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Poor PZ
He just opened a can of worms by linking this new homeschooling article in NewScientist. TO THE unsuspecting visitor, Patrick Henry College looks like a typical American liberal-arts college tucked away amidst the rolling green farmlands of Virginia. Its curriculum is far from typical, however, and anything but liberal. Witness this lecture on faith and reason in an idyllic red-brick college building reminiscent of colonial America. As the speaker takes to the podium, several students silence their cellphones. One puts down his copy of The Wall Street Journal and takes out his Bible. They bow their heads and pray to Jesus, then stand up and sing a hymn, belting out "Holy, holy, holy" with gusto. Eventually, the speaker addresses the crowd.
"Christians increasingly have an advantage in the educational enterprise," he says. "This is evident in the success of Christian home-schooled children, as compared to their government-schooled friends who have spent their time constructing their own truths." The students, all evangelical Christians, applaud loudly. Most of them were schooled at home before arriving at Patrick Henry - a college created especially for them.
These students are part of a large, well-organised movement that is empowering parents to teach their children creationist biology and other unorthodox versions of science at home, all centred on the idea that God created Earth in six days about 6000 years ago. Patrick Henry, near the town of Purcellville, about 60 kilometres north-west of Washington DC, is gearing up to groom home-schooled students for political office and typifies a movement that seems set to expand, opening up a new front in the battle between creationists and Darwinian evolutionists. 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.
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The phrasing is reminiscent of the Center for Science and Culture, originally named the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which has been the main promoter of intelligent design in the US and is part of the conservative think tank Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, Washington. The institute claims that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies". In a 1999 conference entitled "140th Anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species - Evolution or Creation", the institute's co-founder Philip Johnson reportedly announced, "Home-school moms are allies."
However, not all home-school parents have a religious agenda. "There are probably some wonderful home-school parents, some of whom may be evolutionary biologists themselves. But I have a feeling after talking to a lot of home-schoolers that this is the minority," says Alters. Indeed, evangelical Christians do dominate the home-school movement. "It's disconcerting, to say the least," he says.
The home-school movement is often described as a grassroots effort, scattered among a dispersed group of quiet, rural families. The reality is that the movement is well organised from the top down, led by groups with strong political ties. Taken together, organisations like the Discovery Institute, Exodus Mandate, HSLDA and Patrick Henry College are working to sculpt a new generation of students armed with the skills and the motivation to fight for their religious beliefs and their version of science.
"Home-schoolers are going to be leaders in their field," says Wile. "They are going to change science and how science is done." Not likely. Science is based on what works, not what you want to be true. But the article does again raise the question whether or not parents who purposefully brainwashing their children not to believe in science are guilty of child abuse. Sic'em Nance.
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6 Comments:
PZ is entitled to be wrong about one thing. :)
But I did point out that the vast majority of people who are wrong about evolution went to public school.
Nance
10:22 AM, November 11, 2006
This is an error in statistical thinking, Nance. This is only true because the vast majority of people go to public school.
10:36 PM, November 11, 2006
And the information is not getting through. What PZ and others regularly suggest is that if only we could force homeschoolers to teach their kids the same standardized curriculum that public schools have, instead of them being allowed to choose whatever they want, as private schools do, then the homeschooled kids would get it. They'd see the light and understand that evolution is the right way to look at things, not creationism.
But it doesn't work.
The vast majority of people do go to public school. The statistic normally used it that only about 2% of school-age children are homeschooled. That stat is low because of the way we are accounted for -- say it's 4% -- whatever the real number is, it is small. And out of that number, many of us are not teaching our children creationism. But say half are.
About 85% (was that the number I cited last time, it's here in the archives but I think that's it) of the rest of school-age children go to public school and ALL are taught some sort of standardized non-creationist science curriculum.
And, yet, it doesn't stick. It doesn't override what they are taught during the rest of their day.
So we have a country where most people believe in some sort of creationism.
So the proposal that all homeschoolers should be required to use the sort of standardized science curriculum that public schools use, has already been proven not to work on all those public school students. How's it suddenly gonna work so well on homeschoolers? And why should our lives be disrupted to conform to this failed standardized teaching that is imposed on public school students?
I would suggest that, as a nation, we have bigger fish to fry than to worry about 2% (a rough guess of how many homeschoolers teach creationism?) of the school-age population when the vast majority are being failed right now.
Suggesting that homeschoolers' rights be curtailed and a standardized curriculum be imposed would be a tad more convincing, in other words, if all, or even most, of the public school students graduated with a basic understanding of evolution and gave up their various creation myths. But they don't.
If, along with forcing a standardized science curriculum on everyone, you could somehow restrict their access to other sources of (mis)information -- no learning about this at home or in church -- then you might have a chance of making a difference. Of course, we're not going to do this. We are all so darned respectful of religion that it's sickening, so we will continue to have what we have -- a population that generally believes in creationism.
Targeting the homeschoolers who agree with the vast majority of Americans seems an odd way to go about changing this.
Nance
11:30 AM, November 12, 2006
Nance, public schooling is not indoctrination. It's fine that it doesn't stick, but at least the kids are exposed to it and have a choice to believe in something other than what their parents shove into their intellects.
I think the problem here we're having is that you think the issue is which system is a more effective educational system, whereas we're seeing this as an issue of fundamental fairness to the children.
It simply is not fair to the kids to indoctrinate them to believe everything their parents do. Public schools, while not successful in indoctrinating kids into being 100% darwinist, at least expose kids to ideas that are not their parents'. And when parents are racist, or zealots, or just plain wrong about something, the kids have no chance.
Public schools aren't going to turn out kids that have a uniform ideology or even uniform level of knowledge, but it does give the kids a chance to distinguish themselves from their parents. When it comes to racists like the Prussian Blue girls, or zealots like the Jesus Camp people, or the misinformed like the creationists, the best benefit for the kids is to see some of their parents ideas about the world challenged so they are given the opportunity to break the cycle of ignorance. They won't always, but they deserve the opportunity.
1:09 PM, November 12, 2006
They won't always, but they deserve the opportunity.
1:09 PM, November 12, 2006
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My point is that they hardly ever do. No matter what sort of schooling they receive.
And acting as if such a small slice of the population is responsible for out nation's continued religiosity, or any other sort of backward thinking, just doesn't make sense.
If all of this is "for the children," why impose a failed method on even more of them?
Nance
6:23 PM, November 12, 2006
I do not understand why public schools get such a trashing. I know public school teachers (one blogs with us), I was educated entirely in public schools and I did pretty well considering I'm working on two graduate degrees here. All the Give Up bloggers were entirely public school educated actually, and we're all doctors, lawyers, PhD's or grad students working on MD and/or PhD degrees.
Public schools don't fail students who are motivated and have motivated parents. The kids that fail in public schools are the ones who have no educational reinforcement at home, and those certainly aren't the kids who end up in the homeschool pool. You're working with an artificially advantaged set of kids.
Finally, these arguments we're getting from you on public school are just so fatalist. I don't think this level of cynicism is justified, and it certainly doesn't jive with our experiences, nor does it answer the problem of creating an opportunity for kids who have parents with shitty ideas to escape from their backward, racist, or creationist ideologies. I still don't see how saying that public schools aren't as good as homeschooling (which still hasn't been tested in an adequately controlled fashion) has anything to do with the problem of treating kids like chattel. I feel one of the most important roles of the public schools is allowing each successive generation access to ideas that are new, and are not their parents', thus allowing them to make choices for themselves what to believe.
The type of homeschooling we're complaining about is that which is more about exerting control over the kids' beliefs, choices, and lives to an extent that we find morally reprehensible. Again, it's an issue of degree, and having a different opinion about some of the goals of education. People forget schooling is about more than learning a set of facts, it's also about learning how to think, interacting with other people (especially those that are different from you), and satisfying the compelling state interests in having an educated, literate population that understands their rights and responsibilities as citizens. The homeschooling being written about here, and shown in Jesus Camp (not to mention in Buck's show Wife Swap), is not accomplishing these goals. That's not just detrimental to the people that will have to deal with these monsters when they grow up, it's also bad for the kids and a failure to respect their rights as individuals to grow up and make choices for themselves.
12:45 PM, November 13, 2006
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