All posts in category In the News

Is This Child Abuse?

Is it a crime to keep young people isolated from the wider community?  To teach them nothing that will allow them to thrive as independent adults?

From Frimet Goldberger in the Jewish Daily Forward we hear accusations that Hasidic communities in Ontario perpetrate educational crimes on their own children.  She shared a disturbing video in which a journalist asked young men basic questions.  Do you know the name of the Prime Minister?  The names of Canadian provinces?  Do you know anything about Canadian history?  The parts of the body?

The students, all apparently members of the Lev Tahor community—a group of about 40 families—did not seem to understand much about what they were being asked.  Most of the difficulty seemed related to their lack of English language skills.  But the boys did not seem able to answer in Hebrew, either.  One student, for example, asked to explain what he had learned about biology, explained haltingly that it is not healthy to jump too much right after eating.

The Lev Tahor community faces more serious challenges, too.  Some of the members are on the run from Canadian police, facing charges of child neglect and abuse.  Goldberger asks the question we want to hear: Does failing to teach children English or French count as abuse?  As Goldberger puts it, “These boys are lacking the basic language tools to take one step out of the community, to communicate with anyone outside their community.”

The United States has long wrestled with these questions, too.  Most notably, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1971’s Wisconsin v. Yoder that dissenting parents had the right to remove their children from public school.  These days, accusations of abuse in the growing homeschooling community have prompted calls for more government oversight.

Does a dissenting community have the right to restrict their children’s future?  If so, how can the wider society make any claims to regulate religious schooling?  And if not, who gets to decide what knowledge (or lack of knowledge) constitutes a limit?  Is young-earth creationism a limit on children’s futures?  Is a belief in faith healing?

7 Comments
by Adam Laats on March 16, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on March 16, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/03/16/god-dissent-and-educational-neglect/

Bashing the Common Core

Is there a “conservative” attitude toward the new(ish) Common Core State Standards?  Though as we’ve noted, conservatives disagree, the session at the on-going Conservative Political Action Conference about the standards sounded like a bash-fest.

In the pages of The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead offered a fly-on-the-wall report.  Conservative luminaries such as Phyllis Schlafly, Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, Robert Enlow of the Friedman Foundation, and Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute took the CCSS to task for centralizing education.

Such centralization, Schlafly warned, does not occur in an ideological vacuum.  With more control from Washington comes more “liberal propaganda,” Schlafly insisted, as she has done before.  Enlow warned that centralization introduced yet another level of government control, blocking parents from their rightful control of their children’s education.  And Stergios insisted that the CCSS claim to be “state-led” was laughable.

Did this CPAC panel define the only “conservative” position on the Common Core?  As Stergios noted, many conservatives like the core.  He thought that opinion was “ludicrous.”  But correspondent Gracy Olmstead disagreed.  She noted that the standards still attracted fans and foes from all political sides.

6 Comments
by Adam Laats on March 8, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Freedom & the Free Market, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on March 8, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/03/08/bashing-the-common-core/

Do You Read the Bible? Why?

Do you read the Bible?  Regularly?  If you do, you’re in good company.  Or at least you have lots of company.  Results from a survey have been published by the Center for the Study of Religion in American Culture at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis, fondly known as Ewee-poohee.

The survey-meisters attached Bible-related question to two large-group surveys, the General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study.  The authors suggested a few key findings:

*   There is a 50/50 split among Americans who read any form of
scripture in the past year and those who did not. Among those who did,
women outnumber men, older people outnumber younger people, and
Southerners exceed those from other regions of the country.

*   Among those who read any form of scripture in the past year, 95%
named the Bible as the scripture they read. All told, this means that 48%
of Americans read the Bible at some point in the past year. Most of those
people read at least monthly, and a substantial number-9% of all
Americans-read the Bible daily.

*   Despite the proliferation of Bible translations, the King James
Version is the top choice-and by a wide margin-of Bible readers.

*   The strongest correlation with Bible reading is race, with African
Americans reading the Bible at considerably higher rates than others.

*   Half of those who read the Bible in the past year also committed
scripture to memory. About two-thirds of congregations in America hold
events for children to memorize verses from the Bible.

*   Among Bible readers, about half had a favorite book, verse, or
story. Psalm 23, which begins, “The Lord is my shepherd…” was cited most
often, followed by John 3:16.

*   Bible readers consult scripture for personal prayer and devotion
three times more than to learn about culture war issues such as abortion,
homosexuality, war, or poverty.

*   There are clear differences among Bible readers consulting scripture
for specific reasons. Age, income, and education are key factors.

*   Those reading the Bible frequently consult it on culture war issues
more than two times the rate as those who read it less frequently.

*   Less than half of those who read the Bible in the past year sought
help in understanding it. Among those who did, clergy were their top
source; the Internet was the least cited source.

*   Among Bible readers, 31% read it on the Internet and 22% use
e-devices.

*   Bible reading differences among religious traditions followed
predictably the historic divides between Protestants and Catholics, and
between white conservative and white moderate/liberal Protestants.
However, reading practices defy some stereotypes about certain groups.

What can we take away from these headlines?  First, for those of us who don’t read the Bible regularly and who don’t really care about what the Bible might say about any given social issue, this report serves as a reminder that many Americans see the Bible very differently.  For instance, if I read the above numbers correctly, about a quarter of respondents told interviewers that they thought it was important to memorize chunks of the Bible.  Also, those who do tend to read the Bible also tend to use the Bible to prove points on social issues.  For example, I do not find the Bible to be relevant to the issue of gay marriage, but many Americans do.  Finally, we see yet another reminder that religious divisions do not neatly match political ones.  African Americans, for example, tend to vote Democratic.  Yet they also tend to read the Bible more often than other groups.

Yet moving past the headlines, we also see some confirmation in this report of stereotypes about the Bible.  For instance, the authors found that Bible-reading was much more common among old people than among the young.  Of those over 75, 56% reported reading the Bible in the past year.  Of those between 18-29, only 44% did so.  Also, Bible-reading was most prevalent in the South (61%) and least prevalent in the Northeast (36%).

Yet even the body of the report contains intriguing surprises.  For example, of those who said they consider the Bible the “inerrant Word of God,” a significant percentage did not read the Bible at all in the past year.  If we add in respondents who said they believed the Bible was the “divinely inspired Word of God,” we get an astonishing result: Those Bible-lovers made up 65% of the people who said they had never read the Bible in the past year!  That’s right: of the people who said they had not read the Bible in the past year, 50% still thought the Bible was divinely inspired, and 15% thought that the Bible was inerrant.  Clearly, Bible-reading does not correlate with theological convictions about the importance or status of the Bible.

And, of course, people read the Bible for all sorts of reasons.  It was no surprise to find that the most common reason people give for reading the Bible is prayer and personal devotion.  But large numbers of respondents also claim to read the Bible to find out how to make more money, how to heal themselves, and how to predict the future.  As the study concludes, these uses of the Bible correlate strongly to levels of formal education.  People who have gone to college tend to use the Bible less for these sorts of purposes.  As the authors put it, “those with less education read the Bible at twice the rate of someone with a college degree for the purposes of learning about culture war issues, health and wealth, and what the future holds” (24-25).

So what can this survey tell us?  The IUPUI researchers asked prominent scholars for their opinions.

As prominent historian of religion Mark Noll commented, one hoped-for result of this survey was to add needed complexity to public discussions about the Bible.  “These IUPUI surveys,” Noll suggested, “should bring sanity back into journalists’ reporting on religion, at least to the extent that they show how important non-political use of scripture continues to be in modern American life.”

Professor of African American Studies Sylvester Johnson added a different take-away message.  This survey, Johnson noted, demonstrates the persistence of “the dominant reality of biblical fundamentalism in Black churches.”  Many observers, Johnson said, have long attributed a social progressivism to African American churches that simply doesn’t match the cultural reality.

In any case, whether it is used as a symbol of cultural identity, a source of clues to the future, or a dusty tome on a shelf that is left alone to molder, Americans still care about the Bible.

 

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on March 6, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on March 6, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/03/06/do-you-read-the-bible-why/

Can Atheists Be Conservatives? Can Conservatives Be Atheists?

Sorry, Charlie.

That was what the Conservative Political Action Conference told the American Atheists recently when CPAC rescinded the atheists’ invitation to have a booth at the upcoming CPAC meeting.

The conservative planners apparently took offense to American Atheist leader David Silverman’s plans to shake up the meanings of American conservatism.  As Silverman told CNN,

Conservative isn’t a synonym for religious. . . .  I am not worried about making the Christian right angry. The Christian right should be angry that we are going in to enlighten conservatives. The Christian right should be threatened by us.

Threatened or not, conservative Christian leaders objected to the atheists’ presence at the meeting, a gathering that plans to attract 10,000 conservative activists to Maryland next week.  Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council crowed, if the atheists are welcomed, “they will have to pack up and put away the ‘C’ in CPAC!”

Other conservatives disagreed.  As the proudly atheist conservative Charles C. W. Cooke opined in the pages of National Review,

given the troubled waters into which American religious liberty has of late been pushed, it strikes me that conservatives ought to be courting atheists — not shunning them. I will happily take to the barricades for religious conscience rights, not least because my own security as a heretic is bound up with that of those who differ from me, and because a truly free country seeks to leave alone as many people as possible — however eccentric I might find their views or they might find mine. In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious.

From an historic point of view, Cooke seems to have the better of this argument.  As Jennifer Burns has argued, the atheism of Ayn Rand has played a crucial formative role in post-war American conservatism.  Though some contemporaries such as William F. Buckley rejected Rand precisely because of her atheism and her aggressive moral embrace of capitalism, later conservative leaders such as Paul Ryan proudly claimed Rand’s influence.

But even when Ryan did so, he explicitly rejected the atheism at the heart of Rand’s thinking.  David Silverman is asking CPAC to do something much more difficult: welcome conservative atheists as atheists, not in spite of their atheism.

Boo!

Boo!

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on February 28, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 28, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/02/28/can-atheists-be-conservatives-can-conservatives-be-atheists/

A Different Sort of School Shooting…

If you don’t like the way a school is run in the US of A, what’s the worst thing you’d be willing to do?  Historically, the 1974-1975 fight over textbooks in West Virginia might have been the bloodiest in this country.  But sad news from Nigeria updates us on a much more brutal sort of educational culture war.

Conservative militants in Northeast Nigeria yesterday attacked a remote boarding school, killed the male students, and dispersed the females.  Why?  The group, Boko Haram, believes that the national curriculum taught at the school teaches corrupt Western values.  Indeed, the group’s name translates roughly as “Western Education Is a Sin.”

The remains of the school.

The remains of the school.

According to teachers, the militants attacked the school in Buni Yadi and shot dead at least 29 students, wounding another 11.  The militants told female students to leave, to abandon education and to get married.

This is not the first of these school attacks.  According to the BBC, Boko Haram has killed almost 300 people in similar school attacks this year, thousands since 2009.

All the more reason for us to speak carefully when we disagree with one another about schools, culture, and politics.  Language that dehumanizes the opposition can lead all too quickly to this sort of pogrom.

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on February 26, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 26, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/02/26/a-different-sort-of-school-schooting/

Jesus College and the Rape Smear

I’m no fan of Patrick Henry College.  But I’m even less of a fan of the cultural politics of smearing.  Smears are the biological weapons of cultural warfare; they poison the ground for generations.

Last week we read with interest an “expose” of the rape-friendly campus at the attention-grabbing conservative school.  Rape is a terrible problem.  And campus rape seems to have taken on a life of its own.  But the author of this article seemed more intent on smearing Patrick Henry and conservative religious people in general than she did in exploring the real issues.

This sort of smear attack is doubly dangerous. First, smears like this convince the already convinced that their Christian enemies must be fought tooth and nail.  After all, the article implies, conservative Christians support rape.  What kind of monsters are they?  Second, conservative Christians will easily be able to point out the unfair guilt-by-association tactics this writer resorts to.  For Christians, this sort of smear simply provides more proof that Bible-loving Christians are a beleaguered minority, under unfair attack from an aggressive, hostile, secularizing liberal elite.

Let me be crystal clear: I am not defending Patrick Henry College.  I am not saying that the administration and students did or did not react badly to allegations of sexual assault.  I am not saying that assaults did or did not take place.  I am certainly not saying that allegations of sexual assault need not be taken seriously, nor that female victims ought to blamed.

But the author of this article, Kiera Feldman, repeatedly resorts to insinuation and smear in an attempt to demonize this conservative Christian institution.  The article tells the story of Claire Spear, a freshman, who was attacked by a fellow student.  Feldman also describes the case of Sarah Patten, who was assaulted on campus.  Feldman accuses the college administration of pooh-poohing the incidents.  More powerfully, Feldman implies that the conservative Christian campus culture actually encourages male-on-female sexual assaults.

To build her case, Feldman relies on some tried-but-false McCarthyite tactics.  Patrick Henry College, Feldman notes correctly, was opened in 2000, in large part to provide a congenial collegiate home for the burgeoning numbers of conservative Christian homeschooled kids.  But Feldman asserts with wild inaccuracy, “Underlying homeschooling culture is the Christian patriarchy movement.”  Of course, some Christian homeschoolers—even some members of the ILYBYGTH community—have had horrific experiences with this sort of quiverfull-esque homeschooling monstrosity.  But to imply that homeschooling culture is dominated by this sort of attitude demonstrates woeful ignorance about the true contours of American homeschooling.

Similarly, in her attempt to tar Patrick Henry as a hotbed of rape culture, Feldman mentions Missouri Senator Todd Akin’s terrifying discussions of “legitimate rape.”  As far as I can tell, Akin has absolutely no connection to Patrick Henry College, but Feldman mentions Akin’s accursed name, only to point out that Patrick Henry College “sponsored similar ideas.”  This is the smear tactic at its worst.  Did you know, for example, that the Communist Manifesto listed a graduated income tax as one of the ten top goals for communists?  Therefore, President Wilson must clearly be a communist, since he sponsored such a tax a century ago.

Campus rape is a real problem.  The most common statistic we hear is that one in five female students will experience some sort of sexual assault during their school experience.  This is an issue that has justifiably attracted the attention of activists and politicians.  For instance, state senators in California have introduced a bill that would mandate consent for every sexual act as the new legal standard.

But this problem is not somehow related to the Christian theology of school such as Patrick Henry.  Indeed, even if we take Feldman’s numbers of assaults to be accurate—which the administration of the school vigorously denies—it seems Patrick Henry has been a remarkably safe school, compared to other colleges.  Indeed, as the California legislators pointed out, complaints about assault and rape at schools such as UC-Berkeley and Occidental College far outstrip the complaints Feldman chronicles at Patrick Henry.

Indeed, it might seem more accurate to ask if Patrick Henry’s conservative culture PREVENTS sexual assault.  After all, the drinking, partying lifestyle that seems to be such a big part of student life at many secular schools will find no home at Patrick Henry.  As Caitlin Flanagan recently described in the pages of The Atlantic, fraternities and sororities at public and more secular schools have astonishing rates of sexual assault and injury.

Not that such things would excuse Patrick Henry’s administrators if they did downplay the seriousness of sexual assault charges.  But it must give readers pause.  If the Christian culture at Patrick Henry encourages sexual assault, as Feldman implies, surely we’d expect to see more cases pop up at Patrick Henry than at secular schools.  That’s just not the case.

40 Comments
by Adam Laats on February 24, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Higher (Power) Education, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 24, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/02/24/jesus-college-and-the-rape-smear/

Stuff It, Perfesser: The DINE Response

Cross-posted from Do I Need Evolution

What do we do when we can’t agree?  Evolution, US History, sex, prayer . . . there’s a lot we can’t agree about.  A few days back, I asked what a historian like me should do when challenged and insulted.  Should we fight back? Or try to understand why we’ve been insulted and make some connections between disagreeing sides?  Prajwal Kulkarni of the must-read Do I Need Evolution has offered a response:

I can understand why both historians and scientists get angry and feel they must fight. But to fight or not to fight is not the only question. How we fight matters as whether we fight. It’s possible to fight fairly and treat your opponents with respect, something sorely missing with creationists.

Scientists and educators themselves disagree which topics in science are critical for people to learn, and especially non-scientists. Moreover, pretty much everyone agrees that there are many paths to science literacy. Since the experts don’t think evolution is absolutely necessary, and since there are many different ways to cultivate science appreciation and literacy, “fighting” over evolution seems particularly inappropriate.

History is different. Adam can comment more authoritatively, but I get the impression historians agree on a canon that everyone should be exposed to. There also aren’t easy substitutions in history education. You can’t legitimately teach mid-19th century US history and avoid the civil war. But as medical schools all over the world demonstrate, you can teach biology and avoid evolution. “Fighting” might actually be a more appropriate response for history. And even then, we can make sure to to fight fairly and respectfully.

Living in a democracy requires us to draw these types of lines. When it comes to public education, it may be okay to concede on evolution but not history.

9 Comments
by Adam Laats on February 23, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 23, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/02/23/stuff-it-perfesser-the-dine-response/

Are You a Camel Denier?

The authenticity of the Bible has received a new challenge, a new camel’s nose under the tent.  You’ve probably seen the headline: Two archaeologists have published their findings that camels did not likely live in Biblical lands at the time of Abraham, yet the Bible says they did.

One obvious conclusion is that the early books of the Bible were written long after the events they describe.  Conservative Protestants quickly disputed this implication.  Dr. Andrew Steinmann, a professor of Hebrew and theology at Concordia University-Chicago, insisted that this evidence merely proved the accuracy of the Old Testament.  Camels, Steinmann argued (according to an article in the Christian Post), were not described in the OT as widespread, but rather only owned by recent emigres from other areas.

As Gordon Govier aptly put it in the pages of Christianity Today, this archaeological dispute is only the “latest challenge to the Bible’s accuracy.”

Indeed, as historians of evangelicalism will tell you, the roots of what we think of as fundamentalism and its neo-evangelical offshoots came directly from an earlier generation of scholarly criticisms of the Bible’s accuracy.

In all the ruckus, nothing I’ve seen has been more poignant than the recent accusation by Julie Borg in World Magazine that the archaeologists amount to nothing more than cynical “Camel Deniers.”  She argues that plenty of secular research disproves their bitter and ill-conceived anti-Biblical argument.

So how about it?  Is this a new “denier” category to add to our culture-war lists?

 

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by Adam Laats on February 21, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 21, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/02/21/are-you-a-camel-denier/

Learning by Discipline

What should schools do with students who behave badly?  Who assault other students?  Who treat teachers disrespectfully?

A new announcement about school discipline from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder might drive some conservative pundits to distraction.  Discipline, the two leading officials of the Obama Administration announced yesterday, must be more sensitive to student background and more responsive to individual situations.  Blanket zero-tolerance policies, they proclaimed, lead to worse school discipline, not better.

Those zero-tolerance policies, however, grew out of a groundswell of popular conservative opinion throughout the 1980s and 1990s.  Conservative commentators and activists long complained that schools treated students too gingerly.  Good old-fashioned discipline, some conservative writers insisted, would help return schools to their proper role.  Instead of being places where polite students and teachers cower and wince at the domineering swagger of loud-mouthed punks, schools should be calm and orderly places where infractions of the rules are not tolerated.

Some studies have demonstrated the central importance of a reinvigorated school discipline to many conservative parents in the 1980s.  One Stanford study[1] of two new fundamentalist schools in the 1970s and 1980s found that leaders put bad discipline in public schools as one of their top reasons for opening their own school, right up there with “secular humanism,” “evolution teaching,” and the fact that “kids weren’t learning.”  In a fundamentalist school that opened in September 1974 with a grand total of eleven students, one teacher informed the Stanford researcher that most parents assumed that the fundamentalist school was “solving discipline problems the public schools could not.”

Another study, this one from Temple University in Philadelphia,[2] found that parents listed poor discipline as one of their top reasons for abandoning public schools in favor of private Christian ones.  Nearly 65% of switching parents listed “discipline” as a leading reason for changing schools.  By way of comparison, just over 68% of parents listed “secular humanism” as a primary reason for their switch.

It may come as no surprise that some conservative parents choose Christian schools out of fear of disorderly public schools.  Leading conservative religious writers throughout the 1980s insisted that public schools had utterly abandoned all attempt at imposing discipline.  Jerry Combee, for example, warned readers in a 1979 book,

Without Biblical discipline the public schools have grown into jungles where, of no surprise to Christian educators, the old Satanic nature ‘as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’ (I Peter 5:8).  Students do well to stay alive, much less learn.

Similarly, in his 1983 book The Battle for The Public Schools, blockbuster fundamentalist author Tim LaHaye insisted that one of the vital reforms that could save education was a return of traditional discipline.  As LaHaye put it, “We must return discipline, authority, and respect to public schools”

In 1986, conservative Texas school watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler asked readers, “Why has discipline become so bad that policemen must patrol the halls of many schools?”  The Gablers’ answer was simple:

We were taught that if you plant potatoes, you get potatoes.  If you plant rebellion and immorality in children’s minds by teaching them that only they can decide what is right and wrong, that parents are old-fashioned, and that the Judeo-Christian Bible is a book of fairy tales, then what can you expect?  Garbage in—garbage out!

These conservative critiques of the sorry nature of school discipline were not limited to conservatives of a primarily religious background.  After his turn as Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan, William J. Bennett lamented the sorry state of school discipline.  In his 1994 book Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, Bennett cited a fraudulent but evocative historical comparison:

In 1940, teachers identified talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the halls; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering [as “top problems”].  When asked the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.

Due at least in part to this widespread sense that American public schools had reached a nadir of weak discipline, many states and school districts imposed variants of “zero-tolerance” policies.  According to these policies, student infractions would be met with an escalating series of ever-harsher punishments, including out-of-school suspensions and reports to police.  Politicians could claim that they were taking action to ensure a no-nonsense disciplinary attitude in America’s schools.

Yesterday’s announcement by Arne Duncan and Eric Holder represents the Obama administration’s repudiation of that zero-tolerance approach.  Though “zero-tolerance” may sound good, Duncan told an assembled crowd at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, “Too many schools resort too quickly to exclusionary discipline, even for minor misbehavior.”  According to the Baltimore Sun, Duncan described a new federal approach that would de-emphasize suspensions and put more emphasis on creating nurturing in-school environments.  Attorney General Holder agreed.  Principals, not police, should be responsible for school discipline, Holder insisted.

Will conservatives care about this shift in school disciplinary policies?  If history is any guide, I’m guessing that conservatives will paint this new policy as yet another soft-headed, over-complicated liberal approach to a simple problem.  Folks such as Eric Holder and Arne Duncan may worry that zero-tolerance policies unfairly target racial minorities, but I’ll be surprised if conservative educational activists don’t complain that such social-science talk only obscures a far more obvious point.

If students misbehave in school, conservatives will likely insist, they should not be allowed to be in school.

[1] Peter Stephen Lewis, “Private Education and the Subcultures of Dissent: Alternative/Free Schools (1965-1975) and ChristianFundamentalistSchools (1965-1990),” PhD dissertation, StanfordUniversity, 1991.

[2] Martha E. MacCullough, “Factors Which Led Christian School Parents to LeavePublic   School,” Ed.D. dissertation, TempleUniversity, 1984.

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on January 9, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Child Parent State, In the News, Schools in Black and White, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 9, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/09/learning-by-discipline/

To Debate or Not to Debate

Bill Nye and Ken Ham will be going a few rhetorical rounds next month.

The mega-popular science educator will broach the creationist lion’s den of the Creation Museum on February 4th.  The topic: “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?”

Image Source: Answers In Genesis

Image Source: Answers In Genesis

Are these debates worthwhile?  In the past they had decisive impact on the formation of American creationism and fundamentalism.  But these days such debates are a different animal.

Science pundits don’t like it.  Jerry Coyne warned that Bill Nye will only be putting money and legitimacy in Ham’s deep pockets.  PZ Myers wisely concludes that each side will likely only speak past the other.

I agree.  The audience at this debate will likely not be moved by either man’s arguments.  No matter how scientifically accurate or biblically flawless, logical arguments tend not to be the deciding factor in determining one’s beliefs about human origins.

As David Long’s ethnography demonstrated so powerfully, creationists can thrive in mainstream scientific environments without abandoning their religious ideas.  Many creationists have simply been taught to regard mainstream scientists as deeply flawed and bumbling fools.  It is easy to dismiss plausible-sounding talk from someone we have already deemed unreliable.

It’s hard to imagine Ham’s Cincinnati audience won’t be prepared to dismiss Nye’s mainstream science talk out of hand.  I assume Nye is hoping that he may still plant a few seeds of science doubt in the minds of those who hear him.  Not much reason to offer Ham such a plum chance to look like a reputable scientific authority.

At the start of America’s public evolution/creation battles, this legacy of public debating functioned much more powerfully, since creationists had not yet set up alternative institutions.  As I describe in my 1920s book, some of the most influential creationists of the 1920s received humiliating public trouncings in popular debates.

At a talk on the campus of the University of Minnesota, for example, fundamentalist leader William Bell Riley found himself surprised by a student prank.  Someone lowered a monkey onto the stage as Riley tried to convince his audience that creationism was reputable science.  “Every time I hear the argument that this is a controversy between experts on the one hand, and, as someone has said, ‘organized ignorance,’ on the other, I smile,” Riley told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1927.  “This is not a debate between the educated and the uneducated.”

Similarly, in London, creationist godfather George McCready Price found himself hooted off the stage in the days following the 1925 Scopes Trial.  He had tried to tell the merciless audience that the theory of evolution was doomed as mainstream science.  Such flawed science, Price insisted, may have worked fine

for the times of comparative ignorance of the real facts of heredity and variation and of the facts of geology which prevailed during the latter part of the nineteenth century; but that this theory is now entirely out of date, and hopelessly inadequate for us. . . .  We are making scientific history very fast these days; and the specialist in some corner of science who keeps on humming a little tune to himself, quietly ignoring all this modern evidence against Evolution, is simply living in a fools’ paradise.  He will soon be so far behind that he will wake up some fine morning and find that he needs an introduction to the modern scientific world.

The audience didn’t buy it.  Price found himself heckled so mercilessly that he could not complete his presentation.  That London debacle was Price’s last public debate.  After that experience he focused his considerable energy on founding alternative scientific institutions to prevent future creationists from needing to convert mainstream scientists.

Back in those days, creationists and fundamentalist scientists still attempted to tell audiences that they represented the true mainstream of scientific discovery.  Such early creationists eagerly debated in a variety of settings in hope of convincing middle-of-the-road audiences that evolutionary science was not real science.

In that context, public debates held promise for both sides.  Creationists hoped to prove that they had better science.  Evolutionary scientists hoped to demonstrate the scientific vapidity of creationism.

These days, both sides have hardened.  Creationists these days are not unaware of the fact that their science does not represent the scientific mainstream.  Evolutionary scientists are not hoping to relieve creationists of their naïve ignorance.

Rather, both sides in these debates enter and exit with the same set ideas.  Each side knows who to trust on that stage and who to ignore.  No matter how persuasive Ken Ham can be, he doesn’t really hope to change Bill Nye’s mind.  Rather, this exercise merely serves to give each charismatic speaker the chance to gain a sliver of legitimacy and respectability in the opposite camp.

 

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by Adam Laats on January 3, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 3, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/03/to-debate-or-not-to-debate/

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