Today there is a student sitting in a high school classroom who will be one day be president of the United States of America. Others will be lawyers, police officers, and educators. These students will rule the world, but first they must survive a war – the one underway in their local high school biology classroom. This November the Texas State Board of Education will decide whether to keep four mandated standards which promote creationist ideology in public schools. The idea that students should blindly accept creationism is an enemy to the spirit of reasonableness and the liberty of thought and action that any society needs to be sustainable and free.
All four of the proposed standards were introduced or endorsed by the infamous dentist Don McLeroy who was appointed to and served on the SBOE for 13 years despite having no experience as an educator. In fact, his qualifications do not extend past the prerequisites that have persisted throughout history: he is an old man with religious ties. McLeroy also participated in the ancient inclination to exploit power; he used his clout to push creationist ideology into public schools while deemphasizing the validity of evolution. McLeroy’s reign of terror has closed but clearly we are still victim to his tyranny.
Don McLeroy’s religious fueled assault on public schools is a classic example of a ruler who serves his own interest in such a way that it infringes on the liberty of an entire society. His ideology is directly at odds with Darwin’s pragmatic work and the very existence of the scientific method. It is an enemy to what The Clergy Letter founder Michael Zimmerman calls “an education that embraces the best modern science has to offer”, yet McLeroy is intent to insure his poisonous beliefs are carried by future generations.
Darwin’s work is the revolutionary product of intelligence in action. It is hugely important that his theories not only remain in schools but further, as I’ve said before, that it and other modern science be appreciated as more than ‘just another study.’ Science is not just ideas, it is not mere action, but rather it is the unity of both action and ideas. Learning is not merely receiving information, it is a complex understanding and the ability to make judgements through the liberty of free thinking. Nothing epitomizes this exercise of intelligence more prominently than the method of science.
High school biology students are too precious of a resource to be victims of war. They are literally the future, and their abilities will determine the fate of our nation. Without the skills afforded to them by scientific thinking, I fear the imminent downfall of liberalism and freedom itself. I cannot express the weight of this crisis any more plainly. Let me be clear, this is an emergency.
A compassionate society would drive itself in obvious ways as well as unexpected ones. External pressure guides everything about the way people live: the way people vote, the way they write laws, and the way people of one generation raise their youth who will then repeat the cycle. Imagine a society whose pressures were driven by a sincere and well-examined conscious and who improved with every generation. But students are rarely invited to challenge their values and as such general schooling can be thought of just as in crisis as liberalism.