Quote:
Originally Posted by tapu
Oh, we teach kids plenty of incorrect information. And some would argue it isn't incorrect at all. The education system is not perfect.
And, allowing alternative belief systems to be taught in private religions schools is the price we pay for freedom of religion; matter of fact, it is the essence of it.
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I'm sorry my friend, I have to disagree here. In fact, I think the fact that we have taken this attitude, as a culture, is part of why I think we are in the political position we are today.
To illustrate, consider the following statements all of which are manifestly false but are still held by people adhering to alternative belief systems.
1) The Holocaust never happened. It is something that Jews cooked up in order to get sympathy so that they could start the nation of Israel. Even if there *were* executions, there's no way it was anywhere near 6 million people.
2) Humans have never walked on the moon. It is physically impossible to build a machine that can escape Earth's gravity enough to get to the moon, much less carry three human beings back and forth safely. If nothing else, the cosmic rays would have cooked them like hot dogs in a microwave.
3) The Earth, the solar system and the Universe are all ~6,000 years old. They were all called into being during a single act of creation which took place over a week. This action was initiated and controlled, start to finish, by a singular divine entity. Any information that might appear to contradict this story is either not correct, by definition, and was either made up out of whole cloth, misinterpreted, or planted either by God or some other supernatural entity to test the faith of humanity.
People *believe* all of these things. They are all wrong. There are no sane interpretations of *this* world (other worlds in a multiverse, maybe) where any of the three statements are correct. Does someone have a right to believe any of those things? Absolutely. Do they have the right to teach their children these things in the home? Yes. Does that burden them with the problem of explaining why the teacher at school taught something else? Unfortunately, yes it does but that actually can't be helped. It can't be helped, *unless* the rest of us are prepared to pretend that there are perfectly valid alternative explanations that are being rejected not for reasons having to do with evidence but because of some completely arbitrary factor. In other words, unless the rest of us are prepared to enable the willful misleading of students in classrooms.
This is why I would like to see us come up with *national* scientific standards. I do not think you should be able to graduate from high school in a technologically advanced country if you cannot articulate certain very general scientific ideas. I do not think this is a matter of respecting religious freedom. If an adult couldn't, for instance, do the problem 3+2=5 or count by ten to 100 we would not say that person knew math. We would not say that someone who didn't understand that, for instance, WW II happened in the 20th century and not the 19th knew history. I don't see why to treat scientific subjects differently just because people might have religious objections to this or that scientific idea.
Cheers
Aj