Many many diaries on the Kansas evolution trial, and this is yet one more. This one, however, has a solution - and it's all stick, no carrot.
Like many, I have looked upon the Neo-Monkey trial proceedings in Kansas with a mixture of horror, disbelief, and bemusement. To me, it is yet another reminder that the price of liberty - and a rational government - is eternal vigalence. After the Kansas school board's last foray into creationism crazytown was slapped down hard at the polls, they rose again from the flames on a new tack, with a remix of the same old song but with new lyrics.
Now, their plan is more insidious, and gets to the core of what the ID planners have wanted all along: the diminishment of science (aka "materialism") as the only rational way to view the natural universe. This piece in the WaPo gets to the heart of it in the lede graph:
The Kansas school board's hearings on evolution weren't limited to how the theory should be taught in public schools.
The board is considering redefining science itself. Advocates of "intelligent design" are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what's observed in the world.
Instead, they want to define it as "a systematic method of continuing investigation," without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state's science standards.
Higlights mine.
So, say you, how to stop crazy cuckoo bannanas elected school board members? Well, for now, not much - which I imagine is why reputable scientists have wisely embargoed the proceedings. However, if they do go ahead and "redefine" science to make their little pseudo-science fairy stories more academically palatable, academics outside of Kansas (or inside it for that matter, at the university level) don't have to go along with it.
Thus, we come upon the stick: Research 1 universities (really would only need a couple of the big gorillas, e.g. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc.) will establish science education standards for incoming students that require a HS curriculum based on science defined as "a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us", or at least making the point that science is based solely on observable (or potentially observable) phenomena and not unobservable spiritual notions.
They want to isolate their state's top students from the top universities? Go ahead and let them get their BA at Liberty or Oral Roberts or Bob Jones U. Even better, if KSU sets the same standards, even little Johnny from Topeka can't go just because he's a grad of KS schools. See how long they last in the '06 elections with a track record like that.
WHACK!
