Texas Governor Rick Perry chose to appoint a woman who had been a member of the state education board to the chair position who is reportedly a creationist.
Here is a link to a summary of the record:
http://www.teachthemscience.org/...
Why is this significant for people in other states? Why should this be of national concern?
Is it not absolutely critical that the upcoming generations have the ability to think critically? What is it doing to our future for unthinking conformism to become the norm? Does it just present a problem in Texas, or does it not drag everyone back?
There may be an arguable impact in terms of lower declining standards for American education overall.
I recently worked in a standardized scoring environment. Student work is confidential and firewalled behind non-disclosure agreements as it should be. But the take-aways from reading this work are something anyone can get by talking to active or retired teachers, particularly if they have been in education for a couple of decades or more.
It vividly reminded me of the experience I had In the early 1980s, helping run a local school board campaign. Educational standards were a concern back then and our opponent was primarily about bringing a creationist sort of approach onto the local school board. In that case, an outpouring of intense concern in the progressive part of the community defeated the "Moral Majority" effort. My wife has been a librarian teaching library file usage or Information Literacy and interacting with incoming college freshman over the past two decades or so. Her colleagues in various parts of the US confirm the same trends that can be confirmed again through other sources.
I think we should all be a little alarmed that our own acceptance of a general level of compromise year after year, decade after decade, has created a trending condition in which upcoming future generations of smart kids may be in India or Malaysia or some other place besides America. Do we too much accept without critically questioning, larger parameters that we measure within in order to find acceptable standards? This is a valid worry for anyone concerned about education and the future. I hope enough people are worrying this worry instead of maintaining paychecks from the system that come from specifically avoiding this worry.
I wonder if perhaps we are not only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but have addressed the problem by establishing committees that concentrate on producing bright new paint colors for them.
When the Governor of Texas ( or any state) appoints a creationist to lead the state school board, this tends to enhance the prospects that, instead of worrying about critical thinking skills, the world is centered around arguments that should have been settled a long time ago, at the close of the nineteenth century. Here we are in the 21st. This holds us all back.
The meltdown of the financial system, which we will be reeling from for years to come, was probably the result of a spectacular failure of critical thinking. People who should know better seemed to just accept financial doctrine handed to them because it was handed to them by a system that they were impressed by. That’s religious thinking applied to economics, or at least rigidly dogmatic religious thinking. Not all thinking by people of faith is rigidly dogmatic. But enough of it is, that we know what that means. Uncritical thinking should not be mixed with financial decisionmaking, or government. There, we see concrete results and people suffer from them. That’s why we create systems with checks and balances. Human nature is subject to group-think setting in. Outside critical evaluation, accountability, is needed where harm might result to the nation – or to many nations. We know this, and we have always known this.
According to recent DNA science (Google “Genographic”), the modern Cro Magnon human can be traced back to some 60,000 years ago (for males – 170,000 for females) and if you count this in terms of 15 year generations, that’s about 4,000 generations (to the point where the male DNA is traced.)
Are we going to be consumed with arguments about when man discovered fire or are we going to quit playing with fire? Should politicians who choose to pander to the lowest common denominator or the most backward pressure groups among the population be allowed to set a course for future generations?
No doubt, in the 8,000th generation, we will look pretty primitive to school kids studying history. But will they be at least impressed that we looked ahead and passed on enlightened attitudes that benefited the future - or saddened by our inability as a society to see the need to do so? Hopefully they will have the information literacy skills to consider making such an evaluation.
There is a lot at stake. The continued existence of the Republic and any progress that might be made within it depends on an enlightened citizenry. What if the citizenry is unable to comprehend their own role as citizens and unable to comprehend the true nature and complexity of the issues facing them?
If you sit with the average city council person for a day, you will see the pile up of reports, memos, files, and papers relating to a whole variety of issues. This will most likely amount to a couple of feet of paper. Many issues are complex enough that they require a Masters Degree level of focused concentration and analysis. That's why they are issues. There is no chance that our civilization will get less complex, though some seem to expect that a revolution will save us from this reality. This response to sophisticated problem solving tends to be yet another sign of uninformed, magical thinking and declining educational standards.
Surely we need to be alarmed at the prospect of our system of education declining to a point where we are, as a society, no longer capable of self-governance and applied intelligence. We should do what we have to do in order to improve education so that it helps us sustain a role in dealing with 21st century issues, looking ahead to the 22nd century - and not back to the nineteenth.
Otherwise, we might see people like Sarah Palin become the intellectual leadership of the future.