I thought JosKarith was being ironic. Since, you know, it's usually the law-and-order types that use the "nothing to hide" argument. What does it tell us that the same people who make that claim of ordinary citizens are afraid of their own actions being recorded?

In my experience it isn't the government mandates that are the problem. It's the administrators. There has been a lot of talk in the last twenty years about holding teachers accountable for test scores. But where's the accountability for administrators? Can a principal be fired is his school has consistently underperformed for the entirety of his time on the job? There has been a lot of talk about unions and tenure preventing bad teachers from being fired. But who does the firing? If a principal fails to fire a bad teacher for several years, it's not because the teacher is tenured. Tenure may make firing take longer, and ensure that it only happens for good reasons, but it doesn't just protect everyone forever. If a bad teacher has been at a school for many years, it's because the administrators like him. They have probably even cultivated the bad teaching practices.

The primary task of any school principal is to keep order and maintain the status quo. Order is good! But it has to be balanced with the needs and desires of students, who are best represented by their teachers. Even a bad teacher will know better than the principal what is best for his students.

It should be clear that the one group of people who have the most incentive to help students are teachers. So why is education reform so focused on taking power away from teachers? Busting unions? Handing more power to the least competent people in the chain with the least education training (school administrators)?

I agree with you. I do! But even if it's just to be pithy, calling science "correct", or as happens more frequently, claiming to "believe" science or scientific theories, suggests to the ignorant that science is equivalent to faith. If it were just a matter of what to believe, science and Christian literalism would be equally valid. But that's not the point. And since the ignorant are everywhere, we must always be more careful talking about science.

On the contrary! Imperial vs metric has everything to do with religion. Specifically, the Metric religion and the Leave Me Alone I Don't Care If I'm Wrong religion.

Personally, I'm not sure whether you mean he's using base 10 notation or base 10 notation.

I think he's saying that by "Imperial", he meant "Not Metric".

"In Soviet Russia..."

Unless he started smoking in kindergarten, I doubt he "never" tried very hard. Probably just gradually realized that besides a few basic rote skills, school mainly teaches us to hate learning and not think critically. So he gave in early. Less friction and more fun that way, I suppose.

You're definitely right that science is not the opposite of religion. There are too many atheists who don't understand that. But there are also far too many Christians who don't understand it either. Otherwise they wouldn't be getting all offended by evolution. I really don't understand why it's so important to some people that the first few chapters of Genesis literally happened. Does it matter? I thought it was just supposed to be parables about human nature.

Also, Proverbs may be part of the Abrahamic tradition, but you're ignoring eastern faith completely. There is no Book of Proverbs in Buddhism or Hinduism. I know that "most of" lets you weasel an implication that "most" people believe in God, but the world is more diverse than that.

Because more than anything else, powerful weasels like this like having lots of loopholes in the law. That way, the only winners are those with good lawyers. And good lawyers belong to the rich and powerful.

Interesting question. The atheists fighting the culture war are probably a lot to blame (haven't they ever heard of "don't feed the trolls"?). But I'd be very interested in an article on the history of scientific "fact" and "belief" as opposed to "theory" and "methodology".

I personally agree with Gatto, but I'd like to suggest a minor revision to what you are saying. The original purpose of the education system was to extend childhood and discourage critical thinking. Those were explicit goals a hundred years ago, but nobody talks like that anymore. And if you ask any individual teacher or administrator, you'll certainly not find those reasons underlying their motivation.

Yes, our educational system still does these things, but not intentionally anymore. It's just because of inertia: every teacher now grew up in this same system, internally justified every aspect of it as necessary to some noble cause, and now focuses on issues other than whether students should be separated by age/grade or how to cultivate a particular social atmosphere for their students.

Actually, a lot of that inertia probably comes from our current teachers and administrators...lacking critical thinking skills. How unfortunate.

FTFY. We can be pretty sloppy with language. It is English after all. So I just wanted to make your point clear and remove the sloppy things that make it easier to *ahem* crucify your argument.

(Science is not something that is "correct" or "incorrect"; it's a meaningful way of observing the world, reducing human bias of those observations, and making meaningful predictions. Focusing on the results as "correct" falls into the trap this law would inflict on our students: without the scientific method, evolution is just another idea with as much evidence, or maybe even less, than the Christian creation myth. As for "religious people", I just don't think that any organizations, not being people, could hold religious beliefs ;) )

FYI, the whole CFC thing was about ozone depletion, and is not the largest contributor to climate change (and it has nothing to do with butterflies). If was just especially bad because in addition to making the Earth absorb more heat from the Sun, it would also make our skin absorb more cancer-causing UV light. So yeah, I'm glad that shit isn't in our hairspray anymore.

it's just clickbait

Interesting. When you call this "clickbait", do you only mean that this article is likely to be clicked on by many, many people? Or are you implying that more people will click on it than are actually engaged with the ideas? Because there a big difference between "10 ways Bitcoin will change the world" and "New proposed law could change education as we know it". Even if "proposed law" never gets passed, doesn't it deserve to be laid bare by public discussion anyway?