Fixing the sub-standard science standards

Revmitchell · Feb 11, 2008

With only days left before the Florida Board of Education meets Feb. 19 to consider new science standards that would require public schools to adopt an evolution-as-dogma approach, members of the Board have received good advice to correct this 10-year-document both from a drafter of the standards as well as persons on the outside. For the sake of our state, and especially for the sake of our children, let’s hope and pray the Board implements this advice.

http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/8400.article

windcatcher · Feb 11, 2008

Although the education establishment has relied heavily upon numerous consultants, organizations and lobbyists outside of Florida in drafting the proposed standards, if the State Board of Education prefers to seek advice closer to home they need look no further than Fred Cutting, one of the members of the standards’ Framers’ Committee who has issued a “minority report” to the evolution-as-dogma approach.

Writing in The Tallahassee Democrat Feb. 4, Cutting expressed “deep concern” that the standards’ treatment of Darwinian evolution fails to meet its own requirement that rightly insists students must “recognize that the strength and usefulness of a scientific claim is established through scientific argumentation, which depends on the use of critical and logical thinking, and the active consideration of alternative scientific explanations to explain all the data presented.”

Affirming this approach, Cutting writes, “Somewhat inexplicably, however, there is no indicator in the proposed standards that applies this philosophy of science education to the teaching of evolution.

“We do not advance science by canonizing our predecessors but by challenging our successors. What challenge is there if we tell students ‘this is the only way to look at this issue’?” Cutting asks.

Rather than just complaining about the outcome, Cutting, a retired engineer, has offered quite reasonable alternative language to include in the standards that would blunt the evolution-as-dogma approach rife throughout the document: “Students should learn why some scientists give scientific critiques of standard models of neo-Darwinian evolution or models of the chemical origin of life.”

Cutting insists—as do virtually all of the critics of the treatment of evolution in the standards—that he opposes teaching religion in the classroom and is merely seeking the inclusion of scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution.

“There are serious scientific critiques of neo-Darwinism that deserve to be heard by students. This is a scientific debate, not a religious one,” he writes.
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There is much more to this story..... this is just a brief exert focusing on comments made by one of the drafters.

I agree, FL needs prayer that its education system wont so dogmatically enforce evolution as science as to censor questions, revelations of false data, or restrict advancement of those who would believe otherwise.

Fixing the sub-standard science standards

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Fixing the sub-standard science standards

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