<p>Washdad:
There are obviously different kinds of “Christian textbooks.” I imagine the one you saw fell into the first category.</p>
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<p>You can go to the UC website and see which courses at your high school qualify as A-G courses. In addition, the UCs determine which classes they will give added weight to when calculating your UC GPA. It isn’t always the same as the classes that your high school will weight.</p>
<p>Additionally, Washdad, I waited to post more in order to talk to my MD turned HS bio teacher H to ask about evolution in HS bio. He said that teaching ecological and cellular bio without the context of evolution is, basically, meaningless, and I doubt your kids’ school did that.</p>
<p>All my science teachers taught evolution, but didn’t say it was fact, and didn’t rule out other theories.It didn’t really bother me as they were respectful of other beliefs and we didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it anyway.</p>
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<p>Being more radical does not necessarily mean being more pure or more orthodox.</p>
<p>I didn’t say more pure, I said more extreme - schools like that take a more strictly literal version of the Bible than most mainstream Christian churches in the US, IMHO. Doesn’t mean more pure, but falls on to the “extreme religious” category in my mind. Perhaps not the most clear word, sorry!</p>
<p>I think of myself as extremely religious. Just what exactly “literalist” means can also be a matter of some contention, also knowing the present canon was decided with human politics.</p>
<p>Absolutely literalist can be a matter of contention, but I’m more likely to typify “Jesus Camp”-ers as literalist before Unitarian Universalist. To me, an “extremely religious” person is not the same as someone extremely passionate about their religion. Rather, it is someone who identifies with an organization that falls on the extreme spectrum of the religion - for Christianity, this might lie with the Quiverfull movement or the given example of rejection of any and all aspects of modern science if they don’t fit within God’s Word.</p>
<p>Why would any good self-respecting Jesus Freak want to go to college in a cesspool of secular humanism like the University of California anyway?</p>
<p>Yes, but what is “extreme”? Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue. You can be extremely orthodox, or be an extreme believer in centrism, or even a person who believes in pursuing libertarianism to its extreme. In these days it can be in danger of getting as meaningless as “fascist”. </p>
<p>Whether or not they represent the most-Christian-group-in-the-present-era is another deal entirely.</p>
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Had to laugh out loud - I hadn’t heard that term since my guitar-stumming days when “We are One in the Spirit” seemed to be a goal that would be accomplished in my lifetime.</p>
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<p>Are there schools outside the U.S. that use science textbooks that reject evolution in favor of creationism? I thought this was unique to the U.S. of A.</p>
<p>MidwestMom - Do you know, or are you assuming? Is it okay to “guess” that one group needs examination but that everyone else is “probably” okay? Are there no religious schools anywhere else in the world that might teach their own beliefs? </p>
<p>Is there no responsibility to consistently check? Is the issue only related to evolution, or are there other things that other countries might teach as fact that California doesn’t accept? </p>
<p>I suspect that perhaps Chinese schools, or Russian schools, or schools in the Middle East, for example, might present history “facts” a bit different from what California accepts as facts. I also think there are probably other religious schools (perhaps Christian in name, perhaps not) that might teach something different. A few years ago I remember some flack about revisionist history being taught by some textbooks - Are students from those schools also being censured?</p>
<p>If, as stated by others, California has strict rules about which courses are accepted - and they apply these rules uniformly to all incoming students - then it seems within their rights to do so. If they are targeting only one group for censure, then it makes me uneasy, whether or not I agree with them.</p>
<p>These rules are for in-state California residents and CA schools. As has been said before in this thread, there are other ways of applying and being eligible (obviously they are not examining the books of every HS in the US, either.) My understanding is that all CA schools are under the same scrutiny–no one is being “targeted”.</p>
<p>Maybe the born-agains aren’t being targeted, but Binx raises a very good point. We encourage the sharing of western culture with our push to bring in international students, under the assumption that it’s a cross-cultural exchange from which all benefit. Yet studentsfrom many Middle Eastern schools have been severly limited in what has been approved for their curriculum & have used textbooks that are certainly carefully controlled by the ruling religious factions. (“Jews are apes & pigs” comes to mind as an egregious example.) Japanese kids are not taught about the Pearl Harbor attack. European nations that cooperated with Nazi extermination of Jews offer a very revisionist account of that time period in their texts. And the examples go on.</p>
<p>So why is the evolution/Creationism topic such a deal-breaker for fundamentalist kids wishing to get in to California state schools? Should the kids be admitted, much like internationals, as a cross-cultural exchange mission? Perhaps with some remedial Real biology as a requirement?</p>
<p>The UC’s have the right to set minimum education standards/ expectations for all Calif educated students, particularly since instate students have the cost of their college education supplemented by Calif. taxpayers. These kids are not from some uneducated “backward” country where literacy is the exception rather than the rule. Why should Calif taxpayers pay for remedial biology classes, when all a student has to do is read in order to have a basic grasp knowledge of scientific knowledge, for God’s sake. If Calif Fundamentalist want to have taxpayers help pay for their kids PUBLIC college education, they need to accept that their children need to know SCIENCE.</p>
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<p>I doubt anyone disagrees with this, the issue is whether the UC is overreaching by micro-managing secondary education.</p>
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<p>Stickershock drew examples from Japan and Europe – hardly “backward” by any standard – and the Middle East. Are you saying that Middle Eastern countries are automatically “backward”? There’s some cultural bigotry for you.</p>
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<p>An excellent point. Why assume that a student’s only exposure to learning is in the classroom? If the UC thinks a certain textbook (or set of textbooks) are the only ones suitable, why not make reading them a prerequisite for college? I guarantee the UC-level kids know a lot more than they ever learned in a high school class. </p>
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<p>Perhaps it’s because these “fundamentalists” are also citizens and taxpayers and feel that their voice should carry the same weight as that of the autocrats of the nanny state who think their jobs have somehow endowed them with superior wisdom? </p>
<p>Not germane to the main point, perhaps, but I find your implication that the public schools teach science to a point where the average high school kid understands it to be darkly humorous. I generally find my fellow citizens to be woefully ignorant of the scientific method, of science in general, and enthusiastically willing to have deeply-held beliefs about science-related issues they don’t really understand. Many people (include a fair number of regular posters here) adopt the current scientific beliefs as dogmatically as others do their religion, and with equal amounts of understanding of the reasons for their belief. Real science is cautious, skeptical, and recursive. Most people I know treat “science” exactly as if it were carved on stone tablets. I don’t think secondary schools do much for most kids to correct this tendency. The occasional kid who went to a parochial school and then went to the UC without the typical high school background in biology is more than well-enough equipped to catch up. You’re giving way to much credit to the schools.</p>
<p>I heartily recommend The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn if you want to read about the willingness of scientists to cling to outdated beliefs. I think laymen are worse.</p>
<p>Stickershock, there’s no need for remedial biology for the average university student. I would imagine that the majority of college graduates don’t take a single biology course of any kind, even at the UC.</p>
<p>WashDad,</p>
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<p>Sure, they are also citizens and taxpayers, and their voice should (and do) carry the same weight in secular government as any other voice. But anyone who is pushing a religious belief and wanting it to be adopted in the public sphere should have a hard time of it in the US.</p>
<p>“Science” textbooks which are blatantly anti-science can certainly be used by whomever wishes to use them, but that does not mean that public education has to endorse or recognize such books as being acceptable to their standards.</p>
<p>On another note, your “cultural bigotry” comment is uncalled for.</p>
<p>I noticed students can substitute test scores such as SATs- does the SAT test cover evolution, I wonder? I also wonder how these kids would cope in a college class where quoting their scripture won’t help them write a good essay- because “it says so in the Bible”, even with references, does not suffice as proof of anything. Maybe they should take math courses and learn the principles of logic- you can’t use what you are trying to prove as part of the proof (think- proving their bible is the word of “God”- because it says so in the bible…).</p>