a 'sticky' situation

You might remember in 2002 when the Cobb County school district in Atlanta opted to circumvent a sticky situation between several parents and the scientific standards of their school board by inserting a sticker inside their biology textbooks that stated evolution was "a theory, not a fact" and should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." Maybe not so surprisingly, the A.C.L.U. immediately accosted the school board for their overzealous impediment on the constitution, but the school board stated they were only wanting to assuage those parents who were pretty upset with what appeared to be a no-win face-off against evolution being promulgated in public schools.

In November of 2004, Clarence Cooper - a federal judge in Atlanta – began hearing testimony about this situation and in early 2005 ruled that the placement of these stickers within the textbooks violate the constitutionally mandated separation between church and state, and further, by perhaps putting much emphasis on the phrase ‘this is a theory’ aside the phrase "not a fact" summarily after--it appeared to have the possible, even if inadvertent aim, of dissuading the students from giving a respectable level of credence to evolution.

It was believed that the wording may very well play on the students' preconceived notions of what a theory is without giving much weight to the actuality of the rigorous standards a 'scientific theory' must withstand, and the consensuses that much be reached, to be labeled as such. A scientific theory isn't an arbitrary guess, after all.

Keeping that in mind, it’s somewhat fascinating that Florida's anti-evolution school-board members may have gotten far less than what they actually thought they were getting, and far more of what they don’t want.

Yesterday, By a vote of 4-3, the Florida school board members opted to have the word 'evolution' replaced with the phrase 'the scientific theory of evolution' as the meat of their compromise, thereby ironically using the powerful phrase ‘scientific theory’ as the opponents’ own coup-de-grace. Until now, Florida's schools weren't required to teach evolution. The old curriculum guidelines didn't even mention it by name.

Nice.


Additional resource(s):

The Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed a bill that says that a student can receive a passing grade in an Earth Science class if they say that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the Earth an hour ago, and then planted false memories into every single living creature on Earth to make it seem like they’ve been around longer.

Read the rest here.

(He's being facetious, but you get the point.)