Things like the age of our solar system (4.6 billion years old, thank you, Google), and the nature of our changing climate (the temperature is “rising,” than you, ExxonMobil), have been suspiciously omitted in New Mexico’s revised curriculum standards for the state’s educators. What had been planned as a revision in curriculum that would make learning easier and more fluid seems to have gotten—political.
For example, a mention of "Earth’s 4.6-billion-year-old geologic history" was chopped down to "Earth's history," neatly getting rid of the information about how old it was. A reference to the evolution of life was cut entirely. The clear rise in global temperatures was swapped out in favor of talk about temperature fluctuations. In short, the proposed new standards get rid of basic facts, specifically in areas that are politically or culturally contentious.
According to Arstechnica, the main culprit is actual political correctness, not the kind you hear about from angry bigots.
Now, two Democratic lawmakers have pointed the finger at the state's Republican governor, Susana Martinez. The lawmakers, Bill McCamley and G. Andrés Romero, use an editorial in the Las Cruces Sun-News to make their case. The two had been supporters of a bill that would see the Next Generation Science Standards adopted verbatim, a course that had been recommended by a panel of education experts organized by the state. The bill passed both houses of the state legislature, but was vetoed by Martinez, who complained that it would interfere with the executive branch's vetting of the standards.
But McCamley and Romero allege that the vetting process is exactly what's gone wrong here. They say that, at one of their committee hearings on the bill, a former state employee testified that, “Toward the end of my tenure at the Public Education Department, I was tasked to edit and change some of the language in the standards to make them politically sanitized." Because evolution and climate change can be politically controversial, they apparently got sanitized.
The fact that our country has been allowed to consider scientific facts a “political debate” rather than, you know, science, is the real political correctness. Here’s a bit Mother Jones picked out, on proposed “language changes” to teaching evolution to high school kids.
Construct an explanation based on evidence that the process of evolution primarily results from four factors biological diversity is influenced by: (1) the potential for a species to increase in number, (2) the heritable genetic variation of individuals in a species due to mutation and sexual reproduction, (3) competition for limited resources, and (4) the proliferation of those organisms that are better able to survive and reproduce in the environment.
There have been victories for science in our children’s education over the past few years, and yet, every time something like this happens it feels like we are living in the Dark Ages.
“This is really unfortunate,” said David Evans, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, an organization that came up with a set of new science teaching measures known as the Next Generation Science Standards, already adopted by 18 states. New Mexico chose not to use those standards this year, but it employed them as a framework to create its own system.
Evans doesn’t like how New Mexico has altered those standards. “There is a real danger in replacing science with politics in the classroom,” he said. “We need to be cognizant of the fact that we have an impact on the world that we live in.”
Other changes in language include nixing the word “evolution.” For more discussion on this head over to this diary.