Conservatives Continue to Put the Dumb in Free-dumb

Conservatives have attempted to put incorrect information in school curriculums and text books.  Conservatives, particularly the religious right, have waged culture wars on science as well as on women and minorities.

The latest Conservative culture war on education is this one that promotes ignorance in science, while making it more difficult and more expensive for students to go on to college.  This is unpardonably stupid in the 21st century.  Creationism, and intelligent design, are very backward versions of religion trying to masquerade as legitimate science.  They are anything but scientific.  There is no significant or legitimate controversy over the broader concepts of either evolution or climate change.  There are occaional updates, revisions, and refinements as new knowledge, and additional data become available.  But the central premises of the science that is challenged below are far too widely respected for there to be any significant controversy worthy of challenging them.

Shame on conservatives for making American students ignorant.  Shame on conservatives for creating financial impediments for students to acquire post-secondary education.  They make us unexceptional and barely average in competition with the education of children in other countries.  It takes more than blindly, stupidly chanting "we're number 1" to in fact excel or be exceptional.  The conservative educational mandates are neither.  They are flawed ideology, bought and paid for by special interests that exploit the ignorant on the right, people who are completely out of touch with objective reality.

From Think Progress:

Anti-Evolution ‘Monkey Bill’ Poised To Become Law In Tennessee

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 4, 2012 at 11:00 am

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) announced yesterday that he will “probably” sign a bill that attacks the teaching of “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” by giving broad new legal immunities to teachers who question evolution and other widely accepted scientific theories. Under the bill, which passed the state legislature last month:

Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.

Although the bill is written to seem benign, as it neither specifically authorizes the teaching of creationism nor permits teachers to do more than criticize scientific theories “in an objective matter,” the practical impact of this bill will be to intimidate all but the heartiest of school administrators against disciplining teachers who preach the most outlandish junk science in their classrooms. Because the bill provides little guidance as to what constitutes an “objective” criticism of a scientific theory, any principal who reigns in teachers who force creationism or Pastafarianism upon their students risks finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.
In reality, of course, there are few, if any, “objectively” valid objections to the theory of evolution (or, for that matter, to global warming). Rather, as Travis Waldron explained when this bill passed a legislative committee nearly a year ago, “Scientists have reached a consensus that evolution is ‘one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science,’ and as such, it is ‘a core element in science education.’”