MY NEW HERO
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear
On Wednesday, a Kentucky review committee voted down the state’s plan to incorporate new federal science education guidelines into its curriculum. But Kentucky’s governor is making sure the committee doesn’t get the last word on science education in his state. Gov. Steve Beshear (D) said Wednesday that he plans to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) “under his own authority,” despite the Kentucky legislature’s Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee’s 5-1 decision that the standards are deficient. The governor’s announcement will ensure the standards will move forward for the time being — they could still be killed by Kentucky’s general assembly when it returns in January, but the governor would then have the option to veto that decision.
It’s become almost an article of faith that today’s Republican Party is bent on dragging America back to the 14th century. For reasons known only to themselves, Conservatives have decided that knowledge is the enemy, education is unnecessary overhead and a poor investment, critical thinking is heretical, and their path to power lies in creating blind obedience to authority. That would be Conservative, White, male, Christian authority, of course; it’s the natural order of things, don’tchaknow??
This assault on knowledge is particularly acute in red states, where Republican-dominated legislature and state boards of education seem intent on turning public schools into publicly-funded churches, where creationism is taught as being superior to evolution. It’s not exactly a stretch to say that there are those in positions of power who honestly believe that the Bible holds all the knowledge any child will ever need, and that public schools have taken God out of the classroom. They don’t fear the consequences that would stem from a generation of ignorant children, they fear that children taught to think for themselves might question why so many guilty of such narrow, sclerotic thinking remain in power. If the next generation is condition to obey instead of thinking for themselves, the current paradigm will remain unchanged and wealthy Conservative White Christians will continue to wield the levers of power.
Outside the reality that the separation of Church and State seems lost on these zealots, many of them believe that Church SHOULD be State…and vice-versa (The lessons of Iran and Somalia are an inconvenient truth and thus should rightly be ignored). The GOP has become a modern Know Nothing Party, far more concerned with present power and control than with preparing a new generations to face the challenges posed by an increasingly global economy. Hey, who needs to be an engineer when when can indoctrinate children into blindly obeying authority and reflexively voting Republican?
Who needs science? Wee has Jesus!!
Steve Beshear is that rarest of birds, a reasonable, practical Democrat in a red state filled with zealots who’ve been trained to think that Democrats are the enemy and Barack Obama sits at the right hand of Satan. His refusal to allow Conservatives to turn science education into a complete farce is testament to his courage and willingness to do the right thing by the children of Kentucky. As an example, he Commonwealth is home to the Creationism Museum, a monument to a comic book scientific philosophy with no grounding in empirical data. Believing something does not ipso facto make it true, though it can make for some highly entertaining hyper-religious prose:
PREPARE TO BELIEVE.
The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals, great masterpieces brimming with pulsating colors and details, provide a backdrop for many of the settings.
I won’t dispute that religion has a legitimate place in the lives of many Americans, but that legitimacy shouldn’t imply license to overturn the science curriculum being taught in our public schools. When religion is used to restrict or alter the teaching of science, we all lose. You can’t design and build a bridge with prayer. You can’t develop new and innovative treatments for diseases by quoting Scripture. And you can’t begin to understand humanity and its future when you believe the world is only 6,000 years old. Creationism has no empirical basis for being taken seriously as an explanation of how we got to where we are today. Belief is not proof. Proof is what allows science to move humanity forward. Slavish devotion to religious dogma will ultimately only drag humanity down by stifling innovation and creative/critical thinking.
It’s too early to know if Beshear’s brave stand against ignorance and hyper-religiosity will stand. If Kentucky wants to lose it’s reputation as a backwater populated by those who would rather react than think, the people of the Commonwealth should demand that NGSS be taught to all children. They should demand that their children be given the tools to compete in an increasingly-challenging global marketplace.
Or they could continue to insist that children be taught that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago while Jesus rode dinosaurs.
