"Raising the Scientific Bar"

[LearnedHand]

Editorial from the CBS news website and originally published in -- no shit -- the National Review Online. If the pukes are now saying this, it must be WAY worse than I imagined. Where's a John Kennedy when we need one to challenge us to greatness?

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Science education in America is already a hot topic, but it's about to get hotter. A federal committee you may not have heard of is set to vote on a document that could do it long-term damage to the teaching and learning of science in U.S. primary and secondary schools, just when it needs to be strengthened. The timing couldn't be worse, nor could the signals that this decision will send into states and schools across the land.

As Thomas Friedman shows in his best-seller, "The World Is Flat," there is ample reason to worry that America's longstanding lead in science is slipping away. This could be a calamity for our economy, our security, and our role in global affairs. A recent National Academy of Sciences report concludes that “Without high-quality, knowledge-intensive jobs and the innovative enterprises that lead to discovery and new technology, our economy will suffer and our people will face a lower standard of living.”

To reverse this alarming prospect, we must do a better job of teaching students real science content and skills so as to assure that there will be a next generation of scientific leadership — and that everyone else is scientifically literate as well. The first step is to set clear expectations for what schoolchildren should learn, linked to reliable assessments that tell us whether they are learning it.

<snip>

Science's turn has come, and we had hoped that NAGB would refurbish this important assessment to take account of key developments in scientific knowledge and understanding. Instead, NAGB is expected later this week quietly to adopt a watered down, generally mediocre and error-riddled "framework" for the design of tests by which K-12 science education is to be tracked for years to come.

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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/16/opinion/main1048600.shtml

[Demeter]

1. Science Has Been In Charge Since The Reformation--1500's

and done a hell of a lot more for the human race than religion ever did.

[Shadowen]

4. No. It hasn't been.

Science has had to fight tooth and nail for what little influence it holds today in the human mind. Creationism, astrology, and other forms of superstition are rampant, not to mention sheer scientific ignorance.

And in addition, while science is not evil (no more than religion is), it has been the source of power for some evil.

Tolkien once said that the greatest evil ever visited on humanity was the internal combustion engine. Looking at the world, looking at what "humanity" will do for oil, he's not far wrong.

That being said, the ICE is a technology, not a science, and I'm communicating using a machine that in roundabout fashion would not have been possible without the ICE, but think of it this way: no ICE, no war in Iraq, no glutted multibillionaire oil tycoons, no Exxon Valdez...

It makes me wonder.

[Demeter]

5. I'm Not Saying That Superstitions Disappeared

I'm just saying that they became disprovable: one could demonstrate to any rational person that knowledge was worth more than any "belief" or "belief system". The Ancients had a phrase for it "Quod erat demonstrandum" or QED. And technology (applied science) provided the knockout punch.

The need for ethics, or morals, or guides to social conduct, did not go away and never will, as long as there is more than one person alive. If religion concentrated on that and left the rest to science, there would be no conflict between the two.

[Alonzo Fyfe]

6. Religion and Ethics

I am afraid that I have as much concern with the religious focus on morality as with the religious focus on science.

Religion has gotten a lot of the science wrong -- because religion was written in a pre-scientific age when people did not know very much.

Religious morality was also written long ago when our moral knowledge was as limited as our scientific knowledge. Religion has this bad habit of insisting that we had perfect moral knowledge 2,000 years ago, and that there is absolutely no hope for any type of moral improvement. It is, perhaps, even more dangerous to bind ourselves to a 2,000 year old morality as it is to bind ourselves to a 2,000 year old science.

Alonzo Fyfe
Atheist Ethicist Blog

[zonmoy]

2. Of course

the right is doing thier best to disguise religion as science and force the deception onto the rest of us.

[LearnedHand]

3. Exactly, but THIS guy

is saying we need REAL science education, and he published in one of the pukes' flagship magazines! Amazing.

[depakid]

7. No surprise- Republicans don't do science

and don't want people learning how to think critically or reason effectively.

If they did- no one would vote Republican!