{"id":676,"date":"2011-09-26T15:13:24","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T15:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=676"},"modified":"2011-09-26T15:13:24","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T15:13:24","slug":"teaching-ignorance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=676","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Ignorance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rant on.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 This, to me, is wrong.\u00a0 The man should not be allowed to teach.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Before anybody gets too riled about this, let me put this in a different context.\u00a0 Suppose a sex education teacher allowed students to believe &#8220;the stork&#8221; brought babies and sex had nothing to do with pregnancy.\u00a0 Or perhaps a history teacher allowed students to think Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the U.S.\u00a0 Or maybe a geography teacher let them think the Earth is flat.\u00a0 We wouldn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Biologists around the world accept evolution.\u00a0 Contrary to what some believe, it is not a &#8220;theory in crisis.&#8221;\u00a0 Sure, some will argue this particular or that, but they don&#8217;t argue the basic tenets of evolution or human&#8217;s evolutionary path.\u00a0 Scientists of every discipline related to the matter accept evolution as fact.\u00a0 So it&#8217;s bad for a science teacher to disregard this and allow ignorance to continue in his classroom.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s another misunderstood word guaranteed to generate some unhappiness:\u00a0 Ignorance.\u00a0 It applies here, as some of the students expressed ignorant points of view.\u00a0 &#8220;Ignorant&#8221; means, in short, uneducated about a particular subject.\u00a0 They are unaware of the facts, in other words.\u00a0 They&#8217;re not stupid; that&#8217;s not what ignorant means.\u00a0 But when they say things like &#8220;evolution doesn&#8217;t make sense,&#8221; 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.\u00a0 The science teacher refuses to dissuade them, to educate them and, as such, take away their ignorance.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the nice thing about ignorance.\u00a0 It can be removed.\u00a0 Unintelligent can be hard to fight, but ignorance is easy as it just requires a good education.\u00a0 A good education requires good teachers.\u00a0 Good teachers are well-educated themselves in their field.\u00a0 The science teacher above was either uneducated about <em>his<\/em> field of study or refusing to accept what he has been taught.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It&#8217;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.\u00a0 Just as the science teacher above&#8211;or anyone like him&#8211;is failing to teach how evolution works.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Rant off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rant on. &nbsp; 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.\u00a0 This, to me, is wrong.\u00a0 The man should not be allowed to teach. &nbsp; Before anybody gets too riled [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":677,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}