The WaPo sees through the charade

There's a nice editorial on the Washington Post editorial page echoing my previous post about the red herring of "Academic Freedom" bills. This is a clever tactic in a political sense. It exploits one of the most admirable values of our nation's conscience: our devotion to free and unfettered speech. The problem is this has nothing whatsoever to do with speech. Teachers have a contractual obligation to teach the curriculum as adopted by the governing school district. This is why the creationist tactic has been to target school boards and cajole them into adding ID into it. But that tactic simply won't work. It's creationism promotion in public schools which is a clear violation of the establishment clause. So they have decided on a new tactic. After all, if you can't play by the rules, why not just change them!

This new attempt at inserting GAWD into public schools could do far more damage than even a few school boards adopting "Of Pandas and People". If these pass, teachers would be endlessly bringing their own agendas into public school classrooms. And if they teach some nonsense, they would simply be able to wrap themselves in the flag of "speech". Curricula are adopted for a reason. Without some standard base, education cannot build upon itself. Science teachers would be contradicting each other from year to year and the learning progression would be a muddled mess. Sure science changes. But not in primary and secondary school classrooms. It changes in research and private labs and universities. Then once the science is established, it trickles down to the grade school level.

But ID proponents want to bypass all that and go straight to "teaching the controversy" to 12 year olds. These bills would not just affect the teaching of Biology, but ALL the sciences. It's insidious and needs to be exposed for what it really is.