Here’s a short, must-read Q and A interview with TV science educator Bill Nye about problems in United States classrooms. Excerpt:
Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.
We have this issue in Saskatchewan, though not nearly to the same degree. The basic problem is religious tampering with schools. Teachers in the United States are jittery about teaching evolution because some willfully ignorant, arrogant — let’s just call it like it is and say cowardly — fundamentalist Christians (which, to include the apparently mandatory on this blog disclaimer, does not include most Christians) stick their fat, stupid, know-nothing noses into education and make everything worse, dumber and more dangerous for everyone. (They also fuck up art and culture, but that’s less critically important if not less annoying).
You know, if I were the editor of a magazine I would totally run a science column.