In the never-ending Whack-a-Mole of creationist attacks on education, it had apparently quieted down for a little. I hadn't been hearing much about creationist holy warriors, beyond the usual background noise of discontent from the likes of Answers in Genesis. Yet to think that they could be safely ignored would be a mistake, as they've now reared their ugly head in Texas, looking to grab a huge victory for their movement, and thus ensure yet another disaster for an educational system that has already been heavily battered and wounded.
The Texas State Board of Education is currently in the process of adopting new textbooks in line with the education standards that they pushed in 2009, standards designed specifically to allow creationism into the science classroom. Sensing this opportunity, creationist members of the Board are pushing for pro-creationist textbooks, or at the very least ones that are extraordinarily weak in presenting evolution, the central unifying theory of biology. Should they succeed in this push, it isn't just students in Texas who will suffer a poorer quality education for it. As a major market for textbooks, with about four million students, textbook companies will tailor works for Texas that would likely be adopted by schools far beyond that state. The thought that Texas students would be harmed by this ideological push to drive sound, verified science from the classroom is bad enough, but knowing that students across the country would have pseudoscientific rubbish pushed on them as well is especially abominable.
We've seen this story before, the tune remarkably familiar. When any opening is found, creationist drones descend to push for "balance" in teaching science, for presenting "both sides of the argument," and further arguing that their religious freedom is at stake. All of this is absolute and total nonsense. Should we balance the teaching of the Copernican theory of the solar system with the notion that the Sun actually revolves around the earth? Should we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the idea that gravity exists? No sane person would argue that this is the case, but when it comes to the settled science of evolution, as sure a fact as gravity or a heliocentric solar system, a range of useful idiots and charlatans are happy to try and sabotage the education of our students. The creationists deride evolution as a humanistic "theory," without the first inclination of what that word means in science, refusing to accept that it is settled scientific fact that life evolved into the manifold forms we see around us today.
The creationists are welcome to teach whatever they want in their churches or in the privacy of their homes, but they are deeply wrong in trying to undermine the education that everyone else receives. If Texas goes through with this textbook deception the damage will echo across the country, even beyond the classrooms of our nation's schools to embolden and energize a creationist movement that has suffered numerous losses in the last few decades. Please, Texas, don't embarrass this country yet again.
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