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Creationism Masquerading As Science In Texas

Ashley Yang |
September 19, 2013 | 3:58 p.m. PDT

Columnist

Texas is indoctrinating its students (knezeves, Creative Commons)
Texas is indoctrinating its students (knezeves, Creative Commons)
Every ten years, the Texas State Board of Education carries out a subject-by-subject review of its public school curriculum. And this year, creationism and climate change denialism are poised to fully insinuate themselves into state-approved textbooks, gaining a platform to convert millions of Texas youths to the far-right’s version of pseudoscience.

Textbook reviewers, some of whom were chosen by current or former elected Board members, made “ideological objections” to information on evolution and climate change found in the textbooks of at least seven publishers. To gain access to a market as sizable as the state’s more than five million students, publishers may very well choose to alter the language of their textbooks before the ten Republicans and five Democrats on the Board officially vote on textbook selections in November. 

Since Texas has one of the largest public school systems in the country, textbooks written to accommodate Texas’s preferences become the best-selling, and therefore least expensive books on the national market. Even though technological changes have allowed publishers to more readily and cheaply create custom editions to fit specific states’ requirements, mass-produced hard-copy textbooks tailored for the Texas curriculum will still make their way to other states that see them as the most economic option. Texas education policies will effectively lead to the indoctrination of countless students in other states with the pseudoscience propaganda that the Texas Board of Education is masquerading as fact.   

These circumstances markedly mirror the history textbook controversy that occurred in Texas three years ago. In March 2010, the Board approved a social studies curriculum with a distinctly conservative slant, most notably emphasizing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to secular governance, and reducing the apparent relative contribution of minorities to American history as well as criticism of right-wing politics. Because he coined the term “separation of church and state,” Thomas Jefferson’s importance to early American revolutionary philosophies is greatly diminished. And any lesson on McCarthyism must include a statement regarding confirmed communist infiltrations into the U.S. government.

Entrenched interests were successful in rewriting history to socialize youth in public schools into future conservative voters whose only view of America’s past came through a whitewashed, religious lens. Those same forces are again attempting to manipulate academic truths in order to impose their worldview upon impressionable students, to the detriment of not only the next generation’s understanding of government, but the U.S. future as a leader in science and technology.

Social conservatives may believe that students should be exposed to “all sides” of evolution and competing theories on the origins of life, but that doesn’t automatically make the “other” perspectives and theories scientific, especially if they involve divine intervention or mention “faith” or “God.” Creationism does not automatically become compatible within a science classroom if one slaps the word “science” onto the end of it and call it “creation science,” because its teachings can’t be verified through experience or observation. Creationism is a theological explanation for the origins of life. And theology belongs in a Sunday school classroom, not a science classroom. 

I postulate that evolution denialists exist because they are deeply uncomfortable with the fact that maybe, just maybe, human beings are not biologically “special,” “created by God in His own image” with some particular purpose in mind. However, just because humans are currently the most advanced species to walk the Earth does not mean that our biological roots are not intimately connected with those of every other living creature found on that same Earth, from single-celled bacteria to chimpanzees. In the view of evolutionary biology, homo sapiens are just another branch on the hugely prolific tree of life. The implication of creation science that humans are the ultimate form of life, the pinnacle of a pyramid organization of life, has very little to do with religion or God and everything to do with our egotistical desire to assert ourselves as the rulers of the biological kingdom, therefore rightfully entitled to exploit the natural world as we see fit.

The fact is, science classrooms should teach science, not impair students’ right to access true, empirical scientific information or become the medium of conservative propaganda. Socially conscious Texans are joining the campaign to Stand Up For Science. Will you?


Reach Columist Ashley Yang here.




 

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