Rant on.

 

Last week, I Stumbled across a video news report about a science teacher somewhere who taught about evolution only because he had to and he did not discourage creationist beliefs in his classroom.  This, to me, is wrong.  The man should not be allowed to teach.

 

Before anybody gets too riled about this, let me put this in a different context.  Suppose a sex education teacher allowed students to believe “the stork” brought babies and sex had nothing to do with pregnancy.  Or perhaps a history teacher allowed students to think Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the U.S.  Or maybe a geography teacher let them think the Earth is flat.  We wouldn’t want people with allowing (or believing in) these points of view, views disregarded as fallacy by everybody in the appropriate field of study, to be in a classroom.

 

Biologists around the world accept evolution.  Contrary to what some believe, it is not a “theory in crisis.”  Sure, some will argue this particular or that, but they don’t argue the basic tenets of evolution or human’s evolutionary path.  Scientists of every discipline related to the matter accept evolution as fact.  So it’s bad for a science teacher to disregard this and allow ignorance to continue in his classroom.

 

There’s another misunderstood word guaranteed to generate some unhappiness:  Ignorance.  It applies here, as some of the students expressed ignorant points of view.  “Ignorant” means, in short, uneducated about a particular subject.  They are unaware of the facts, in other words.  They’re not stupid; that’s not what ignorant means.  But when they say things like “evolution doesn’t make sense,” as they did when interviewed for the news report, they are expressing a point of view which is unaware, uneducated, about why evolution does, in fact, make sense.  The science teacher refuses to dissuade them, to educate them and, as such, take away their ignorance.

 

That’s the nice thing about ignorance.  It can be removed.  Unintelligent can be hard to fight, but ignorance is easy as it just requires a good education.  A good education requires good teachers.  Good teachers are well-educated themselves in their field.  The science teacher above was either uneducated about his field of study or refusing to accept what he has been taught.  It would be bad to have a math teacher teaching who refused to accept the basic rules of mathematics and allowed students to think, for example, that 1/3 is greater than 1/2 because 3 is greater than 2.  It’s mathematically wrong, but I have seen a Facebook screenshot where somebody expressed this exact point of view, which means a math teacher in grade school failed to educate somebody about how fractions work.  Just as the science teacher above–or anyone like him–is failing to teach how evolution works.

 

Rant off.