Monday, December 30, 2013

Our evolving ignorance



evolution2013-1 

It gets worse, at least from a biology teacher's point of view:

Only about a third of Americans accept natural selection, the cornerstone of biology. That's like "believing in"  chemistry without accepting the concept of atoms, or physics without accepting inertia.

Forget NAEP, forget NGSS, PARCC, and CCSS--forget all of that, because whatever we're doing is not working, and will not work, so long as we continue to treat children as standardized units, as long as we treasure obedience over skepticism, as long as we continue to reward the worst of our behaviors at our highest levels of power.

In the meantime, I will continue to plant seeds in our classroom, both figuratively and literally, until the happy (but not inevitable) day when our children bark at the nonsense we feed them every day at home, in school, in malls, in just about any space where kids encounter adults.




Take a child clamming, gardening, fishing, crabbing, kite-flying, hunting, whatever it takes.





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

climate change seems to be inspiring some vested interests to demonise science and changes in energy and economics to stabilise climate.

perhaps it might be an interesting thing to have kids record storms etc in different places and mark them on a map. weather is not climate in terms of scale but it would help to make observation more real?