possibly believe them when they say we came from monkeys?" It's the prologue to the longer riff of "we're just trying to teach the controversy with Darwin". The problem is is that there isn't a controversy.

No serious biologist questions whether or not evolution happens. There's disagreement in the field about levels of selection (is it *all* gene-level selection or does selection happen at the gene and individual and group level) and there's disagreement about what role sexual selection plays into things but all of this takes place on the basis that evolution *happened* and what we are pursuing is understanding of how it works, not whether or not it did.

Cheers
Aj

It also seems to go hand-in-hand with many of those "sects" decision to make a more "Conservative" bible and remove references where Jesus was seen as helping the poor and referencing the "Golden rule" and such. The more of this that I see, the more that I find the "Religious Right" to be a cult than a religion.

Electricity is created when the Great Sky Gnome rubs the Great Sky Balloon on his head to make his hair stand up.

Duh.

Is that step 2?

1. Get underpants
2. Rub great sky balloon
3. Profits!

Eureka! It works! A complete economic theory. Yay!

Cheers
Aj

I was totally thinking of the Underpants Gnomes when I wrote that. :)

I was wondering at what juncture petting a cat that is under blankets in the winter comes into play?

The article is about a Christian (Protestant) School. Parents send there kids there because they WANT Christianity to permeate all areas of learning.

For Protestant Christian schools, I think the religion piece is a big part of the reason that parents send their kids to these schools. I think that this is not always the case for Catholic schools (at least around here people of all religions send their kids to Catholic schools for the academics. Parents decide if their child goes to religion class and religion is much less commonly carried over to other subjects in the Catholic schools).

The problem becomes when kids educated in these schools either leave the warm womb of Christian education and suddenly have to sit in a science class where actual science is being taught OR they wind up going to an evangelical university and then get out and only then have to actually deal with people who didn't have the same education. Then you wind up with adults who are, for any practical definition, scientifically illiterate.

We really need a rethink of educational standards in this nation. We are too large, too powerful and have altogether too much technological sophistication at our disposal to have any significant portion of our society so dramatically illiterate about science. We are the *only* major industrialized nation where denial of climate change is in the least bit intellectually respectable. We are also the only major industrialized nation where denial of evolution is in the least bit respectable.

We desperately need national science standards for students k - 12 and, quite honestly, I would like to see the universities and colleges require a full year of physics, chemistry and biology regardless of major but that's probably a pipe dream.

Cheers
Aj

SOME Christian schools are using religious texts written at Christian universities...

My sister (Pepperdine university professor) would DIE before she would send her children to a Christian school (which is where they go) that was not of the highest quality.

Getting back to the "some" word would be appreciated, folks! :)

<--- had planned to stay out of this thread when it first surfaced

Historically it has been states that set their standards in all content areas. (In accordance with the doctrine of "States' Rights.") It is true that recently a set of National Standards for math/LA have been developed. These are called the "Common Core." States may decide whether or not to adopt the Common Core. It is projected that, eventually, there will be National Standards mandatory for all states. One of the reasons Science Common Core lags is precisely because of Christian vs. Scientific disagreements among states and among various Boards of Education within a state. It is very doubtful that private schools' leeway in teaching religious alternatives would ever be affected by public school curricula, at least in those areas. The standards, National or State, will have to be met, but "add-ons" like religion will remain privately determined in those schools.

My apologies. I should say that very specific Christian schools are using very specific textbooks written by faculty at very specific institutions that, for lack of any better word, are called universities. These very specific schools that are using said textbooks written at said universities should not be teaching from these textbooks because they are ultimately hobbling their students in the long run. These kids will grow up to be adults who will be profoundly confused about science and will find themselves almost entirely unable to evaluate political issues with scientific content. The point here is not that kids going to Christian schools will be hobbled. Rather, if the school in question uses textbooks from Bob Jones, Liberty or Regent's universities (I think this is safe to say) then it is vanishingly improbable that they will have received an even adequate scientific education because they will not have learned the basics of the scientific method.

Textbooks that come from BJU, LU, or RU and are used at schools that have some kind of sectarian connection to those institutions and/or are feeder schools for those universities and/or are otherwise in theological agreement with those universities, will have the science diluted because it will be filtered through a specific theological point of view wherein scientific truth must *first* pass a litmus test adhering to a specific interpretation of very specific passages within the Bible. As I said earlier, the whole point of the statement about scientists being entirely ignorant about the nature of electricity is to sow seeds of doubt that scientists know much of anything thus allowing them to suggest that intelligent design is a viable scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution.

I want to make it clear that the issue is NOT that the teaching is occurring at Christian schools. In 2005 the school board of Dover, PA had a blistering decision delivered to them from a Federal court judge because they were using a textbook titled "Of Pandas and People" which had been developed by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that tries to push the idea that scientific ideas must first pass a theological litmus test. The edition of Pandas was so shoddily edited to remove all references to 'creation science' (which was ruled as being just creationism given a face lift in the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillar case in Louisiana) that there were passages that had been subject to find-and-replace where one would see creationintelligent designscience" in order to try to get it to pass Constitutional muster (specifically the so called Lemon test). Now, the Dover school board was a *public* school board that had approved creationist curriculum for instruction in public school. So the issue is, again, not Christian schools. It is teaching non-scientific concepts in science classes.

Cheers
Aj

Meanwhile, back in Ontario, I don't even like the Catholic school board. They are publicly funded by property taxes just like the public schools are (in Ontario) and so far as I am concerned no school that gets government money should be allowed to teach religion.

I want to know, during that hour a day that kids are in religion class, what education are they missing out on that Ontarian public school kids are getting?

(Threads about education in the US always confuse me. I don't get what is so bad about public schools. In Canada hardly anybody goes to private school (why would they?) and the few private schools I'm aware of are either religious, french, or all-girl. And I don't know anybody who went to one.)

ETA - I actually want to know, during that hour (or whatever a day) that kids are in religion class anywhere in North America - what education are they missing out on that non-religious schools use that hour for?

In *my* area where I live it was safer, better education, better extra carriculars, smaller classrooms, more nurturing environment and preparation for college if he do chose. I felt this way about Columbus public schools cause of the area we lived in..

This probably varies dramatically depending on the state, the school, etc.

When I was in upstate NY I had looked into a Catholic school for Rooster because it had an outstanding reputation for academics.

There were religion classes, but they were offered before the "official" school day started...so kids not attending religion arrived an hour later, and then all students did the academic day together. There was also bible study/catechism (forgive me, I'm not up on Catholic terminology) during lunch hour as a sort of "lunch and learn"...which was purely optional.

Honestly, I would have sent him there, but the waiting list was years long, and our name never came up before we moved. I probably needed to list him at birth.

There were other religious schools in the area that delivered a truly sub-standard education, in my view, but the Catholic school system (at least in my area) was quite different.

Part of what happened to public school in America is that it became desegregated. I'm about to step into a minefield so I'm going to try to be very careful here.

When it became abundantly clear that public school desegregation was here to stay, Christian academies* (sorry Dapper but that is the term that the people who STARTED these schools used so I have to use that term) sprang up like mushrooms in the Southern United States. In the USA you can discriminate in pretty much any manner you choose if you are a religious institution AND you do not take public funds. This allowed these Christian academies, which were all Protestant and, given the locales, largely (but not exclusively) Southern Baptist to continue to discriminate on the basis of race.

As the culture wars heated up, these schools became more about generically teaching a curriculum that was amenable to specific parts of specific denominations of Christianity. Specifically, these schools became core to teaching a version of American history that would lead students to believe that America was founded on theocratic lines (it wasn't) and that the Earth is much younger than it is (6000 years old as opposed to ~4.5 billion years old) and that while 'mistakes were made' slavery was, on the whole, good for blacks because it brought them to the United States where we could learn of Christianity. That much the same thing could be said of the Native Americans.

It is important to note that I am talking here about schools started by Protestants who were largely Southern Baptists or Methodist with some scattered Presbyterian and Lutheran sects thrown in. I am very specifically NOT talking about Catholic schools because while Catholics are, for any reasonable definition, Christians the schools run by various Catholic diocese were not part of this movement. Nor am I saying that all Christian schools were started for these reasons.

The homeschooling movement is an outgrowth of what happened. Because many of the sectarian schools under discussion here were started on a segregationist basis they have had to avoid taking Federal funds lest they have to open their doors to all students. This has made them more expensive. So families that might not otherwise be able to afford these Christian academies (again, I am using the term because that is the term that the founders of the schools used at the time and I am deferring to their nomenclature) but did not want their kids getting a 'secular' education where they might learn that the United States is a secular nation with a majority Christian population, as opposed to a constitutionally Christian nation, or that human beings are very closely related to chimpanzees, gorillas, pygmy chimps and orangutans, started schooling their kids at home. This is not to say that all home schooled children are in religious families, nor is it to say that all religious home schooled children are Christian nor is it to say that all Christian schools or home schooling parents are doing so for reasons of racial segregation. My only point here is to provide some context on why these schools grew up and how they ended up spawning the burgeoning home schooling movement.

Cheers
Aj

In the Utah public school system, all the jr. high and high schools have "Release Time". Release Time actually means Mormon seminary, but they can't actually put that on student schedules in public schools. The LDS church owns small buildings just off campus (in some cases, on a small parcel of land that would have been school property, but the church pays a pittance to the school to buy just enough land to build the seminary building) where students are taught Mormon doctrine during school hours. Even though they technically call it Release Time, that doesn't mean students can use that period for whatever they want. I tried to use it as a study hall period once and got detention for cutting class, even though my schedule said I was on Release Time and I was in the school library. Generally, students take seminary in place of one of their other electives. Usually it's art, language, or home ec/shop that they're not taking to make time for seminary.

Eww, home-schooling. That's all I have to say about that. (Mind you, I only know two people IRL who were home-schooled and they were brothers from my church growing up. So I guess I really have no real yard stick with which to measure homeschooling. But those two boys (I used to hang out with them when I was in 11th and 12th grade) had zero concept about how to function with groups of people and would throw tantrums (seriously!). No sense of what compromise is. No sense of the importance of sharing, even - and that's something you learn in freaking Kindergarten. As far as how they would measure up academically, I have no idea. But I do know that socially they were behind.)

So in the US is it presumed that all public schools are bad, or does it vary depending upon where you live? Because here it doesn't matter if you are from Scarborough, Pickering, or freaking Northbrook - the expectation is that you've graduated highschool with the same tools and you know the same things.

ALL of them, though? But what if you're not a Mormon? That's so messy!

Yes but to be fair, you get to choose whether you want your taxes to go to public or Catholic schools. And Catholic schools are required to meet the same standard for ALL courses as public schools (I've gone through the submission process for college courses in Ontario and it ain't easy!)

How good the public schools are in the United States depends upon where you live. Quite literally. We fund our schools based upon property taxes so the higher the property taxes in your neighborhood the better your schools are. This means that wealthy and upper-middle class neighborhoods have good public schools and working class and poor neighborhoods have bad public schools. This also means that rich states have better public schools than poor ones. So Mississippi is a state of largely crappy schools while Massachusetts is a state largely of good schools. (Again, this is not say that EVERY school in MS is bad and EVERY school in MA is good. Rather, I'm saying that the worst school in MA is going to be closer to being on par with the best school in MS while the best school in MS will probably be nowhere near the best school MA)

If that system sounds insane and, in fact, almost exactly the opposite of what one would like to see that's because it is.

Cheers
Aj

For us where Grants parents live which is 10 miles East of us Worm would of ended up in a far better Jax public school WAY better with all the things Christ The King would offer. In Columbus I lived on the edge of Worthington and Columbus has I lived 250 more to the North Worm would if went to Worthington Highschools, had we stayed in Columbus I would of entered the lottery for the Charter School or I'd of sent him to St Michaels.

It all really depends where you live and frankly class status...

Blech, still. I'm not sure why there should be a "give my taxes to Catholic schools" option at all. I think Ontario (and possibly Alberta?) are the only province(s) that do(es) this. Especially since the Ontario Catholic/Separate School Board gets to pull heinous fuckery like, for example, banning GSAs on campus.

That's fucked. And it certainly goes a long way toward explaining things like generational poverty.

Ya. I know. But at least the taxes default to public rather than Catholic so that's good.

And I'm surprised that no one challenged the removal of the GSAs because of the Charter. Although I could see that as being a challenge since it pits the rights of religious freedom vs. free speech.

If there is a public school in Utah that doesn't have a seminary building, I've never heard of it. Non-Mormon kids just don't get religious instruction during the school day.

Okay, cool. I must have misunderstood you then. I thought everybody HAD to go. I'm glad to hear that they don't.