Wow. Seems my timing as usual is pretty good. Underscoring my recent post re ID comes news that the LA legislature and Bobby Jindal (LA Governor) have put into law SB 733. John Derbyshire at national Review says this is really unfortunate (I’m paraphrasing here) because what the bill does is little more than encourage school boards to do silly things and think that adding religious stuff in science classes is proper. They’ll lose in court, of course, just as they should, because this is held as unconstitutional.
The purpose of my post here isn’t to argue the constitutionality of religion in classrooms (I agree with the current laws; if people want their kids to learn ID and not science, there’s a number of parochial schools) but to underscore my previous point that public school boards simply aren’t qualified to assess what science is or what science is not. Here we have a case of the Discovery Institute (oxymoronically dubbed as a “creationist think tank”) who seems successful at duping people at the state level, who are held to be a bit higher up the food chain than mere school board members. What chance does a school board have? None.
My solution? Do not let a school board have the power to change textbooks written by experts (not really, but they’re certainly experts compared to school board members) unless they can demonstrate the requisite expertise. Think about this for a moment. We have at any time in the US thousands and hundreds of thousands of degreed people in the sciences, in history, and so on. In other words, people qualified to hold an opinion about their field of expertise. I have an opinion about biology. Should you listen to my opinion of biological matters? Not really. I don’t have enough expertise to have an informed opinion. A biologist does. But you can trust what I think about my own field of expertise.
Dr. Jerry Pournelle writes that my view is “credentialism” which he holds is very bad, and this seems mostly in reaction to the well known excesses. Of course, many of these excesses are in soft sciences (e.g. psychology) ruled more by cult of opinion rather than hard core fact (e.g. physics, astronomy.) Credentials can be abused, yes, but in many fields this is desirable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Salmonella. I want a qualified food inspector. I want my doctor to have credentials (preferably from an Ivy League school.) Not all credentials are bad.
If we license teachers to teach what’s in the textbook, then by logical extension we ought to license the bodies that seek to influence what’s in the textbooks. No expertise? No license. School boards are intended to figure out how to pay for a new roof, band uniforms, and do bus schedules; i.e. things they are suited for by nature of who sits on such a board and how they got there (politics!) They are neither suited for nor qualified to hold an informed opinion on what science ought to be taught.
Dr. Pournelle’s counter is that if the good people of Resume Speed KS want their kids to learn ID, let ‘em. But this too is wrong. If **everyone** in Resume Speed was on that page, I might be able to see the point. But let’s face it, there are going to be any nunber of people who are NOT on that page. Should their children be taught this silliness because a local majority decided for it? Ummm… No — what is their alternative? Move? Yeah… who’s going to pay for that? This is freedom? The necessity to move about the country until one winds up in a suitable locale or collapses from mental or financial exhaustion is NOT freedom.
Limiting school boards to what they have expertise in IS freedom (everything but textbooks!)
