"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Some ideas are better than others.
The idea that you go to heaven if you blow up innocent people is nauseating. This idea is extremely dangerous even if it is taught to a small number of people.
A global education system, where ideas that have no supporting evidence or predictive ability are taught as fiction but never fact would help erradicate the word of ideas like those above.
Because the defense of Intelligent Design is not on its own merits, but the merits of teaching different ideas, it creates a bad precedent.
It may seem ridiculous to create the analogy, but just as separation of church and state is important, separation of church and science is too.
KRT Wire | 08/01/2005 | Bush endorses teaching 'intelligent design'
Given that traditional academic clothing, mortarboard hat and black robe, has religious origins, does that mean that it is now illegal for French scholars or teachers to dress as scholars?
Also, since it is traditional for American high school students to graduate wearing mortarboard and cape, perhaps the students of the American School of Paris would be expelled were they at a public school.
Perhaps next time professors parade around the Sorbonne in traditional garb for a formal occasion, someone should test France's proposed law and demand their expulsion.
Satire aside, this excellent New York Times article outlines some of the real complexities of the issue.
1. It is backed by the head of the Paris Mosque who:
"praised today's vote as "impressive" and a "buffer" against Muslim fundamentalists intruding into French secular institutions"
2. Communism has been historically agressively secular but French Communists are among the few detractors of the secular laws:
"Alain Bocquet, a Communist Party deputy who voted against the law, said that it will 'stigmatize' citizens of immigrant origin and 'set things on fire rather than calm them down.'"
3. The law is a part of the move to secure teaching of issues which are objected to by some, including Evolution and the history of the Holocaust.
"at the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox Jews in the Paris suburb of Gagny, which receives state funding and was vandalized in an arson attack last November, evolution is taught as a theory, not as fact."
but more serious is this:
"teachers have complained that some Muslim students have been so disruptive in rejecting the veracity of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews that it is impossible to teach the subject"
4. Non public, religious schools, which do in fact get state funding, will not be held to the law.
"Despite France's insistence that secularism must govern French schools, there are exceptions. France spends billions of dollars a year to fund private religious schools, mostly to pay teachers' salaries, for example."
EducationGuardian - Darkness at noon:
"The university has embraced the fallacy of arguing that if Latin America cannot be understood without an understanding of the United States, therefore the United States cannot be understood without the study of Latin America. The first may be true, the second is manifestly false."
An article that suggests that for the 'IM' generation the ability to write is disappearing:
"in many other classrooms, traditional cursive is on its way out. So many students have trouble with it that teachers are increasingly adopting a simpler style known as Italic or print cursive"
The last exam I took to become an architect was a professional exam on legal practice issues - all the people in the room had been working as architects for several years and over half of us had forgotten how to use cursive writing legibly, and so had to do entire essays in uppercase print.
I now never use cursive writing, and notice that many of my friends do not, as this article suggests, perhaps it is becoming a legacy.
Keyboards may replace cursive, some warn
We may be dumb but the bombs are smart.