Iconoclasts are at work in Kansas. The 6 school board majority to the 4 member minority said such things as “we’re opening the curriculum and the minds to alternative viewpoints.” What is happening there is legitimizing “Intelligent Design”. The design is rewriting science textbooks and overthrowing solid science to include “know-little” alternatives. Hard won scientific information disseminated in “science” classrooms in the schools of this country is threatened. Ideology and irrational religion interferes with the way our curricula developed over years of storing up knowledge. This step is not expanding knowledge. It is diluting it and directing attention to a small minded focus on the few first words in a book held as “Holy” that will not be subject to questions or denial by students who really want to know how the world works.
Taking over schools by electing narrow minded religiously oriented members one at a time has been a tactic that is working. It is like a cancer that cannot be stopped because fear is engendered by those predicting divine retribution against non-believers. It is a clever design by humans who have used it to put into power a non-thinking gang who botched up systems of taxation and diplomacy by insisting on the power of belief as the litmus test for legitimacy. Just a little over a majority was needed in elections either on the national scene or on local school board contests and the push was on that has given us this sad perversion of education.
Intelligent Design or its predecessor, Creationism, is frightening only because of the numbers of people who accept it as an alternative to science. If it belongs anywhere besides the rubbish heap of failed concepts, it could be introduced into philosophy courses on post graduate levels or, of course, in arcane religious subjects that discuss such things as the apocrypha, numerology, Scientology and prayer breakfasts in the White House. Dover, PA rejected their radical school Board.
The design of the universe is overwhelming. If you like, attribute it to a god – whichever one your denomination decrees is THE ONE GOD. Think of the computer as an intelligent design that can do wondrous things - but this machine into which we put our trust to solve a myriad of problems, this machine was put together by the work of human intelligence over many years and is still developing with thousands of thousands of helpers who daily add to its capabilities.
The good citizens of Kansas who approve this madness should be ashamed. So should the good citizens elsewhere who accept being hoodwinked. Intelligent Design, a science, is taught in MIT, Stanford, Harvard and other such places.