Florida, still scientifically illiterate
I suggest if anyone wants to disprove evolution they use as an example the members of Florida school boards.
Board Opposes Evolution Being Taught As Fact
Four of five members of the School Board of Highlands County oppose the proposed change in the state’s science standards that would present evolution as fact to students.
Some school board members across the state have opposed the proposed revisions to the science curriculum that specifies that evolution be taught as “fact” as opposed to a “theory,” School Board Attorney John McClure said at a recent school board meeting. School Board Chairman J. Ned Hancock said Thursday he would support the resolution to encourage the state not to approve the science standard of evolution as fact.
School Board Vice Chairman Andy Tuck said Thursday, “as a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory. “I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”(Source)
North Florida weighing in against evolution
A growing number of North Florida superintendents and school boards are objecting to the state’s proposed new science standards, saying the standards give too much credence to evolution and leave no room for alternative theories.
Evolution is “going to be taught as fact, and everyone knows it’s not fact,” said Dennis Bennett, the superintendent in Dixie County, west of Gainesville. “There’s holes in it you can drive a truck through.”
At least seven of Florida’s 67 school boards – all north of Ocala – have passed opposition resolutions, according to the Florida Citizens for Science, a group that supports the standards and has been methodically searching board minutes.
That number could double by the time the state Board of Education votes on the standards Feb. 19, said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.
Dominated by Baptist churches and dotted with military bases, most of North Florida makes no bones about its political and cultural conservatism. Throw an election year into the mix, Blanton said, and it’s no surprise that school officials in places like Bonifay and Macclenny are “going to try to do some things their constituents want.”
“We just wanted to get it on the record that we’re a Judeo-Christian community, and we believe in academic freedom,” Bennett said.
“I’m a Christian. And I believe I was created by God, and that I didn’t come from an amoeba or a monkey,” said Ken Hall, a School Board member in Madison County, east of Tallahassee.
The St. John’s resolution says the standards should “allow for balanced, objective and intellectually open instruction” that doesn’t treat evolution as “dogmatic fact.”
“Anybody with half a brain can see that natural selection takes place,” said Beverly Slough, a St. John’s board member who is president-elect of the Florida School Boards Association. “But to make great leaps from a fish to a man … the fossil record doesn’t support all that.”(Source)
Half-a-brain indeed. That seems to be the only requirement to be a Florida Board of Education member.
A lonely voice of reason:
Schools Should Teach Evolution
Florida children may soon be the laughingstock of the nation, especially if they have a public school education.
There’s a move afoot to include the Bible story of creation as part of our science classes — you know the one: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh?
Instead, Florida children should be learning about evolution in science class. The theory of evolution is just that, a scientific theory, with facts and fossils and proven timelines and carbon dating.
I’m sorry. The Bible story, the fable of creationism, has no place in official science class. No place in public school altogether, unless you’re taking some sort of comparative religion class. What’s next? Jonah and the whale instead of marine biology?
Teaching fables as real science does our children a disservice when they get out in the real world. Save the religious stories for Sunday school and let our Florida science teachers use real science to educate our students. (Source)
