The Slatest Lambasts Texas "Creationism"

Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism
by Zack Kopplin

(Kopplin is a science education activist who has fought against creationism being taught with public money.)


When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.

The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”

Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.

Read it all here.

I read the article and I still don't know exactly what is being taught. "Creationism" isn't defined and there are many forms of Creationism. Does the curriculum teach Young Earth Creationism?  Does it teach Theistic Evolution, or maybe Intelligent Design? From this article I have the impression that there are various views being presented. That seems like a good approach for schools, but it may be that Kopplin's real objection is that all the views assume the existence of a Creator. I would be willing to bet that this is the assumption of the vast majority of Texans, and they do pay taxes to educate their children.

Kopplin is not well informed about the nuances of Creationism. He poses the term as anti-science, which is not uniformly the case. Too much vitriol, not enough information!

Related reading:  Kansas Bill Calling for Objectivity in Science Fails; A Scientific Timeline of Genesis; Americans Sick of Partisan Science; Questioning the Common Ancestry Hypothesis; Austin L. Hughes on The Folly of Scientism; Biblical Anthropologists Discuss Darwin; 12 Blogs on Creationism and Evolution; A Christian School Committed to STEM