Child Soldiers for Creationism

Cross-posted at Street Prophets

Yikes.  A friend just sent me a link to this article:  Their Own Version of a Big Bang

My friend's advice was to avoid reading the end of the article without a good glass of bourbon in hand.  I'll let y'all choose your own coping devices, but it is a hard-to-swallow story, so be forewarned, but learn and prepare.

WAYNE, N.J. -- Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

from L.A. Times article by Stephanie Simon

Follow the link to read the rest of the article.

more below the fold.

Do we have a battle plan of our own to counter this sort of brainwashing?

Earlier this year, my own daughter's 5th grade teacher assigned them a new project:  They were to do a report on a scientist.    "You can choose any scientist you wish, anyone at all," the teacher said, then added as an afterthought, "Except Darwin.  I won't have that man in my classroom."

(I should mention, at this point, that my daughter has a surprisingly accurate memory, and other classmates have confirmed this conversation.)

The first thing that happened, as any of you who have ever worked with children can predict, is that a whole bunch of hands now went up into the air.  "Who's Darwin?" they wanted to know.  Many had never heard the name before.    The teacher had now made Darwin forbidden fruit.  And in spite of her answer, ("He's that man who said you came from a monkey," was the teacher's reported reply,) nothing the teacher could have said would have made a report on Charles Darwin now seem more fascinating.

But the only reason I heard about this, the only reason I was able to contact the principal, PTA chair, and other parents, the only reason I knew that my outrage needed to be channeled in that direction, and the only reason we were able to get the teacher reprimanded and change her policy, was because of my own daughter's sense of awareness in hearing the problem in this teacher's remarks and in bringing that conversation home to me.

At home, from an early age, we had often talked with our kids about dinosaurs and the Bible and creationism vs. evolution, so not only did she, at 11, know who Charles Darwin was, she understood that a teacher standing in a class forbidding exploration of the topic was out of bounds.

The only counter-action we will have to people like Evangelist Ken Ham and his "Christian Patriot missiles" will be the personal role we take in our children's education and our continuing vigilance.