The conservative majority on the Texas state school board is pushing through a set of changes to History and Social Studies textbooks which present a view of these subjects more in line with politicized, right-wing thinking. The school board, made up of ten Republicans and five Democrats, is dominated by a conservative Christian bloc. None on the school board are experts in the field of History or Social Sciences, and have rejected the opinions given by those who are experts in those fields. The board is not interested in making changes across the board, but instead only in fields which have a political bearing. The changes reflect a definite bias toward conservative Christian biases. Therefore, it is blindingly clear that this is not a debate over balanced education, but rather the desire to dominate the education of children with political views rather than objective information.

Should you think this is exaggeration, then consider this board member as an example:

Board member Cynthia Dunbar, a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School and author of a book declaring that America’s founders created a theocratic government, opened the final board session with a prayer for “a Christian land governed by Christian principles.” She explained the ideology driving curriculum changes: “[N]o one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England … the same objective is present — a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”

Well, I’m glad the board members have no preconceived notions.

This will affect more than Texas: since so many textbooks are made for Texas’ large population, textbook publishers often apply these changes nationwide. This fact is not lost on the school board, the conservative members of which have obviously taken the cue from national conservative leaders and gone whole-hog with the now-popular out-and-out divisive wingnut strategy. That strategy is to claim a liberal bias which, if it exists, is mild, and “counter” it with such an outrageously one-sided bag of rabid right-wing polemics as to make one gag.

Among the proposed changes:

• increased emphasis on the ideas of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis;
• increased attention to Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich;
• new entries on the NRA and Phyllis Schlafly, replacing removed entries on Kennedy and César Chávez;
• requirements to study right-wing personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, but no requirements to study left-wing commentators;
• critical analyses of “unintended consequences” of Title IX, affirmative action, and the Great Society;
• change in terms used–e.g., “capitalism” changed to “free enterprise,” “imperialism” where applied to the U.S. will be called “expansionism,” and references to a “democratic” society are replaced with references to a “republic”–not because of the meaning of the words, but instead because of their connections to political parties;
• slavery de-emphasized as a factor in the causes of the Civil War;
• “slave trade” now referred to as the “triangle trade”;
• insertion of critical analyses of Social Security and Medicare in the context of conservative critiques;
• increased scrutiny of the idea of separation of church and state;
• Thomas Jefferson’s role in U.S. history to be de-emphasized, while the roles of Christian personages such as John Calvin to be more prominent;
• lessons framing the United Nations as detrimental to U.S. sovereignty;
• watered-down coverage of the Civil Rights movement;
• insertion of lessons regarding causes and key organizations of the conservative movement, including the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority;
• major political ideas examined under the paradigm of “Laws of nature and nature’s God”;
• the image of Joe McCarthy will be cleaned up; and
• where President Obama will be mentioned, he will be referred to, unlike all other modern presidents, by his full name–Barack Hussein Obama.

Well, these are hardly political at all, wouldn’t you agree?

All of this, of course, is supposedly to “remove the liberal bias” from existing education standards. In short, to counter what is claimed to be a perceived liberal bias, make the whole shebang blindingly conservative, knowing that the nation will tilt toward you.

Welcome to Fox Education.

A lot of people decry the Internet’s effect on language, noting how lazy people are about grammar and spelling online, and how this seems to be spilling out into other areas beyond the Internet. However, they may just have that backwards: it could be that people are becoming more literate because of the Internet, and that the bad English you see might be the result of people writing regularly for the first time in their post-college lives:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I think they have an excellent point. As inane as Twitter can be, its 140-character limit forces one to be clear and concise–so much so that I have been toying with the idea of making students run sentences through Twitter before including them in essays. And several years ago, I wrote a blog post about how arguing on the Internet is a great (albeit painful) way to sharpen your argumentative skills. (That post is now included in a published college reader–almost ironic evidence to the point made here.) And I have always believed that the Internet is a subversive new media type that expands not just free speech, but the range of speech as well.

The point about audience and shaping one’s message is also important; this is something writing teachers try to impress on students, but have trouble because in school, the audience is usually just the teacher and no one else. It is hard to find a writing environment for students which is more varied than that.

There is no doubt that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, bad influences on language and people’s use of it; but it may be that the overall effect is far more positive than anyone expected.

When I was talking with my father about the online classes I am taking, he wondered how such coursework is considered in terms of reliability: after all, anybody could be taking these classes for you. Just as traditional correspondence courses may not be respected all that greatly because there are so many opportunities to cheat, so might online degrees be discounted.

But maybe not so fast–a new study suggests that online students may actually be more honest than their on-site counterparts. While the study is limited to counting people who admit to cheating rather than the actual cheating itself (as evidenced by there being more people who admit to helping others cheat than there are people who admit to cheating directly), the value is in the comparison of results between the two venues. Unless people taking classes on the ground have more motivation to admit to cheating than do online students, the results may be noteworthy.

Just took my final exam for Intermediate Algebra last night. I don’t know the exact final score, but am pretty certain that I’ll be getting more than 500 of the 510 points the class tops out at, so, whew. I can honestly say it wasn’t achieved through remembering what I did last time–that was 20 or so years ago, and I literally forgot just about everything. This was a hard slog. Being (a) more mature and (b) a teacher helped a lot, as my study habits were somewhat improved, and I know much better what is important. As a student, you tend to just do what you’re told blindly, going through the motions of study because that’s what the teacher assigned, and then expect that you will magically know the material by the last page of the chapter. Instead, you have to focus on actually understanding the material, using the best techniques (proper note-taking, asking for help, etc.) for you to do so. If you finish a section and still don’t understand, then you can’t just go on–you have to re-orient and come at the material from a new angle. You can’t depend on the teacher as much as you do on yourself.

In any case, I can finally leave all that behind and spend the next two semesters in which I will take classes online focusing on actual computer stuff. Which is the whole reason why I’m taking courses again.

Unfortunately, the Intro to Programming course I was looking forward to has been taken off the roster for Fall, though it is offered through something called “BlendEd,” which is a regular on-site class where people can take portions of it–or all of it–online. I’m just concerned that I’ll be the only one doing it online, and effectively by myself. Hrm. There is another class I would take–Database Basics, which is not so terrible (I could use training in that), and it is online. We’ll see.

Now I can finish up the last business for my last semester of classes–the ones I teach, not the one I am taking as a student–and then get on to planning my classes (to teach) for the Fall.

Can you spot what’s wrong with this Fox News map of the Middle East?

This from the broadcast corporation whose entertainment division runs a show called “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” Who knew that the consolation prize was a job in their graphics department?

This semester, I am taking Intermediate Algebra. True, I passed it about 20 years ago–I think I got a “B” in the class–but I remembered nothing at all from the class so long ago. Nowadays, I am a teacher at a college myself; I teach a survey course in Computers along with a few Writing courses here at our branch campus in Japan. But I want to extend my computer science credentials, and learn programming.

Now, for a long time, we were kind of cut off from the home campus in some ways, but in the past few years a lot more connections have been made. Recently, they made us part of the program where we can take courses with no tuition–a courtesy extended to full-time faculty. Being in Japan, the commute is a bit tough, but the college has an extensive range of online classes. So this semester, I decided to take Intermediate Algebra. Technically, I probably didn’t have to; my passing grade from years back might have sufficed. But it’s a pre-requisite for the programming courses, and I wanted to actually know the stuff I’ll be needing. So here I am.

This is the first time I have ever taken an online course; it’s not too bad. The main activity at home is to read through the text and try to understand; the main online activity is to take part in the discussion group, like a forum or bulletin board, but limited to class members discussing problems. We have to post at least three messages a week: one question, one answer, and one other post which could be either.

And, we just had our first test. The score just came back–100%. Woo hoo! Since my participation grade is also 100% so far, it’s going swimmingly.

As for the subject matter, I have always had a Math phobia. Strangely, I am not bad at all with numbers–I just get nervous around anything more than basic math. And I honestly cannot say that “it’s all coming back to me”; I don’t remember any of this from when I took it before. But I’m getting it.

It helps to have been a teacher: I know what makes for a good student. One important point is to not just read the text carefully, but to take careful notes on your reading. It’s too easy to read without really understanding, but if you summarize what you’re reading, you are forced to comprehend what you summarize, not to mention that it helps you to memorize things as well.

The same goes for discussion: when others have problems, jump in and try to help. I have found through experience that the best way to learn something is to teach it. I learned this as a college student, when I joined study groups where all the other members were non-native speakers, so I was constantly explaining to others; the lesson was reinforced as a teacher, where I found myself picking up new subjects required by my teaching much faster than I would have as a student. The basic idea is that if you explain something to others, it forces you to organize the facts and simplify things. If you don’t understand it yourself, you can’t teach it, and so you really have no choice but to get it straight and then spell it out.

There is, perhaps, another reason to do well: it would be kind of embarrassing to not do well in a class as a student while I am also teaching students in a class of my own. So I’ve gotta keep things up–midterms coming up….

The right wing, especially people like Pat Buchanan, have been attacking Sonia Sotomayor in many ways, one in particular by suggesting that Sotomayor got her academic credentials via Affirmative Action when she did not in fact deserve them. Buchanan recently said this at a conference to rebuild conservative political power:

Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter]

In other attacks, Buchanan added the idea that Sotomayor had to study “basic grammar” as well. More has been said on the topic, of course, but that’s the essence: Sotomayor’s English was so poor that she had to read children’s books in order to get up to speed. How could her English be so bad and yet she’s graduating summa cum laude at Princeton? Must be Affirmative Action, Buchanan concludes. More evidence of the liberals supporting minorities by helping them get undeserved credentials just because of race.

Naturally, that’s not the reality. Here’s the snippet from the New York Times article upon which Buchanan and the others base their argument:

She spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and “re-teaching” herself to write “proper English” by reading elementary grammar books. Only with the outside help of a professor who served as her mentor did she catch up academically, ultimately graduating at the top of her class.

Is this true? Well, in Sotomayor’s own words:

“First I found that my vocabulary and writing skills were poor and I didn’t know anything about the classics. … So during my college summers, I retaught myself basic grammar, learned 10 new words a day and set up a program of reading all the books I had missed.”

A ha! Buchanan was right! Sotomayor was illiterate! Hmm, let’s see.

Sotomayor was born and raised in the Bronx, but during her formative language years (age 0-6) she was in primarily a Spanish-language environment; she only became “fluent” in English after her father’s death. But still, she grew up in the U.S., went to schools where English was the language of instruction. Here’s WikiPedia’s summary of her early education:

For grammar school, Sotomayor attended the parochial Blessed Sacrament School in Soundview, where she was valedictorian and had a near-perfect attendance record. Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for, then commuted to, the academically rigorous parochial Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. … At Cardinal Spellman, Sotomayor was on the forensics team and was elected to the student government. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.

What can we glean from this? Obviously, she was no academic slouch. Her language skills were also probably not so bad; you don’t get through all that without the ability to speak English fairly well.

So, how do we reconcile Sotomayor’s statements about poor language skills and re-learning basic grammar? The answer is easy: it’s all relative. When she entered Princeton, she found that she could no longer get away with small errors in grammar or less-than-perfect choices in vocabulary. When she says “poor vocabulary and writing skills,” she means “poor vocabulary and writing skills by the standards of Princeton academic requirements.” That’s a pretty significant distinction.

What Sotomayor referred to was not that she was unable to string together sentences like “see Dick and Jane run with Spot,” but that she sometimes made subtle errors in grammar and word choice which in normal language are excused, but which in demanding academic prose can cause some difficulty. Her reading of childhood classics was likely more to learn the flow and cadence of words; her vocabulary building to learn greater variety, not the basics; all of this to recognize and use the subtle distinctions rather than the gross ones. She described (pdf) her English not as simplistic, but rather as “stilted and overly complicated,” and was sorting out the subtle differences between terms such as “authority of dictatorship” and “dictatorial authority.” Hardly Dick-and-Jane-level stuff.

A lot of the left-wing criticism of Buchanan and others tends to focus on which books Sotomayor read–she read Huckleberry Finn, not Snow White, they point out–but miss the whole fact that the “re-learning basic grammar” was not about how her language was poor or admission standards lax, but instead was about how strenuous and demanding her new learning environment was. Sotomayor’s story was not one of remedial education, but of an incredibly difficult and top-notch college program in which Sotomayor excelled so much that she graduated at the top of her class.

Some conservatives might still try to attack Sotomayor for her language problems–even if she wasn’t learning how to write “See Dick and Jane” level material, she still made mistakes, right? How do you get to call yourself literate and yet still make errors that don’t even stand up to those pansy-ass liberal-elite college standards?

Well, it turns out that even the English-only crowds sometimes make an error here and there. Here’s Pat Buchanan standing under a banner at his organization’s conference:

Note the spelling of “conference” in the banner. And keep in mind that these folks are taking jabs at Sotomayor’s English and going on about how the U.S. should shun Spanish and maintain English as the official language.

I think some tolerance for a certain level or error-making is in order here, don’t you?

Recently, the Texas State Board of Education voted on new state standards for science education. This would not be a big deal except that this is one of the arenas where creationists are trying to get their religious dogma implanted as “science” in the classroom. While the board rejected language which would have required science teachers to discuss “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories–the latest code-wordplay creationists are using in their campaign to dismiss evolution and give credence to creationism–they did approve some of the creationist language.

One example was a requirement to “analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations” based in part on “examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific experiments.” Again, sounds reasonable, but this language is not intended to actually analyze scientific findings honestly, but is instead language to open the door for creationists to allow their science teacher brethren to introduce faulty creationist critiques of standard scientific theories, or to force non-creationist teachers to cover such topics against their will. It is not surprising that, just coincidentally, topics that were at the forefront of this “analysis” were evolution and the age of the universe–the two areas most important to creationists.

One reason all of this has been happening in Texas is that the board’s chairman, Don McLeroy, is an unabashed creationist who can’t understand why those darned scientists are fighting all of this. “Somebody has to stand up to these experts,” he stated on a video; “I don’t know why they’re doing it.”

One of the issues McLeroy wants discussed is the “complexity of the cell,” a standard creationist argument against evolution. In barely veiled language, new standards bring up the idea that cells are too complex to have evolved by mere natural selection. The problem with this is that there has never been any scientific research which supports this idea. There is no evidence that in any way proves that natural selection is too “unlikely” to have built DNA and life itself. It is nothing more than intuition, a feeling–creationists look at the structure of a cell and simply conclude that it’s too complex to have arisen naturally. No statistical analysis of chemical reactions, no calculation of the mass of organic material over time considering certain chemical reactions, etc. Just, “that doesn’t look right,” and presto!–it’s science.

McLeroy also tipped his hand when he made a statement about why he felt genetics trumped evolution: “Genetics goes back to a Christian monk who did precise data.” This should not be too surprising to those who understand the views of some of the more extremist conservative Christians, who believe that nothing is of value unless Jesus figures into it somehow. To paraphrase the Mike Myers SNL sketch, “If it’s not Christian, it’s crap!” Like this “expert” on morality, two completely indistinguishable acts can be as different as saintly good and Hitler-level evil depending only upon whether or not they were done by someone with Christ in their hearts.

Then there was discussion on “sudden appearance” of new species in the fossil record, another standard creationist argument which essentially says, “if we haven’t found it yet, it doesn’t exist.” It is equivalent to waking up and looking outside to see the ground is wet, but because you didn’t witness the rain last night, then that calls into question the whole “rain” theory and so we should instead give serious consideration to the theory that god magically makes the ground wet overnight without precipitation.

This is one of the major problems with school boards: they are a political organization that can be populated with, well, anyone who can win a school board election. If you’re a conservative and see no problem with that, remember that Michael Moore’s first serious job was on a school board–to which he was elected at age 18. School boards can be populated and run by people who are not only not educators, but wish to use the education system to promote their personal, political and religious agendas. You hear talk about how you don’t want politicians to make decisions about your health care, but apparently with education, there’s no problem.

Seriously, school boards should be done away with, and serious educators–with the required qualifications you would expect in any profession–given the authority to decide curricula. The whole creationists-running-school-boards thing, from Dover to Kansas to Texas and beyond, is simply a running example of why this should be.

An etymologist criticizes the use of the third person plural as an indefinite singular pronoun.

I’ve always been of the opinion that while rules are a necessary part of language, it is speakers who drive the rules, and not the other way around. Many who speak dialects which are associated with low education may be remonstrated by their teachers at school for speaking “ungrammatically” or using “wrong” language. The thing is, if the language a person speaks follows a set of rules, then there’s nothing wrong with it. “Ain’t,” for example, is perfectly appropriate so long as it is used consistently according to linguistic rules recognized by the group of people who use it. The double-negative is not intrinsically incorrect–it used to be acceptable in mainstream English, in fact–it just happens to be out of vogue.

Language changes. New structures are introduced and played with, sometimes at the fringe of society, and sometimes driven from its core. But it is people who decide what makes sense to them, what feels right, what they prefer to use. Complaining that the new structure does not follow what we have decided previously is not good enough.

Language is not grammatically or otherwise “correct” because it resembles language spoken in the past, it is “correct” because the majority of speakers agree on a rule and apply it consistently. That’s why I have less objection to the “new-cue-ler” pronunciation for “nuclear”–so many people use that pronunciation that it is now becoming part of the living language.

I use “they” or “their” regularly to refer to the indefinite singular chiefly because it makes sense to me, and sounds better. The context makes clear that I am speaking of a single person, so there is no danger of being misunderstood, and it neatly corrects an imbalance in the language which, for all of the whining about “political correctness,” nevertheless is much more accurate and far less grating gender-wise than the traditional form.

But the truth is, you don’t need these reasons to change the language; changes can be made on whim, and need neither rationale nor even internal consistency–as seems evident from much of the language now deemed “correct.”

You can rail against the use of new structures because you don’t like them, but you cannot say that they do not belong in a language because they don’t follow past example, or because you don’t like the logic or lack of same that the new structures represent. If people use them, that’s all that’s necessary.

If you live in the Tokyo area or will be around next month–specifically July 23rd–then drop by my school, Lakeland College Japan, for a special event. We’ve started a lecture series at the college, and after two successes, we’re gearing up for a third which should be special. Mr. Tadamasa Iwai, 88, a former Tokkou-tai officer, will be speaking. The Tokkou were Japan’s suicide bombers during World War II.

Most Americans–and Japanese, for that matter–only know about kamikaze pilots, but there were more than just that kind of suicide soldier. The Japanese navy used suicide bombers in various ways. One was to use a mini-submersible, packed with high explosives, with a human being acting like a living guidance system in what was essentially a large, manned torpedo. Another was to outfit a diver with a pack full of explosives, place him underwater for hours on end, and when an enemy ship sailed past, have him explode himself against the ship’s hull. Illustrations of each:

Mr. Iwai and his younger brother were both swept up in the wartime fervor of the time, and in that fervor compromised their personal principles and ideals, and became officers in the Tokkou-tai. There, they help persuade other young men to join, compromising their own principles, and leading many to their deaths. After the war, both came to seriously regret their actions.

But what affected them more than one might have superficially thought was 9/11, watching those planes fly into the Twin Towers. One can only imagine how the Iwai brothers felt to see not only the action taken by those pilots, so dramatically public, so similar to those they themselves advocated more than half a century earlier–but just as destructive, the public reaction after the attacks, leading to a fearful and patriotic fervor so much like the one they were drawn into so many years before.

Additionally, the two were angered by the efforts of many Japanese right-wingers who romanticized the roles of Tokkou soldiers, using them as icons to encourage new generations of young Japanese to surrender their own personal principles and become weapons for the state. One manga artist named Yoshinori Kobayashi, for example, has created comics using images of the kamikaze as a way of today promoting “an altruistic spirit of selflessness” among Japanese youth, the kind that led to so much tragedy in wartime Japan.

In 2002, they published a book called “Tokkou,” subtitled (my rough translation) “The Story of Brothers Who Went from Students to Suicide Weapons.” Their primary mission is to speak to as many young people as will listen, and tell them the truth about what things were like, about what was done, and what it meant on a human level. To warn them not to allow themselves to be drawn into the same mistakes.

Frankly, this is a message that all too many Americans should hear. Not that we’re training suicide bombers–but that we are, instead, training our young men to become things just as bad, or worse, for the same reasons. One thought of what has happened at Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib should be enough to drive that point home. Americans so driven by fear, so intimidated by the national fervor in a time of war, that we believe that almost anything is acceptable–from disassembling our Constitutional rights, to renouncing the Geneva Conventions, repealing Habeas Corpus, starting wars based on thin tissues of lies, and even torturing and killing people under the official banner of national security. Making the same mistakes all over again, allowing our own ideals, principles, and good judgment be compromised in the name of patriotism, security, and war.

So, if you’re in central Tokyo–that’s 7:00 pm, Wednesday, July 23, in the Shinjuku area–mark it down on your calendar. Here’s a link to the PDF file we have for the event, which includes a map to the lecture’s venue. The same information will be available on the lecture series’ web site as well (it hasn’t been updated yet). You should plan on coming 15 to 20 minutes early–I expect it’ll be SRO, so you’ll want to get there in time to grab a seat.

This is an event you won’t want to miss.

Well, the ID’ers are at it again, trying to cram creationism into Science classes by way of sabotaging the teaching of Evolution theory. This time, their false-front is called “academic freedom,” as in “academic freedom bills” which creationist legislators are pushing to get passed now. It’s all about the name of the bill, isn’t it? This one is like the “Patriot Act,” suggesting you’re not a patriot if you vote against it. We all know that the more strongly a bill is so named, the more likely it is not to have any relation to the name, and this one certainly fits the bill.

The problem is this case, of course, is that it’s not about academic freedom. It is not “academic freedom,” for example, to teach that photosynthesis doesn’t happen, or that the Earth’s atmosphere is primarily made up of oxygen. Instead, that kind of stuff is more accurately termed as “being wrong.” Now, the ID’ers are not claiming that photosynthesis doesn’t happen or that the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t mostly consist of nitrogen. My point is that they would be arguing such drivel if they had happened to interpret the bible as having said so. They are not against Evolution because it’s wrong–after all, they have not argued against scientific theories that are far more likely to be wrong. They argue against it because it goes against the peculiar brand of science they have divined from scriptures written by people who knew even less about science than the least-educated people in the country today, people who were not even writing about science, but from whose words people today extract conclusions about the nature of the universe. They argue against Evolution because they want people to believe in their own product instead of what actually exists.

The argument is that these new laws don’t bring creationism into the classroom, but just like ID, that is a shallow pretense and is ultimately false. After all, what is being proposed is essentially to tear down Evolution in the classroom and teach that it is false–which is precisely the nature of the intelligent design scheme, which runs not on its own evidence but rather purely on the conjecture that Evolution is wrong–which they claim leads us to the conclusion that god created the universe.

They are, to their credit, becoming a lot more politically savvy about this. Creationism failed because it was a blatant attempt to implant one religion’s dogma into science classes. ID failed because it was a sloppy attempt to dress up creationism as a faux scientific theory; its origins were directly traced back to creationism, and as a “scientific” theory, it was laughable. This latest attempt is the creationists’ cleverest attempt yet, because it claims to do nothing but to allow teachers to challenge Evolution theory, which is what Science is supposed to do–challenge and test theories to see if they stand up.

That sounds legitimate, except for one small detail: it is even more a fraud than ID was. This is not about challenging Evolution theory in scientific venues to test its veracity; if it were, there would be no new laws necessary; anyone can challenge Evolution theory anytime they want, however often they want. ID’ers have been trying to for some time, and they came up against a teensy little problem: their challenges have to have the smallest shred of legitimacy or fact, and none of theirs have that. What these new “academic freedom” laws intend to do is not to challenge the theory, but to discredit it with false claims that have been disproved in that very peer review.

Here’s the Fox News argument presented by one creationist “Science” teacher:

Doug Cowan, a public-school biology teacher, said his colleagues are often afraid to speak out.

Mr. Cowan said he tells students: “I’m going to give you the evidence for Evolution and the evidence against, and let you decide.” For instance, he’ll mention Darwin’s observation that finches evolve different-shaped beaks to suit different ecosystems. Then he’ll add that you don’t see a finch changing into another species.

Asked what evidence he presents to bolster evolution, Mr. Cowan paused. “I don’t have any,” he said.

Mr. Cowan is obviously an idiot. First of all, if he has no evidence to bolster Evolution, then he clearly is not a Science teacher; that’s like a professor of Constitutional Law claiming he doesn’t have any evidence to bolster the concept of Freedom of Speech. Secondly, the claim that no one sees a finch spontaneously change into a giraffe in a sudden puff of smoke is just one of the many completely ludicrous “criticisms” of Evolution theory that has the honor of having been so plainly disproved that even creationists are loath to bring it up; Mr. Cowan apparently didn’t get the memo.

But even aside from that, Mr. Cowan is suggesting that it’s a good idea to have creationists masquerading as authorities representing Science in the classroom to follow a half-assed representation of a rock-solid theory upheld by a century and a half of testing and peer review with a rebuttal of plainly false creationist fabrications, and then “let the students decide.” Yes, let’s do this for all subjects. Let’s hire members of white supremacist groups to teach American History, give students a half-assed lecture about slavery, follow it with a rebuttal about how black people enjoyed slavery and were better off under it, and then “let the students decide.” Or let’s have Computer Science taught by Luddites who briefly introduce the Internet and follow it up with a scare lecture about how using the Internet will lead teenagers to be raped and killed by child molesters, and let the kids decide on that, too. Because this kind of teaching methodology will only lead students to make informed choices which are bound to be correct. Right?

Let’s not kid ourselves. This bill to introduce “academic freedom” is nothing less than a bald attempt to give creationists who have defrauded their way into becoming “science” teachers free license to sabotage the teaching of actual science so that the students will, they hope, be driven to accept creationism.

This new angle is building up to a regression of lies and scams, all leading back to creationist claims that when what we see with our eyes contradicts a specific interpretation of biblical stories, we should deny observed fact and instead accept the preferred biblical interpretations. I mean, really, who could believe that science-fiction claptrap about the formation of proteins in a primordial soup, followed by the formation of cells grouping into colonies, which then progressed into more complex forms which survived by being the best-adapted to changing environments? Baloney! After looking at all of the abundance of fossils, the chemical analyses, the structure of DNA, and all the rest of the evidence, it is so obvious that man was formed when a big guy with a white beard breathed on a lump of clay! I mean, come on, how clear can it be? All you have is a century and a half of piercing peer review and mountains of evidence; we’ve got a guy who may or may not have been a sheep herder four thousand years ago who claims he spoke to god!! Beat that, science bitches!!

Good lord. Already the English language teaching market in Japan has become bad enough so that most jobs out there for teachers rate only the rock-bottom $30,000/year salary, work you hard, and most require you teach classes to little kids. For those of you who thought it could not get much worse, then prepare to have your hopes dashed.

What’s next? Clown suits and pie throwing? (Although this could easily be seen as the equivalent….) I am all for making the classroom environment stimulating and interesting for the students, but there are limits; this borders on the fetishistic.

Today we had several meetings at my college concerning accreditation. When I was a student, I was completely unaware of the process; I just took for granted that colleges got by on reputation or something, and didn’t think about how they got the authority they have. In the U.S., colleges are accredited by one of several regional accreditation agencies, which use thousands of volunteers (educators and administrators from colleges and universities) to observe and investigate institutions, and hand down decisions based upon those observations. This is an oversimplification, but will serve for the time being. Colleges have usually been reviewed every ten years or so; an institution falling short is given warnings and a chance, over several years, to correct itself.

The accreditation agencies derive their authority from the federal government, through the Department of Education. In the past, the DoE has not been overly controlling, and educators have pretty much run the show. It is unsurprising that this has changed under the Bush administration. In another crony hiring, Margaret Spellings was installed as Secretary of Education by Bush at the beginning of his second term. Spellings’ highest degree is a B.A. in Political Science, and was Bush’s political director in his first campaign to become governor of Texas. She has not done any teaching beyond work as a substitute–and she was not even certified for that (Texas, at the time, did not require certification).

Spellings has demonstrated a pretty clear but unstated preference for dismantling the current regional accreditation system and replacing it with direct federal control. Her husband is an advocate for school vouchers, a position which usually claims that government cannot be trusted to manage the education process. Spellings is a big “No Child Left Behind” advocate, and wants to apply the same standardized assessment system to higher education. So now big buzzwords in our accreditation process are “outcome assessments” and “transparency.”

The problem is, no one has assessed the assessment policy. Just as NCLB sounds good in principle and has a lot of support, but is underfunded, the new paradigm of assessment is big on concepts but short on demonstrating how A leads to B. Standardized tests look good in a political campaign, but they do more to encourage “teaching to the test,” which focuses on test scores rather than actual learning. Japan has suffered from this for a long time, producing students with high scores but not as high comprehension of the subject matter. “Transparency” sounds great, but there is no reason to believe that this will lead to lower tuitions.

There’s a rule in education: learning is a personalized experience. Everyone learns differently. It’s hard enough to maintain quality teaching in a class with 20 students, each with individual quirks and styles of learning. The more generalization and standardization there is, the less freedom each individual student enjoys, and the less likely it is that they will be able to learn. Standardized tests veer the lesson away from the student advancing in their skill or understanding, and emphasize instead rote memorization and test-taking strategies. Scores might increase, but that does not mean that learning will increase.

As a teacher, I will have to devote less of my class time to addressing individual student needs, and more time administering tests which are written by people who have never met my students, much less instructed them. We got a taste of that recently, when Writing class teachers had to administer a test in their classes which included questions they felt had little relevance to what the students in the class needed to learn.

Worse is that our students, being mostly non-native speakers learning in an English-only environment in a country where English is not widely spoken, have even more unique needs which will be ill-served by standardization.

And we’re still in the early stages of preparation, with the review coming in two years. A lot of headaches down the road.