Are we just a pretend world of fashionable thought, obsessed with trying to look and feel smart for each other, neglecting and perhaps unable to actually BE smart and DO smart?

Pink, Oprah and JK Rowling fighting “Thin is in” face stupidity both cultural and critical, a telescoping of intellect and imagination into a one-dimensional reflective surface, thinking selves starved for sustenance, belief and skepticism simultaneously out of whack in their daily diet of thought, causing chronic, clumsy, often crippling cultural malnourishment of epidemic proportions.

These all are problems that public education should be building cultures to combat, not to cement.

But in dispiriting fact, the standard-narrowed, uncertainty-fearing, control-freakish Culture of School works in the opposite direction from open science cultures that celebrate real smarts. If critical thinking is brain food, school is anorexia. . .

ScienceDaily (Jun. 28, 2007) — Evolution is not just about human
origins, dinosaurs and fossils, says Binghamton University evolutionist
David Sloan Wilson. It can also be applied to almost every aspect of
human life, as he demonstrates in his first book for a general audience,
Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think
About Our Lives (Bantam Press 2007). . .

Creationist paints evolution as racist
Letter to the Editor, Augusta Chronicle
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
(100 comments)

Mr. Ken Ham, founder of the Answers in Genesis organization, is coming to town to explain how evolution has incited racism and should be banned from the classroom.

According to Mr. Ham, evolution suggests some races are closer to apes than others. This is the latest creationist strategy to battle evolution, following the failure to get Intelligent Design recognized as science.

Evolution, in fact, denies racial superiority, claiming instead that all branches of man are equidistant from the apes as measured by generations. DNA studies show the branching of the races was so recent as to be negligible. We are not separate species, and with current rates of intermarriage, race itself will disappear in a few hundred years.

Moreover, evolution has never assumed any measure of superiority at all. If there is any yardstick of superiority in evolution, it would be the proliferation of offspring, by which the most recent census would place Hispanics above both African-Americans and whites, and fire ants above us all.

Mr. Ham seems to forget that for 300 years the Bible was quoted by Southern white preachers to support slavery, identifying Africans as descendants of Noah’s son Ham (no relation to Ken). Noah cursed Ham’s children to enslavement after Noah got drunk and naked and Ham failed to cover him up.

Come on, Mr. Ham. Are we to keep a literal interpretation of Genesis at all cost? Should we hide from our children the Hubble telescope pictures which still haven’t found the firmament holding back the waters of chaos? And how is it that God created night and day on the first day, photosynthetic plants on the third, but didn’t create the sun until day four?

Let us enjoy the spiritual truths of the Bible without insisting on its clearly bad science.

Joe Fausnight, Evans

I am sorry to say I think they must just not be thinking at all.

John Stemberger, an activist with Orlando-based Florida Family Policy Council, said the standards go too far, unfairly muzzle teachers and will lead more people to pull their kids out of public schools in favor of home-schooling and private education.

Stemberger was one of the 10 opponents to the standards who spoke alongside the 10 supporters before the board voted Tuesday.

ROLE REVERSALS

The roles seemed reversed, with evolution supporters talking about God and critics talking about science and the need for inclusive learning.

Illustrating the apparent role reversals: Presbyterian pastor Brant S. Copeland of Tallahassee supported the standards as written and said evolution has helped shed light on God’s creation.

Others said that not teaching evolution would mean that Florida’s $600 million investment to lure bio-tech firms here is a waste, or that it would be tantamount to a Taliban-style religious fundamentalism.

On the other side: public school teacher David Brackin. He said the standards seem to discourage any teaching that questions evolution.

”There are cracks. There are holes,” Brackin said, noting research and study from the Intelligent Design movement, which posits that multiple forms of life show such complexity and evidence of design that they must have been made by some unnamed higher intelligence.

Brackin said he was concerned that the new standards wouldn’t allow him the freedom to teach some of the problems with evolution.

But board member Phoebe Raulerson said that’s not the case. She provided the second to board member Linda Taylor’s motion to add the ‘’scientific theory” language, but didn’t take up Callaway’s motion to add the ”academic freedom” provision because the standards already encourage critical thinking.

”One of the best parts [of the standards] is that we are trying to teach what is the scientific process,” she said.

Joining Taylor and Raulerson in backing the standards were Kathleen Shanahan and Chairman T. Willard Fair, who cast the deciding vote and quickly slipped out of the meeting during a break.

So biology, technology and most other sciences and arts, as well as global “zeitgeist” changes over time such as women’s rights and other civil rights including the end of slavery, are quite inconvenient!