Kansas School Board Evolves

The Washington Post reports that the majority of the Kansas Board of Education will no longer favor Intelligent Design. It pays to trust the people. It also shows that elections matter in this age of pressure group politics.

The teaching of intelligent design is an obvious back door to the teaching of creationism in the pubic school system. There is no issue in the private school system, at least in the Catholic parochial system. They teach Darwin, although the text I had in junior high made reference to creation theories of various cultures (which seems like an intelligent way to design a text on the subject). Decades earlier, their were those in the Catholic Church who were against Darwin, but they evolved too.

Frankly, it would be interesting to see what would happen if Creationism were taught not as doctrine but as scientific theory. Such a treatment would have to include an explanation of where the story came from. A fact based treatment of this question would have the fundamentalists running to the Courts, since the current thinking on this question is not that God dictated the story to Moses, but that it evolved from the Sumeric and Caananite creation myths having multiple gods which created man to serve them so that they would stop killing each other. Teach Creationism and biblical literalism is going down as a theory. Tee hee.

For more on education in general, see my web page at http://www.geocities.com/xianleft_michael/education.html