Here are links I found interesting on January 14, 2011:
Is it an excuse to teach religion instead of science?
I’ve always been concerned about the quality of education kids get these days. Underpaid teachers, peer pressure that rewards bad behavior, high drop-out rates. As I reported back in November 2008, kids are graduating the local high school without knowing how to tell time on an analog clock. It’s impossible to have an intelligent conversation with most teens; they seem absolutely clueless about anything that isn’t on television or the Internet — and I’m not talking about PBS or Wikipedia here. They can’t spell because they have spelling checkers that do that for them. They can’t do math without a calculator. While I’m obviously not talking about all young people here — there would be absolutely no hope for America’s future if the problem affected every kid — it’s certainly more than half of the ones I come in contact with.
And “No Child Left Behind” just made the situation worse. It forced teachers and schools to teach just so kids would pass exams. Teaching by rote rather than ensuring that kids understand what they’re being taught is not doing the next generation any good.
These days, concerned parents are taking an active role in their kids’ education. While I personally believe that working together at the end of the day on homework and even just discussing what was learned in school each day is enough, many parents are going the extra step: they’re home-schooling their kids.
I’ll admit that I don’t know much about home-schooling. I don’t have kids; I decided early in life not to take that path. I don’t regret it. I sometimes wonder how my kids would have turned out — whether they’d be smart or lazy or interesting or dull. I’d like to think that they’d know how to tell time by the age of 18 and aspire to something more substantial than stocking shelves at the local supermarket.
I do know that if my kids weren’t getting the education they needed at school and I couldn’t help them by being part of their nightly homework routine, I’d likely consider home-schooling. After all, if you want something done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself.
My neighbor home-schools her kids. She has four of them ranging in age from about 5 to 12. She and her husband are either Evangelical or Born-Again Christians. I don’t know which and I don’t care. The last thing I want to do is have a discussion about religion with people who scratched religious slogans into the wet concrete of their driveway.
And this brings up my concerns about home-schooling. While browsing the news with the Associated Press (AP) mobile application on my BlackBerry (while waiting for a notary public at the bank), I stumbled upon an article titled, “Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution.” It reported:
“The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians,” said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.”
It went on to say that, “Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution,” according to educators who reviewed the books.
And this is the root of my concerns. I believe that science textbooks and science lessons should be about science. Evolution is a widely accepted component of the science of biology. The alternative — creationism or its disguised alter-ego, “intelligent design” — is not. There is a wealth of scientific evidence to back up evolution; there is no evidence to back up creationism.
Clearly, the failure to teach accepted science as that — accepted science — is a serious shortcoming in the home-schooling textbooks that shoot down evolution. The children being taught that evolution is “only a theory” are being given an inadequate education — one that could put them at a serious disadvantage if they go on to college or attempt to pursue careers in science or medicine.
One of the books doesn’t hide its intent:
“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”
The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”
The Christian worldview is the only correct view of reality? In whose world? I don’t think the millions of Jews, Muslims, or Hindus in the world would agree with that statement. I know the atheists wouldn’t. Does that mean that Christian children should be taught a different version of reality than the rest of the world? To what benefit? Certainly not the benefit of the children.
And what of the home-schooling parents that don’t want religion to be part of their children’s curriculum? The AP article discusses their struggle to find appropriate science textbooks.
(Might I suggest starting with Daniel Loxton’s excellent book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be
So here’s my question: if a school board has to approve textbooks that are used in public school classrooms and home-schooled students have to take and pass standardized exams, who is approving the textbooks used in home-school “classrooms”?
And then I recall this, a piece of “Hate Mail” that was sent to Bobby Henderson of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can find it here, but to save effort for the folks too lazy to click, I’ll repeat it here in all its glory, as an example of home-schooling gone terribly wrong:
wow you people are crazy i pray to my LORD jesus christ that you people wake up God created man in his own image and im sorry but if you look like noodles with meatballs growin out your BUTT you need to go back to SPACE or get back in the pan where you’ll be somebodys dinner!
people will believe anything!!
i am verryyy happy i was well homeschooled becuase i would be in jail for punching a teacher in the face when she tried to tell me about this so called spagetti monsterr!
i hate to be the breaker of bad news but when you look around when u die u wont be with your master meatball you’ll be burning in the pits of HELL and i am a REAL christian and that hurts to know that so many people are gonna be in hell! over a random guy that started a joke and has nothing better to do besides make up some god for fun then see how many people are loving this idea.
God bless you wacked out meatball loving freaks!
-christy
(I recommend Bobby’s site if you’re interested in seeing where reason and faith collide.)
Christy is right about one thing: People will believe anything. But is it right to teach it to their kids?
Sure, they can pass tests. But can they tell time?
I had a heavy shock today in the Safeway Supermarket in Wickenburg, AZ when I witnessed the following exchange between a cashier/manager and the teenage clerk who was bagging groceries at her register.
Girl: Do I get a break today?
Cashier (after studying a break sheet): Yes. You have lunch at 3 o’clock.
Girl: What time is it now?
Cashier (pointing to the clock on the wall): Look at the clock.
Girl (laughing): I can’t tell time on that.
I looked at the clock. It was a typical wall clock — you know, the round kind with two hands and a bunch of numbers. It read 1:35 PM.
Me (to the girl): You can’t tell time on a regular clock?
Girl (still laughing): No.
Teenage Guy behind me on line: I can’t either.
Me (to the girl): And you think that’s funny? What school did you go to?
Girl (still laughing but now moved to the end of the next register; I think I was scaring her): Wickenburg.
We’ll cut the conversation here, mostly because I became outraged and had to be calmed by the cashier, who is about my age. I reminded her that I learned how to tell time when I was 5 and I’m sure she was about the same age.
The point of all this is the fact that today’s kids apparently lack basic skills that they need to get by in life. How can an 18-year-old girl not know how to tell time on a standard analog clock? What else does she not know how to do? Read? Write in full sentences? Spell the words that might appear on a job application?
How the hell does she expect to get anywhere in life? Or is her highest aspiration to be a bagger in a grocery store? No offense to folks with challenged kids, but mentally retarded people can do that.
Yet apparently, this kid can pass the tests she needs to graduate high school.
No child left behind? Sure.
A quick note from a recent flight.
I recently flew a dad and his two kids on a 50-minute flight in the Wickenburg area. The kids were aged maybe 8 (the boy) and 10 (the girl). These are estimates. I didn’t ask and since I’m not a parent myself, I could be way off.
My helicopter has a voice-activated intercom system. That means that anything anyone says into their headset microphone can be heard by anyone else in the aircraft wearing a headset. (And yes, I do have an isolation switch I can use to “turn off” my passengers, but I rarely use it.) I narrated the flight, as I usually do, and pointed out interesting things.
Now I’ve flown kids before, but these kids were different. They asked a lot of questions. A lot. In fact, they pretty much never stopped asking questions.
I have no problem with this. It’s great to see kids who are interested in what’s going on around them. And it sure beats the kid who almost fell asleep on one of my Grand Canyon flights years ago.
Since I don’t have kids, however, it was a bit startling to me. It made me realize the limits of a young kid’s knowledge. For example, they repeatedly asked me to define words I’d used — irrigation and skeleton crew come to mind. They asked a lot of “why” and “how” questions. It was a real eye-opening experience for me. It was also a pleasure to be in the position where I could share some of my knowledge with them.
But the part I liked most was defining those terms I’d used without a second thought, bringing my vocabulary down to a level they’d understand and perhaps teaching them a few new words and concepts.
I went down to the horse corral to shovel last night’s horse poop — an important part of my exercise routine — and brought my MacBook Pro and iSight camera with me to do a quick video of the chickens. They’re 2 months old now and starting to look a lot more like full-grown chickens. I expect to start getting eggs in 2 to 3 months.
Anyway, two of my neighbor’s kids saw me heading down to the coop and came over to see what I was up to. So I recorded them, too. I get a kick out of some of the things kids say, probably because I’ve never had kids and I don’t have to listen to them all the time. I assume these two boys are typical for their age.
The chickens make their appearance in the second half of the video, although you can hear them in the background throughout.