The early days of third world country...
Sep. 27th, 2010 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn this morning's newsfeed, two articles back-to-back only showed me that we are in the early days of becoming a third-world country. The first article is from USA Today, and it stares us in the face and we flinch, terrified. Entitled Poor science education impairs U.S. economy, the article shows that science education has declined over the past five years and there's nothing in the pipeline intended to improve it. 49% of Americans don't know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun; US mathematics teaching is 48th in the world; China has replaced the US as the world's top exported of high technology.
And we are doing nothing to turn that around: we are arrogant in our assumption of exceptionalism, we are cowardly in our unwillingness to face the truth, we are self-destructive in our tolerance for foolishness.
Foolishness like the second article, Speakers challenge Darwin’s theory, in which Southern Methodist University's campus newspaper reports on how Stephen Meyer moderated a panel among Intelligent Design proponents without any input from a competing viewpoint, and ended with this quote from a student at the business school: "We can have a positive future if we can convince people that Darwin's theory is just a theory like any other and not a fact."
It's a fact and a theory, just as gravity is a fact and a theory. Just as chemistry is a fact and a theory. Germs are a fact and a theory.
I'd like to ask the business student: "I can point to several successful pharmaceutical, zoological and agricultural research programs that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being true in order to be successful. These research programs have resulted in new businesses and billions of dollars in revenue. Can you point to a single similar initiave that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being incorrect or incomplete?"
Nobody can.
SMU is an accredited university. It's motto is "The Truth Shall Set You Free." Today, SMU administrators ought to be ashamed of themselves for allowing this kind of tripe. They'd never allow yoga instructors to claim they can levitate, or acupuncture woomeisters to give a symposium on how they cure cancer, and that's the level of respectibility "Intelligent Design" deserves.
And we are doing nothing to turn that around: we are arrogant in our assumption of exceptionalism, we are cowardly in our unwillingness to face the truth, we are self-destructive in our tolerance for foolishness.
Foolishness like the second article, Speakers challenge Darwin’s theory, in which Southern Methodist University's campus newspaper reports on how Stephen Meyer moderated a panel among Intelligent Design proponents without any input from a competing viewpoint, and ended with this quote from a student at the business school: "We can have a positive future if we can convince people that Darwin's theory is just a theory like any other and not a fact."
It's a fact and a theory, just as gravity is a fact and a theory. Just as chemistry is a fact and a theory. Germs are a fact and a theory.
I'd like to ask the business student: "I can point to several successful pharmaceutical, zoological and agricultural research programs that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being true in order to be successful. These research programs have resulted in new businesses and billions of dollars in revenue. Can you point to a single similar initiave that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being incorrect or incomplete?"
Nobody can.
SMU is an accredited university. It's motto is "The Truth Shall Set You Free." Today, SMU administrators ought to be ashamed of themselves for allowing this kind of tripe. They'd never allow yoga instructors to claim they can levitate, or acupuncture woomeisters to give a symposium on how they cure cancer, and that's the level of respectibility "Intelligent Design" deserves.
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Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 01:48 pm (UTC)At the high-school level, the local property taxes fund everything. They fund the science program. They fund Quiz Bowl. They fund the sports teams.
So, in some (many?) school districts in the US, the football team drains money from the science programs.
At the university level … HoooooooBoy.
The university I attended for grad school has a large, lavishly-funded football team. It was an open-secret that research grant-money paid for that team. The physics buildings has a tower that overlooks the football stadium. The department lounge was at the top floor. "Our grant money at work," the physics department faculty used to ruefully say as they looked out the physics lounge windows at the stadium. They'd then point out that the football teams luxurious, private gym was built by skimming money off of the physics+chemistry+biology+other research grants.
And this was also a huge bone of contention even between the football team and the rest of the sports teams at that university. (Not that those other sports teams were that much better. While I was there, an infamous incident occurred involving the women's basketball team. You see, there was an arena that doubled as a lecture hall. The first-year Spanish finals were taking place in one such arena, and the women's basketball team kicked them out in the middle of the final so that they could practice.)
So, no. It's the intellectual pursuits which have funded the university sports. Sports in the US not only outranks intellectual pursuits, and is more popular than intellectual pursuits, it sucks the life out of intellectual pursuits.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 08:30 pm (UTC)I love that section of the book (in the excerpt). And it was published in 1958. It seems that little, if anything, has changed in some 50-odd years. It probably has a lot to do with how high school isn't really meant for education as much as it's meant to keep teenagers out of the workforce. Sure, there's good reasons for doing that: it helps create jobs for adults with families to feed. It helps reduce the number of occupational injuries. It also kind of almost prepares people for trade school.
But as education, it's crap.