A great teacher would indeed tell about the many experiments Darwin ran, and about the specific observations of nature around the world he made that pointed him to discover evolution theory.
In a test-driven curriculum that does not test one's understanding of how science really works, there is little time for that. In a curriculum that has been battered for 40 years to get those stories out of the texts because they make evolution too clear for Texas critics of evolution, it's swimming against the stream.
Good science education isn't made in the courtroom, and it's not made by school boards that micromanage, either.
Ed Darrell
Dallas
Steven Jamar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
so! mething can be true without being the full truth.2+2 = 4. That is true.But it does a poor job of fully describing nature. Or math.Setve_______________________________________________
On Dec 21, 2005, at 2:06 PM, Perry Dane wrote:
This doesn't strike me as quite right. It seems to me that real science should also not, in the public school setting, be taught as True with a capital T. To do so would be to teach, not science, but scientism, which is something entirely different.&n! bsp; In fact, it seems to me that if a student asks a science teacher, "So is all this stuff that you're teaching us actually True," the teacher, qua teacher, should say (at a level suitable to high school students) something like: "Science is a form of methodologically-constrained inquiry built on certain assumptions such as naturalism. That inquiry has proved itself to be incredibly useful, as well as insightful. It is part of what, imperfectly but necessarily, we call secular knowledge. But precisely because it is a constrained discourse, it cannot claim, within its own four corners, to give us a full picture of Truth."
--Prof. Steven D. Jamar vox: 202-806-8017Howard University School of Law fax: 202-806-85672900 Van Ness Street NW"The most precious things one gets in life are not those one gets for money."Albert Einstein
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