Government in the US is Promoting Anti-Creationist Dogma Evolution

I agree that there are teenagers who are both intelligent and mature, and I do think that youth deserve more respect than they are sometimes given. Since I'm 20, memories of teenagehood aren't that distant. But I also agree with another post that the public can be amazingly ignorant.I think it is the worst thing that could happen for the government to dictate to schools what they should teach in thier science classes. Not only that, but the government needs to back off on standardization. Over standardizing education and tehreby restricting curriculum is the worst thing the government could do: teachers need to have freedom so they can use their gifts to inspire children to love learning. It is no wonder we have a populace that seems ill informed when some of our schools amount to little better than what I think of as "holding pens for youth". They're a place to put kids so they'll be out of the way while everyone else goes about their business. *That* is the firt thing we need to fix. Then our society will be better able to handle intellectual issues.

I am not saying that there should be no standardization whatsoever--I know it is valuable to have a certain amount of unity in what is taught in schools around the country. I just think that we need to be careful in diong this because we could easily go overboard and do more harm than good.The truth is that legislaters are typically neither teachers nor scientists and while sometimes they come up with a good idea for helping our schools, sometimes they are unaware of the impact their ideas may have. (And in the case of the Kansas incident, legislature far oversteps its bounds.) We need some form of check and balance that will help schools and legislatures come up with a system of standardization that benefits both groups.

I hope so too.

I agree with Gene90 and others who note that the attempted creationist views do not hold up well when tested as scientific theories. I think that typicallly religion--especially conservative/fundamentalist religion--has entirely different methods of truth-seeking than science has, and that normally religion asks questions that science cannot ask, and science answers questions in a way religion cannot. It is not wise for creationism to try and "battle science on its own ground".
--Redwing