Bored of Education

As a pluralist, I'm okay with a school board adding things to the curriculum. As a writer, I'm not at all happy with a school board taking it upon itself to redefine a whole field of study because they don't like its conclusions.

I may be a secular humanist myself, but I know science doesn't have all the answers, and many of the answers it does have are not the final answer. I still remember my 7th grade geography teacher scoffing at the idea that the shapes of Africa and South America made it look like they had broken and drifted apart once upon a time. When it turned out that satellite data revealed continental drift, I knew that contemptuous scoffers can be proven wrong.

But it is this being able to be proved wrong that keeps science's feet to the fire. If we eliminate that from the definition of science, we get a new idea of science.

The new science of Kansas lets you teach things that sound good and never have to be corrected because they cannot be proven false. The existence of God? No way to prove false so it could be true. But the law doesn't simply add teaching "God's plan" to the neo-scientific mix. It says any "systematic method of continuing investigation," The way I read it, this would include ghosts. Witchcraft. Astrology. Tarot fortunetelling.

So I say to the teachers of Kansas, start looking for fun stuff to teach that used to be relegated to the backwater of superstition. Wicca incantations will probably become a big hit given the popularity of Harry Potter. Whole sophomore classes could learn Transcendental Meditation and then visualize world peace for credit. Poltergeists and boggarts could become the new thing to look for instead of quarks and superstrings.