Wordlab

You tell me that it's evolution: Seventy-nine years after the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial," Georgia's School Superintendent, Kathy Cox, is proposing to ban the word "evolution" from the state's school curriculum. Not the teaching of the concept of evolution, mind you, but the speaking of the word evolution, which ought to be described as "biological changes over time" according to the educator.

Cox, who was elected in 2002, last week proposed editing the word "evolution" from the curriculum as part of a massive revision of the state curriculum. She called the term a "buzzword" that poses a risk of derailing teachers' efforts to teach the major concepts of biology.

"By putting the word in there, we thought people would jump to conclusions and think, 'OK, we're going to be teaching the monkeys-to-man sort of thing.' Which is not what happens in a modern biology classroom," Cox said at a news conference Thursday.

Not surprisingly, this neanderthal proposal to ban the word "evolution" is causing an uproar heard 'round the world. Nowhere is the response so well written as by Evan Ferguson in The Observer, today:

Too hard to hate them, and it's hard, too, to loathe a group of people quite so innocent in the ways of the world, so sweetly premodernist, that they can't yet do irony and thus fail, delightfully, to appreciate the rich layers lying behind the fact that the people in this world who are most fervently opposed to the idea of evolution are so often the same ones who will most benefit from it when, one fine day, they grow opposable thumbs.

Such is the denigration of the reputation of the State of Georgia that the Governor seeks to quell the fray with a balanced approach, which makes clear that evolution should be taught in the schools as a theory. Creationism, I suppose, should be spoken of as what in Georgia's schools -- an alternate theory, a religious belief, or a scientific fact?

Posted by abnu on Sunday, February 01, 2004 @ 8:52 AM [ + ]

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