A high school teacher and two students sued Arkansas on Monday over the state’s ban on critical race theory and “indoctrination” in public schools, asking a federal judge to strike down the restrictions as unconstitutional.
The lawsuit by the teacher and students from Little Rock Central High School, site of the historic 1957 racial desegregation crisis, stems from the state’s decision last year that an Advanced Placement course on African American Studies would not count toward state credit.
I don’t think that this angle is going to be successful.
States do have the right to set the content of their curriculum.
They can’t stop the teacher from saying what he wants outside the school, but in the context of the education system, they do get to decide what goes.
The Scopes trial dealt with this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial
Yeah, because a famously anti-science trial against a teacher accused of teaching science in science class is a GREAT jurisprudence to look to! 🙄
You don’t have to like it for it to be the reality of the situation, and the fact is that the precedent is extremely relevant. Your little fantasy world where teachers choose the material ignores the other side of the equation too, as I’m sure you wouldn’t want some evangelical deciding on his own to override the curriculum to suit his beliefs.
I’m not talking about teachers choosing the material. I’m talking about scientific consensus arrived at through abundantly peer reviewed proof dictating what is taught in science classes, not the equivalent of the Catholic Church insisting that the sun revolves around the earth.
Sure wouldn’t. For the reasons I already mentioned.
Science is real and testable no matter whether you believe it or not. It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s not equivalent to creationism.
That’s a fun idea you have but you’re wrong. Who decides what the scientific consensus is? Is there some governing body that is accepted as the source of truth on what constitutes “abundantly” peer reviewed proof? No? Then it’s still subjective.
Could you possibly be any more condescending?
I objectively am not, according to the best way of arriving at truth without opinion or faith.
Who do you fucking think? You can’t possibly be this ignorant of how science works and what a consensus is and expect to be taken seriously when discussing science.
No, that’s nowhere near what a scientific consensus is. Since you apparently ARE that clueless, allow me to inform you:
In this case, “evolution is how life works” being the almost universally held position of anyone with expert knowledge about biology that isn’t paid by pseudoscientific and usually religious organizations to pretend otherwise.
Nope. That’s not what that word means. A scientific consensus is the most objective thing there is in human knowledge.
Since you seem to have trouble with the meaning of key words, let me clarify: objective and subjective are antonyms. Antonyms are words with opposite meaning.
Hard not to be condescending in the face of such a childlike understanding of the world. Everything you’re arguing would be true in an ideal world, but that’s not what we have. I mean, have you been living under a rock while the science around climate change has been politicized and manipulated by monied interests?
I’ll remind you we are talking about the courts, and the autonomy of the States to make their own laws, and not about what makes good science.
Ah, now I see the problem. I’m talking about what makes sense while you’re talking about what a broken legal system wrongly thinks make sense.
Corrupt people trying to deny the science doesn’t change the science. That’s why I alluded to the very few scientists not being part of the overwhelming consensus being paid for lying.
Yeah, because “state’s rights” have always been an argument used for good laws… 🙄
Call me old-fashioned, but I am of the opinion that science education should be about good science, not the ideological opinions of demagogues without so much as a relevant degree.
Right back at you. You’d give Dunning and Kruger daily aneurysms if you had been a part of their famous study.
You go on having that opinion and see what it changes. The rest of us are doing the best we can in the real world. Let me know if things ever work out the way you want.
The fun part of living in a society with low public education standards is that this argument can work for anything from creationism to holocaust denial. Doesn’t matter if the Earth is a sphere, only matters if the schoolboard has the collective IQ to understand the abundant proof that the Earth is round. If they don’t- then the shape of the Earth is just ‘subjective’ ;)
That’s exactly the point. The only remedy to this problem, given the structure of our government, is through the legislature. If you live in one of the shithole states, that’s going to be a challenge.
It’s not about the material in question, it’s about if a state employed teacher has the right to override the curriculum. They do not.
Yeah, I still call bullshit. Legislating against the right of a teacher to teach well-documented science in science class isn’t about the teacher “overriding the curriculum”.
It’s about the state trying to override reality with lies and compelling teachers to do so as well.
Say I believed the earth is flat, and provided ‘well documented science’ that the earth is flat. Who’s to say that I shouldn’t be doing that? Or what if in social studies class I provided proof that men were superior to women?
The law is clearly in the moral wrong in our current situation, but in general it provides more protections than it does harm. The problem isn’t with Tennessee vs Scopes. The problem is with the Republican agenda.
That’s not equivalent since there is no such thing.
Every person who doesn’t subscribe to your fringe hypothesis. So roughly 8.1 billion people.
Again, you don’t seem at all familiar with how scientific proof works.
Also: factually and in every other way.
Nope. It’s states trying to remove every mention of LGBTQ+ people and racial equality, not rogue teachers.