New Education Secretary: Will it make a difference?

musicprnt
Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:30:40 +0000

@exlibris:
I didn’t say that believing in God meant you couldn’t believe in evolution, the anti evolution attitude comes along with biblical fundamentalism that basically views Genesis as literal truth. The Catholic Church accepts evolution (interestingly, their original issue with it wasn’t biological evolution, their fear was the concept of "social darwinism’ that sadly exists to this day, that somehow someone who is well off or has achieved is an example of ‘survival of the fittest’, and they had reason for their concerns, many of the robber barons used Darwin to justify themselves as ‘superior’ human beings),and that ranges the gamut from very conservative to very liberal. The conflict isn’t with God, it is with fundamentalism that reads the bible literally for the most part. There are those, too, who believe evolution is going on, but who don’t believe it is all the result of random mutations (the basic principle of natural selection), but rather that for example, the evolution of human intelligence and such was caused by a ‘hidden hand’ (which I have no problem with, as long as they don’t claim that as science, nothing wrong with it IMO, I could make a pretty strong argument for that position without obviously proving anything). The problem is not believing in God, the problem is in the mindset of the fundamentalists who read the bible literally and want that ‘fact’ to supercede anything that challenges that.

The problem with Devos is that she is a fundamentalist, and that is a problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/opinion/betsy-devos-and-gods-plan-for-schools.html?src=me talks about the views of groups she supports, and it is chilling, they see vouchers as a way to break the public schools (since of course they teach godless secularism, of which science is a big part), that they see, to quote good ole Jerry Falwell, where schools are the provinces of churches, not the government. Obviously, given that the federal government represents only about 9% of spending she directly couldn’t do this, but the federal government could change funding formulas, for example, and give federal aid to states with the stipulation it be used for vouchers, they also could change federal rules and penalize states that don’t allow vouchers.

One of the successes of the public schools has been and should be that religion does not have a say there, that it teaches and exists as a place where any and all beliefs are respected, but is not allowed to control or dominate what is taught, if there is one thing that history has taught it is that religious control of vital institutions like schools leads to stagnation and oppression (and before someone goes on about the parochial schools and religious private schools that are considered to be excellent schools, keep in mind that is because they have competition from secular private schools and public schools; in countries where religious schools dominate, where there isn’t widespread public education, the quality of those schools for the most part is mediocre). My biggest objection to the voucher program is that the one she and others have proposed don’t require standards, if kids in failing schools are given vouchers, they should be tied to SLA’s in terms of what we expect them to learn, and if they don’t do any better with vouchers at other schools (which was the outcome with voucher programs that have been tried, including in Michigan), then the program should be stopped.