The obvious problem with any monopoly is the inevitable effect lack of competitive pressure has on both product quality and cost containment.
And so it is with our taxpayer-financed schools. For years spending has far outstripped inflation, even as student achievement has deteriorated.
But in the case of education there is another even more pernicious consequence – a never-ending fight over curriculum.
Since there is only one state-sponsored school system everyone wants to control what is being taught.
Although there have been occasional battles over such things as having The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in libraries or the Pledge of Allegiance in homerooms, there has been a perpetual war over including evolution in biology classes ever since the theory first appeared there. From Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 to Gull Lake, Michigan last semester, proselytizers for the Judeo-Christian worldview have relentlessly thumped biology textbooks with their bibles.
Meeting little success in getting evolution expelled, those who crave a larger significance to man’s place in the cosmos are now merely stumping for equal time. However, due to an apparent unfamiliarity with the fundamentals of scientific terms and method, they are generating more infernal heat than divine light.
In the first place the theory of evolution has nothing whatever to do with the origin of life.
Evolution had its genesis in naturalist Charles Darwin’s seminal 1859 book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This work deals exclusively with the diversification of species. It is utterly silent on the origin of life.
Further, the word “theory” is not a synonym for “conjecture.”
In the scientific realm a “theory” is a set of principles devised to explain a group of facts. Especially one that has been repeatedly tested, widely accepted, and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
Critics of Darwinism mistakenly use the term “theory” in its common parlance – the way a TV detective does in talking about a “theory of the crime.” Scientists, however, use that word specifically to describe a well-settled and coherent set of statements that consistently account for real-world experience.
Physicists, to cite another branch of science, also use the phrase “theory of gravity,” though I doubt many people would be willing to take a flying leap of faith by regarding its laws as mere speculation.
Finally, neither “Creation Science” nor its contemporary euphemism, “Intelligent Design,” can be regarded as a scientific theory at all, for the simple reason that the assertion there is a creator/designer is not testable.
A fundamental requirement of any scientific hypothesis is that there must be some way the idea might be falsified, i.e., disproved.
Critics of evolution have two possible lines of attack: produce some verifiable evidence of unnatural providence, or describe a replicable experiment by which genetics as currently understood produces inexplicable results – for example, mating two elephant seals and thereby creating a baby giraffe.
And, indeed, professional biologists would be lining up to examine this kind of foundation-shaking data. It is the stuff of which reputations, even careers, are made. There would be incredible opportunity for every tenure-eager scientist in either integrating the new information into scientific orthodoxy or else getting credit for a revolutionary reformulation.
On the other hand, one suspects that there is no evidence anti-Darwinists would find sufficiently compelling to abandon their belief in a creator.
This is simply because their precept is religious, not scientific. Votaries will hold out forever for the evidence of things hoped for, clinging tenaciously to the substance of things unseen.
Personally, I happen to believe there is both a spiritual and a physical plane, and that the place where the two intersect is what we have labeled “life.”
But I recognize that this is a religious (or, at least, philosophical), not scientific, judgment. And I certainly would not advocate having it taught in high school biology classes.
Of course, if it were up to me, we wouldn’t have a government monopoly school system. Or any need for this debate.
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More on education:
- Breaking the education monopoly
- Hobson’s proposal
- A priori education
- Civics lessons
- Chasing Pokemon
- School millage fatigue
