The Tangled Bank

Since biologists have proven intractable, the next direction the IDists are going to take is to target other spots in the curriculum. Here's the comment that leapt out at me in an article on California creationism.

At a special meeting of the El Tejon Unified School District on Jan. 1, at which the board approved the new course, "Philosophy of Design," school Supt. John W. Wight said that he had consulted the school district's attorneys and that they "had told him that as long as the course was called 'philosophy,' " it could pass legal muster, according to the lawsuit.

Oh. So "philosophy" is the new dumping ground, the subject with no serious content, the one where you can safely present any ol' garbage and it still fits? Like the colloquial definition of "theory" (any guess), I suppose the new definition of "philosophy" is "idiots babbling".

Any doubts that this is a serious course in philosophy are dispelled by the description.

Philosophy of Intelligent Design: "This class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological, and Biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid. This class will discuss Intelligent Design as an alternative response to evolution. Topics that wlll be covered are the age of the earth, a world wide flood, dinosaurs, pre-human fossils, dating methods, DNA, radioisotopes, and geological evidence. Physical and chemical evidence will be presented suggesting the earth is thousands of years old, not billions. The class will include lecture discussions, guest speakers, and videos. The class grade will be based on a position paper in which students will support or refute the theory of evolution."

How about the instructor's qualifications?

Name: Mrs. Sharon Lemburg
Department: Special Education
Brief Biography: B. A. Degree in Physical Education, Social Science: with emphasis in Sociology, Special Education
Class Description: Special Education
Club Advisor or Coach? Soccer and Softball

And then there's how the course will be taught…

Board members recommended changes to the original course plan, which included 24 videos - 19 of them supporting intelligent design. They also voiced concern over scientific issues in the class, such as the laws of thermodynamics and how fossil dating works.

One weblog has a complete list of the videos and speakers, and there is also an annotated breakdown of the course syllabus by one of the listed speakers for evolution (he was not asked nor did he consent; the other one who is, well, dead…and wasn't it a little presumptuous of the teacher to expect to get a Nobelist to drop in to her little school?) It's worse than you might think: 19 are creationist videos, 1 is about catastrophism, and the remaining four are of mysterious content.

So we have here a course "taught" by a soccer coach and special ed teacher who has no training in either science or philosophy, which will consist of day after day of the teacher queuing up creationist videos (I assume she is capable of running a VCR, but there is probably an A/V department in the school to help her if not), and she's going to teach the kids the evidence that the earth is ten thousand years old.

It's a good thing that the school district is being sued over this course.

With one exception, the suit asserts, "the course relies exclusively on videos that advocate religious perspectives and present religious theories as scientific ones — and because the teacher has no scientific training, students are not provided with any critical analysis of the presentation."

…

One of the parents, Kenneth Hurst, who has a doctorate in geology and is a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, said in court papers that the class "conflicts with my beliefs as a scientist. I believe this class undermines the sound scientific principles taught in Frazier Mountain High School's biology curriculum and is structured in a way that deprives my children of the opportunity to be presented with an objective education that would aid the development of their critical thinking skills."

Hurst, who has children in 10th and 12th grades, said the class also interfered with his personal religious views as a Quaker and "reflects a preference for fundamentalist Christianity over all other religious and scientific viewpoints."

That represents reasonable cause, but I think they're missing the most important justification of them all: we ought to have some expectation of competence and some standards of quality in our public school education. This course fails to meet even Sunday School standards of rigor. The school board rushed to have a meeting about it when parents complained about the conflict between religion and state, but they weren't doing their job when they initially approved it—I would be questioning what other dreck they've allowed to slide by.